Chickens

I first met chickens at my grandparents in Manchester when I was four or five years old. During the war they had swopped their egg ration for a poultry meal allowance, and the hens were fed mash mixed with boiled potato peels and food scraps, and some hot water. I was fascinated by them, and fell in love with them.

My great grandmother also had a few chickens, kept in cages next to the back door of Sharston Farm. They didn't have much room, they were prototype battery hens in the early 1950s, but they produced eggs for her. When my uncle Philip and Aunt Lyn moved to Mons Hall in 1955 they had a mixed farm, with pigs, sheep, hand-milked cows and free range chickens. I enjoyed going with a basket to carefully collect their eggs, sometimes slipping my hand under their warm bodies to retrieve the eggs.
It must have been in about 1960 that I bought my first bantam hen, a Light Sussex that I named Biddy.

She was followed at some stage by Polly Molly Twinkletoes, a grey Polish bantam hen with a rather poor crest.

I subscribed to Poultry World, a magazine aimed at the commercial trade, but it had at least adverts, where I was eventually able to order nine day old Welsummer bantam chicks when Biddy fell broody.

I was fortunate in that eight of the chicks were pullets, with just the one cockerel. He was named Augustine, and he was a particularly fine bird, and rather aggressive too. It was Augustine who attacked my sister Dana when she came to the back door and found it locked. She was too scared to run away and escape, and his spurs left her with bleeding shins.

Welsummers are handsome birds that lay brown eggs, even the bantams that I kept. The hens have an attractive brown plumage with a dark edging to each feather, but the cocks are glorious, with chestnut, golden and beetle blue plumage.

Keeping poultry gave me an excuse for a regular Saturday bus trip into Manchester where I would go down Tib St, famous then for its pet shops, and buy supplies of poultry food: chick crumbs for the newly hatched chicks, and mash for the adults. Mash would be mixed with left over food scraps, and boiled potato peelings with their distinctive smell, and some hot water. Later a pet shop in Withington Road kept a stock of poultry food that I purchased in weekly instalments.
When I went to university in 1968 the chickens stayed behind, and eventually the last two went into retirement to my Aunt Lyn in Devon where I believe they survived for at least ten years.
There was a gap then in my poultry keeping until, in 1981, I went to live in Bideford. We had only a small backyard, but the outside toilet became their shed, and I made a hole i the wall where there had once been a window, so that the chickens were able to access a wild, overgrown patch encircled by the old houses. I think these chickens were a broody and chicks that I purchased at Hatherleigh market, and then walked back with them down the lanes to my grandmother's about four miles away. I suspect we would have then taken them on the bus back to Bideford, as we had no car then. Eventually I had to dispose of them as we were about to go abroad, and in my usual way there were executed with my axe I kept for this.
When we moved to Crediton and acquired an extremely large garden keeping poultry became a normal part of my life. I think the first ones were Black Minorcas.

I kept them at the very far end of the garden an eighth of a mile away from the house down the former lane that forms part of the property. I built a hut using scrap timber, and an adjacent covered run using spare slates from when I reroofed the house. The twice daily walk down to see them meant that the garden did not become overgrown, and in the evenings one or more of the children would accompany me, and we would give them corn, replace their water, let them out for a scratch, and sit in the adjacent hut. At different times we had Old English Game bantams,

mongrel bantams from Braunton where we stayed on half-term holidays and which I selectively bred back to Black Sultans with glossy plumage like the Minorcas, but vulture hocks, cresting and feathered feet.

Also part of our menagerie were Buff Cochin bantams acquired from a distant cousin in Crediton,

Light Brahma full-size chickens bought as chicks in Hatherleigh market but which turned out to be all cockerels, that stomped in the run like dinosaurs.

These were all eaten, big birds with good-flavoured meat that hid in the freezer till their deaths were forgotten, and were taken out to make excellent casseroles. I think our last birds were the full-sized Faverolles, hatched from eggs acquired from our neighbours at Downs Home Farm, lovely big birds with very attractive plumage that laid light brown eggs.

Eggs were aways in plentiful supply, and in Spring the supply often became a deluge so that many eggs were used for cakes, and for packed-lunch sandwiches. Sometimes I'd use thirty small bantam eggs at a time.
Poultry keeping came to an abrupt end after fifty years when I was away in Sheffield at a training conference for work and just once the chickens weren't locked up at night, and they all died. I decided not to keep chickens again.