Tractor heritage, news and features

Strange fixations

I’d grown up in a large and mostly male family, all of whom were interested in machines and vehicles. The vehicles they tinkered with were all old – not because of any particular enthusiasm for 'vintage' stuff, as I don’t think the term was even in common usage back then – but because we were too poor to afford anything remotely new.

Although he was the son of a hill farmer, by the time I was a child my father was working in a scrapyard. One of the perks of this job was being able to bring home all sorts of defective, but highly interesting vehicles, or parts of vehicles, at a knock down price. Most of these would end up outside our house, and for my poor mother, who, in amongst the axles and the engines, was struggling to maintain some sort of ‘garden’, this uninvited pile of junk wasn’t a perk in any way, shape or form.

Most of the conversations in our house contained words like ‘magneto’, ‘big end’, ‘bottom ball joint’ and ‘half shaft’. If I had absorbed just a fraction of these conversations I would have been a mechanical genius at the age of six. But I didn’t. I became as obsessed about horses as they were about machines. And then I went to university. Which was an odd thing to do as far as my family were concerned, because I think both of my parents, and all five of my brothers had absolutely detested school and couldn’t wait to leave the place. 

One rebels, and then oddly one finds oneself coming around full circle and embracing the way of life that one has previously rejected. I gradually realised that the way that my parents lived wasn’t such a bad way of life after all, and at the age of 27 I bought an ancient and run down smallholding on the Llyn Peninsula. While there I bought an old chain harrow off an inebriated farmer in the pub for three pints, and started using my Series 2A Land Rover to harrow the fields with it.

One day I went to a Vintage Rally and I started to look at tractors in a different way. I began to wonder what was happening to me! Then I went into a newsagent and picked up a tractor magazine. I looked at all the classified ads, without a thought of what was actually a useful tractor. I think I was just drawn to whatever tractor looked nice, and which one I would most like to visualise myself chugging down the road on. Rather annoyingly all the really eye catching tractors were also the most expensive. Which I suppose meant that I had pretty good taste in old tractors.

One of my female friends came to see me and laughed out loud at the tractor magazine that she found lying on my kitchen table. I laughed with her, and we joked that it was like one of those oddball magazines that you see as a guest publication on ‘Have I Got News For You’! But despite the fact that yes I did think this vintage tractor world was a strange and largely male orientated world, I was determined that I was going to be a part of it, and that one day I’d be a tractor owner myself, and that I might understand at least some of what it was that they were talking about in all those articles.