Roundabout
The Guernsey was not there alone: her com- panion was a beautiful white heifer from 'the only Chartley White herd in the world'--a cow with the Negative Look, white hide and black hooves, eyes, ears and nose. A Hindu would have loved her. The two nobles were actually farmers too—though the respective agricultural positions of the Earl of Lonsdale and the Duke of Bed- ford are rather like those of Cobbett and Marie Antoinette. The Duke of Bedford, whose cows they were, has the prospective Dairy Queens to stay at Woburn Abbey while the committee makes its preliminary appraisal, and seemed on good terms with the honest milkmaid in peep- toed shoes who was this year's reigning queen.
'It was delightful,' he said. 'Last year we had a picnic; and since she is Welsh, she sang for us. We have wallabies in the woods at Woburn, but they are so shy I had never seen them. When she sang, they all came out and sat listening to her. I suppose,' he said thoughtfully, 'they may have come from New South Wales.' The Woburn herds comprise fifty-five animals, and on a fine summer Saturday their entire yield is consumed in the Abbey Milk Bar.
The Earl of Lonsdale farms 3,000 acres in the north, and his family were farming several cen- turies before the introduction of the mangel- wurzel revolutionised British cattle farming. But times have changed : his agricultural apprentices now go to classes to learn the technicalities of present-day farming; and, a more sorry sign of the times, the Earl has had to pull the roof off his ancestral seat and let the cows go grazing there. 'You have the British populace at Woburn,' he said to the Duke of Bedford, 'I have the British cows.'
The traditional efforts of mothers to get their young to drink up their milk are as nothing com- pared to the efforts of the Milk Council to in- terest the nation in the drink. Ever since the gnarled features of Mendes-France were photo- graphed with a glass of the stuff to prove to Prance what milk could do for the Constitution, the great drive has been to rid the idea of milk from its nursery associations. The gimmicks currently under way include a Milk-for-Stamina Twelve-Day Bicycle Tour (each eager pedaller to gulp down six pints a day); the Dairy Queen con- test and various Dairy Festivals; a poster com- petition for the prisoners at Dartmoor (the winner certainly drew the better drawing, but third prize had the slogan 'There's no udder way'); and a delicious drink made from creme de cacao, brandy and cream, which tastes as mild as the eyes of a Jersey and has a kick to equal an Aberdeen-Angus.
Milk and cigars, milk and the atom bomb, milk and the Margot rumpus, the butter rumpus, the Thurso rumpus—the conversation of the human beings beat the familiar paths. A man seemed to be suggesting that milk should be drunk mainly because mankind were unlucky enough not to be able to eat grass: whereas the cow, assisted by 134,000 milk producers, 20,000 dairymen and 270 manufacturers of dairy. products, did it for us.
Nobody tried to interview the cows. None has given tongue, according to Aubrey Menen, since an ancient Indian philosopher taught his cow to speak in order to lecture the court on philo- sophy. The cow learned to speak and had an instant success at court—but all she would talk about was bulls.
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