John Ellman

The effect of the quiet work John Ellman did on the South Downs can be traced today all over the world.

 

When John Ellman began to farm at Glynde, Robert Bakewell's fame as a breeder of sheep, cattle, horses, and pigs had already spread over Europe. Ellman, brought up on his father's farm, did not see why he should not do for the sheep of his native downs what Bakewell had done with mutton and wool for the Leicester breed. The mountain sheep are sweeter, But the valley sheep are fatter.

Sweetness was, and is, the special quality of the South Down sheep, but it was inclined to be bony, scraggy, and tough. Why should he not, by careful selective breeding, give it compactness, more flesh, and a finer wool?

John Ellman set himself the task of reforming and refining the thin, scraggy, and coarse-woolled sheep of Sussex, retaining a small size, and attaining a pleasant mixture of fat and lean, with the sweetness that seems to come from hilly pastures. In that he succeeded.

Improvements have followed on the lines of his methods in the century or more since he retired from his sheep-breeding, a deservedly prosperous man; but the most distinctive changes made in the original South Down sheep were made by him. His success was such that Glynde became almost as much a place of agricultural pilgrimage as Dishley in Leicestershire had been in Bakewell's day.

Ellman was the most open and frank of innovators. He offered his experience to all comers, fearless of rivalry, but he was so uniformly successful in prize competitions that he withdrew his own exhibits when he found that some of the exhibitors had bred their flocks from purchases made from himself.

The success of Ellman in serving the table with superior mutton was accompanied by a similar improvement in the amount and quality of the South Down wool, and this double success, continued down to the present day, is traceable in many parts of the world. He was a model employer, judged by the conditions common in his day.

He lodged all his unmarried servants in his own house, and when they married he and his wife provided then with a domestic outfit, a cottage, a garden, and grassland for a cow and a pig. If he was an autocrat in Glynde his was a benevolent autocracy.

He knew everybody who was prominent in the agricultural world. He maintained in Glynde a school for the education of his labourers' children. He was a sportsman and a capital cricketer.

Though he was offered a title he refused it, preferring to be known as a plain farmer, proud of having the best cultivated farm in Sussex.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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