Robert Stevenson late of Changue, Cumnock writes:
Poultry used to be an enterprise on many farms before the days of large intensive units where the birds are housed all the time. Recent years have seen a revival in free range egg production, some of which involve very large numbers.
In days of old most farms would have from 50 up to a few hundred hens running about, and these could provide some income for the farmer's wife and family. When my father (John Stevenson, Changue) was in his mid teens his father wanted to encourage him, and a number of large pens were built, each housing 12 hens and a cock, which I think came from Binnie of Denny. Each pen was for a separate pure breed and Dad was then able to offer hatching eggs for sale round the district ( more valuable than eating eggs) .
I think there were a few breeds involved, certainly White Wyandottes, Light Sussex, Rhode Island Reds, White Leghorns and as something a bit different Exchequer Leghorns ( which were black and white mottled ). After a few years in poultry Dad then progressed to Border Leicester sheep, breeding tups for the crossing trade.
My Grandmother said it was keeping hens that got the Meikle family through the farming depression of the 1930s. There was a lot of work involved as the hens were kept in separate houses, one in each grass "park", to allow the birds to forage on clean areas, supplementing their diet and helping to minimise disease.
However this meant quite a lot of leg work, when it came to feeding the hens (three times a day) and collecting the eggs (twice daily). One of the feeds would be of a hot mash, made by mixing a milled mixture (containing in those days cereals and fish meal for protein) with scalding water. There would be a good proportion of maize (known as Indian Corn) in the mix as this was a cheaper source of energy that could be imported from North America.
A tragedy occurred at Changue in 1914, when two year old David Stevenson fell into the hot water readied for making the hens mash and was scalded to death. Dad said his mother was never the same after this accident.
Mum said that during WW2, when the government introduced Double Summer Time (Greenwich Mean Time plus two hours), it didn't get properly dark until midnight at Grangemouth, and this meant that the family took turns at who had to sit up late, to shut the hens in! Bear in mind that my Granny said they only began staying up after 9pm to hear the BBC radio nine o'clock news once the war began - and they developed the habit of having a bedtime cup of tea because they sat up late !
Of course if ever the hens are not shut in, that is the one night the fox wreaks havoc. Actually the fox looks round the henhouses every night - and takes its chance. Modern free range units have henhouse doors on clocks or light meters that allow egress of the hens. I'm not sure what happens to stragglers, although I can guess.
Also on offer to the hens at Bearcrofts, Grangemouth (my mother's birthplace) were cockle shells, as a good source of calcium for them to form their egg shells. A supply of these cockle shells followed the family to the farm of Hardengreen, when they left Bearcrofts, due to the encroachment of the Scottish Oils refinery works. The remnants were brought through to Changue when Granny and Granddad retired to Ayr, and I fed them to my hens in the 1970s- the hens loved them. They had originally been lifted from what Mum called the Shelly Bank - which was on the shores of the River Forth, Bearcrofts being a carse farm ( ie the flat, heavy land that the Forth wanders through in its middle reaches). Imagine my surprise when I later learned that the Shelly Bank wasn't a tidal accumulation of sea shells as I had rashly assumed - but a stone age midden that must have taken hundreds of years to grow, created by Scotland's early residents.
Mum said she had cause to bless Mac the collie when shutting in the hens. Hens are a bit like children, some are quite reluctant to go to bed. The last one would often sit on the lip of the hen's bole, and Mac was wise to this and would sneak up on them and tip them into the henhouse with his nose.
Bole is a Scots word for a small opening eg the surname Campbell is Cam Boel, meaning crooked mouth.
Ducks are a bit different - if it comes on heavy rain just before you shut them in, they will be off back out to the field and gorging themselves on slugs and worms. I've seen my ducks bills all clogged up with the slime from slugs, so many had they eaten. This probably partly explains the rather striking flavour of duck eggs. They are extra thick of the white though and are said to make good batters. They are fully larger than hens eggs, and the remarkable Khaki Campbell breed introduced by a Mrs Campbell in the 1900s, from a surprising mixture of Indian Runner, Mallard and Orpington blood could lay 300 eggs a year, decades before modern hybrid hens managed it. Ducks do have the advantage of being healthier and nicer natured than hens, generally.
Geese by contrast are purely vegetarian, and their huge eggs are lovely flavoured and excellent for baking - provided the recipe quantity is large enough!
Collecting eggs meant braving the clockers. These were hens that had decided they wanted to sit on eggs, and would loudly object to you feeling underneath them to retrieve any eggs. Modern hybrid hens have had this broodiness bred out of them, but the pre-war Rhode Island Red X Light Sussex was bred form two dual purpose parents, and retained the propensity to sit. If they were particularly vicious you might have to restrain the hen by gently but firmly holding a stick under their beak, so to minimise the scope of movement of their heads.
Mum used to quote a small boy from the cottages at Hardengreen who liked to help collect the eggs. This young worthy, on his return to the farmhouse with the eggs, was heard to loudly declare " Mistress Meikle! A dom bitch o' a hen pecked me!"
The Rhodie X L Sussex was almost ubiquitous, thanks to the discovery of sex linkage in fowls. This depended on the sex chromosomes in birds being the opposite way round from mammals, the females being XY and the males XX ( although they don't call them by those letters in birds now). Rhode Island Reds are of a deep red body colour, with black feathers in their tails, which makes them a "gold" in genetic terms, while the Light Sussex (which got its Columbian colouration and part of its name from the old Light Brahma breed) is a " silver".
The Columbian pattern is a white body with neck hackles having a black stripe down the centre, along with black wingtips and tail. By mating a R.I.R cock with Light Sussex hens, the resulting chicks are born in two colours, the males being " silver " ie pale yellow and the females " gold " ie buff coloured. Note that the colours are switched round from the parents. This allows the sexes to be distinguished as soon as the chicks are dry and meant that they could be sold at day old, with sex guaranteed. In the old days the yellow males were reared for meat, because both parents were heavier bodied dual purpose types.
The trick works because the Y chromosome is very small, and pigment is only on the larger X chromosome - thus the females inherit a X chromosome with a red gene from the cock, and a Y chromosome with no colour gene from the parent hen, therefore they turn out red and female.
The clever part is that silver is " dominant " to gold and the male chicks which have two X chromosomes and a gene for each colour, nevertheless turn out white. Note that the reverse cross ( Light Sussex cock onto R.I.R hen merely produces silver chicks of both sexes , because the males inherit a dominant silver gene from the father which suppresses expression of the red gene from their mother , and the females only have a silver gene from the father and a Y chromosome lacking pigment instructions from the mother.
The Rhodie X LS had some value after two or three years laying, as a " spent hen " because of its carcase attributes. Nowadays the modern hybrid hen is a couple of pounds lighter, also broiler chickens are so efficiently grown in less than six weeks and cheap, that a hen at the end of its life is practically worthless.
The Brown Leghorn which is a light egg laying breed, is also gold in sex linkage terms but the White Leghorn is pure white and not a silver so doesn't work. ie Brown Leghorn X Light Sussex is a sex linked cross, but the popular R.I.R X White Leghorn -a better layer but poorer meat bird than Rhodie X Sussex) is not sex linked.
Non sex linked chicks have to be sexed by a method invented by the Japanese, where the vents are examined and the sex determined (amazingly quickly by trained operators). Birds of course have only one orifice. Modern day hybrids mostly incorporate auto sex linkage, where one of the sexes will have have different colouration at day old - so the Japanese are no longer needed.
As the days grow shorter in autumn the old breeds of hen stopped laying. Hen houses in the steading could be fitted with electric lights to give an 18 hour day, but this wasn't an option for remoter hen houses. Similarly there tended to be a glut of eggs in the springtime " when even sparrows lay. "
One answer to this imbalance was the preservation of eggs in spring for use through the winter. We had a cupboard under the stairs in Changue house where a number of large galvanised pails sat, filled with a solution made with sodium silicate dissolved in water . This was called waterglass and appeared a bit cloudy. The freshest eggs possible, clean and without any shell blemishes were placed in the pails, and a chemical reaction sealed the pores in the shells and allowed the eggs to keep, unrefrigerated in the dark for it is said, up to two years.
The eggs would become covered in part in a white encrustation, and apparently should be opened carefully not to contaminate the contents. They were used in baking, and could be scrambled but not poached as the yolks lose their structure a little. Eggs used to be much dearer in wintertime and this was a way round this, although like many housekeeping procedures of old, would take up the housewife's time.
Exchequer Leghorns, which seem to have originated as "sports" in White Leghorns in Scotland.
Leghorns always have yellow legs and white earlobes, seen most clearly here in the cockerel.
They lay a lot of white eggs, but can be flighty ( and noisy) by nature, and seldom go broody.
Rhode Island Red cockerel, showing black tail feathering. Bred in the USA from crosses of Asiatic breeds such as the Cochin from China. Good hardy layers of tinted or light brown eggs.
An exhibition trio of Light Sussex.These would lay pale tinted eggs,and had some use as table birds Commercial types would have less distinct markings. The Light Sussex was bred from the enormous Brahmapootra ( later called just Brahmas), which combined Malay Game, Chinese Cochin and an Indian breed. Cochins and Brahmas arrived in Britain in the 1850s and created a fad for poultry exhibitions.
A Light Brahma cockerel - the light name is to distinguish it from the Dark Brahma variety ( which is silver pencilled in females and silver duckwing in males). Brahmas are heavyweights of the poultry world ( 10-14 pounds). Note also the pea comb, probably from the Malay blood ( short and stubbly comb).This boy also displays the breed characteristics of feathered legs and "vulture" hocks - the feathers that are sticking out beyond his legs.
Old 1885 illustration of Dark Brahmas
