FARMERS IN SPATS

Manawatu Herald, Volume L, Issue 3895, 15 January 1929, Page 4

FARMERS IN SPATS

MODERN TOUCH ES ‘AT LONDON DAIRY SHOW. SILK STOCKINGED DAIRYMAIDS. The Dairy Show recently held at the Agricultural Hall, Islington, London, among other things, demonstrated that the modern farmer is a very different person from the lie-whiskered and gaitered figure that comic artists love to depict. Country visitors to Islington now wear smart lounge suits and spats. Another remarkable feature of this year’s show was that it provided the visitor with a most extraordinary series of noises. Once inside fhe turnstiles the visitor was met with a miscellaneous cacophony—a cross between bagpipes, radio static and the Zoo at feeding time —which on closer observation revealed itself as whirring milk churns, brigades of clucking hens, hundreds ol prize cows —all “mooing,” battalions of quacking ducks, cooing pigeons, revolving bottle-capping machines, cow cake cutters, and the thousand and one grunts, roars, rattles and bangs which help to make up the exhibition of complicated machinery—the Dairy Show of 1928. There was not a gaitered leg to he seen in the whole of the Agricultural Hall, save among the white-coated land girls and cowmen who attended the prize beasts. Malacca canes and neatly-pointed shoes ousted the hobnail hoots and the gnarled walking stick of the farmer visitor of bygone years. The aluminium-tinted erection which looked like the first of the tanks was a labour-saving device which cleaned milk cans at a superhuman rate; and there was a rotary bottlefilling machine which caps and fills a modest 4,800 pint bottles an hour! In the middle of the hall whiteaproned girls, with shingled heads and silk stockings, were churning at lightning speed, while slim young things in’“tailor-mades” watched and criticised with the assured manner of experts—file modern farmers’ wives!