For the love of a longwool

The ancient, golden-fleeced sheep that once drove the British economy are now in need of conservation help. Kate Green reports

- Kate Green

THE place to be seen in turn of-the-20th-century Lincolnshire was Henry Dudding’s livestock sale at Riby. He would send wagonettes to railway stations to collect potential buyers, who would be wined and dined in the manner of operagoers, while his Lincoln longwool sheep and shorthorn cattle were paraded around a raised parade ring as if they were stars at Glyndebourne.

Dudding’s Lincoln longwool sheep were world-renowned; an 1897 article in the Australasian Pastoralists’ Review described them as ‘the best flock in existence’. In 1906, a ram sold to South America for 1,405gns. Dudding was lying ill in bed and, on being informed by a nurse of the record price, exclaimed: ‘Why, dang it, lass— they’ve given it away!’

It’s fortunate, therefore, that Dudding didn’t live to see the breed’s near extinction from the 1960s and 1970s, due to the postwar collapse of the international market, the advancement of synthetic fibres and the scorning by the fashion-conscious of the woolly jumper as something Julian and Dick of the Famous Five wore or in which Colin Firth looked idiotic in Bridget Jones’s Diary.