Mr Robert A. Barr born 1922. East Kinleith Farm, Currie

(Interviewed June 2013 by Liz Beevers and Helen Ogg)

Memories of Bobby Russell, stock dealer and last owner of Fernieflatt

“Bobby Russell (owner of Fernieflatt 1950-1970) stayed down in Colinton, right at the traffic lights and I think it was the third house down on the right. I never met his wife… He was a very sociable man: I can remember him coming up here soon after we moved in (November 1939) to see if there were any young ones and he took us in the car to the dance at Mid Calder.  When you go out to Mid Calder there’s a hall there on the right .  He was a dancing man and loved to get the farmers involved.  Not a big man: about the height of myself.

I was only down to Fernieflatt once or twice taking messages from my father maybe about one or two cows he had to sell.  My father got on great with him.

Bobby Russell grew grass at Fernieflatt. He was buying dry cows (cows that are not being milked any longer).  He was going to Lanark on a Monday and bought cows and all the rest of it.  He’d carry calves in the back of his car: a Rover I think it was.  Then take them into Swann’s (the auctioneers in Edinburgh) on a Wednesday.  He worked together with Stoddarts too for the horses. He trained his son to do the dealing as well.

I can still see him standing at Lanark on a Monday with a drink in him, standing at the back door of his car and I tapped him on the shoulder and said
 “Bobby! That’s the back door you’re trying to open !”  
 “Oh! “ He said “I’ve had too much to drink”  
He’ d come to see my father and walk down the byre and buy some cows off him.  

NB Mr Barr also showed us a crook –hazel staff and carved horn top inscribed Robert Barr East Kinleith which Bobby Russell had got made for Mr Barr by a Borders shepherd.

Ploughing Baberton golf course in the war.

“Meiklejohn was the man in charge of the agriculture department in the war and he went round the farms telling us what to grow. You couldna just grow what you liked.  So we were growing wheat, barley and oats and doing the dairy too.  Meiklejohn was very friendly with my father and when we got the tractor
 (an early Ferguson in 1939) we started doing a wee bit of contracting.  Meiklejohn made the golf courses plough up so much of their ground and put crops in it.   Baberton and the Braids I remember.  Course I got the job of ploughing it and sowing the crops.  I think it was oats and barley we planted.  I don’t know who harvested it.”

Mr Barr also had many interesting memories of working on Muirwood fields, harvesting potatoes for the Currie Kirk minister in the war and his very early tractors in this area.