After a positive visit to the surgeon last week and on an invitation from Maurice Young in Alvorge, Rozanne and I went to watch our local rugby team play. The team is Lousã Rugby Club based in a town of that name some thirty kilometres away or thereabouts. A nice ground, a great, but small stand overlooking the centre of the pitch where alcohol and food are served throughout and after the game. Lousã languishes in the bottom rungs of the Portuguese Top 10 rugby table, which is amongst the elite of Portuguese rugby.
I was to learn that the main sponsor, probably the owner, is the senior member of the family Redondo, who make Licor Beirão. This is a herbal liquor I always add to my fruit salad at home or in restaurants. Being herbal, which includes such ingredients as cinnamon, mint and lavender it must be healthy after all. If you see it in your local liquor store try it. It is only €9 a bottle here in Portugal. Shit! I just checked it is £18 in the UK. Yet another reason to live in Portugal where even whisky is a lot cheaper than in the UK and tot measures are rarely used.
“In a paragraph just yesterday, a family was born with the nickname Redondo como o mundo, which keeps in the mouth of time the secret of a liqueur capable of making time last forever.” - Beirão history
The game was very enjoyable, the scores were high in sympathy with the poor all round tackling with the referee receiving the most criticism from friend and foe. The man was of an age which made it hard to keep up with the game, whistle-blowing, a strategic relief for both the referee and the players, some of who were on their knees by the end of the game. Great fun with some individuals showing amazing speed and skill. Set pieces were always slightly delayed as the front rows struggled to arrive.
I was pretty competitive when I played rugby but I have become much more so since becoming a spectator of sport, live or on TV.
“Watching sport makes you much more competitive while ensuring your knowledge of the tactics and rules of the particular sport are second to none. In fact, you are happy to defend your knowledge even under threat of physical violence, especially if in a pub.“- Peter McSporran
Despite sitting down saying I will enjoy the game for the sake of a game, claiming neutrality, by the end, I am either dismayed or overjoyed. I just cannot help my support going to one or the other competitor no matter which sport. More often dismay as I often sympathise and offer support to the underdog. Is this an urge to lose in my nature? I think not, rather my penchant for optimism.
It gets back to what I said you must continue to do things in your old age. If it was not for Maurice Young’s invite, despite rugby being played in Portugal after qualifying for the World Cup when Spain was disqualified, a joy even to Portuguese soccer fans. I plan to attend as many home games as possible in the future, not just for rugby but for the making of new friends over rugby, food and of course beer if not Beirão.
Farming 1980s
On moving to Mede farm with the expansion we decided to employ some professional management. We were now growing some hundred hectares of tobacco, forty hectares of seed maize and sixty hectares of groundnuts and commercial maize for the cattle which had become an important enterprise on the farm, the latter offering both income and enjoyment.
Tony Leckie, married to Helen Vermaak with three young girls, joined us on Mede moving into the cottage looking after the tobacco on both farms, not an easy job as we still had conventional curing barns on Mede requiring checking often at night. The forced air systems on both farms required less supervision having temperatures controlled by thermostats with automatic stokers. Tony was to work for us for several years having worked for many years in the ‘bush’ with Tsetse Control. He used to recount the culls of the wild animals that took place in his time in efforts to eradicate this pest along with the spraying of DDT. All in vain. Now pheromone traps seem to be able to do the job better without all the shooting and spraying although the latter is sometimes resorted to, just not with DDT.
Tony was one of the first of our many managers that on leaving our employ went farming on his own account. On leaving us, Tony leased California Farm from the African Finance Corporation which had been taken back from the Laubschers who lost the will to farm on the death of their son in the war. These things affect everyone differently, their neighbours the Vermaaks also lost a son but they continued with determination. California Farm is the one with the bridge where the Youth Brigade managed to kill some of my workers, becoming known to me as ‘Leckie’s Leap’. Later, due to political interference, Tony and Helen lost the farm and moved to their son-in-law's farm in Banket. During the farm invasions in the early two thousands, both were so badly beaten they ended up in intensive care. Tony spent months in hospital. Both never fully recovered, Tony unable to work and Helen suffered a premature death with complications caused by the head injuries she received in the beating.
“Those that tell us we should get over the loss of our farms as it is now a thing of the past forget the physical and mental damage, even death, suffered by farmers at that time. Only those that did not experience it can say this, those that did will never forget.” - Peter McSporran
At the same time Mike von Memerty, the son of a farmer in the Mazowe Valley joined us straight from university. Mike was still single, although already in a relationship with his wife to be Karen Nesbitt. Mike was to prove himself to be one of the best managers we ever employed. He was intelligent, hard-working with a burning ambition to go farming in his own right, especially as his father had earlier given up the family farm. We made the cottage on Diandra more comfortable for him, not much, while we now pushed on with our new house hoping to move back as soon as possible as that was the main centre of operations. Further riding the five kilometres there and back, morning and evening, in the dark in winter on the motorbike was bloody cold. It is the obscure reasons that often motivate an action in life.
"Nothing like a cold motorbike drive before sunrise to motivate house building on a farm.” - Peter McSporran
I find it hard to put precise dates, Karen tells me it was about 1984 when Mike joined us. Unfortunately, Mike on losing his own farm from invasions moved to Botswana where he farmed before his early death. Why were there so many early deaths following the farm invasions? I think she is correct because in 1983 my friend and neighbour Henry Bezuidenhout decided to earn some foreign exchange money by taking on a three-year contract to grow fire-cured tobacco for Cassalee in Swaziland. That is where the dachshund is reputed to have bitten his penis. For the first year of the contract his brother-in-law Rex Carey ran the farm for him but after a year he must have missed his wife Wendy too much and decided to return to his own farm in Goromonzi. Henry then offered the farm to me to lease, which I did, moving Mike von Memerty there to manage it. In that year, our house on Diandra was completed and I moved back there.
‘If you want to sow the seeds for divorce try building a house on a farm. Luckily, having your own building team reduces the cost of the inevitable changes to plan.” - Peter McSporran
We now upped our tobacco to sixty hectares irrigated and a hundred hectares dryland, at that time a large area although there were many bigger growers in Zimbabwe, John Impey in Karoi immediately comes to mind along with Forester Estate in Mvurwi.
It was the golden years of my farming, tobacco prices were improving, we still had a good marketing system for beef and grain while most of my other crops sold at a premium as seed through the Seed Co-op. We even started to grow seed wheat on top of everything else.
On Henry’s farm, Marivale, we grew tobacco and groundnuts. We had mixed curing there with bulk curers and conventional barns. Henry did not want maize grown on his farm but did not stipulate not to grow groundnuts which we did and upset him when he heard.
He later got his own back. We got a very big surprise when we went to sell the tobacco from that farm on the tobacco auction floors. All the proceeds of the sale went directly to the African Finance Corporation (AFC) much to my and Mike's chagrin. As tobacco was still on quota we had to grow under Henry’s registered grower’s number where it was discovered that a registered stop order on that grower’s number remained, a long-term capital debt which was being paid off by Henry. Despite our protests they had grabbed all the proceeds one time from the sale although their claim was tenuous. Luckily, it was resolved, only after a month following legal intervention. Fortunately, I had income from my other two farms to tide me through that time. These were two small hiccups in my working with Henry, not enough to spoil a great friendship although at the time I called him some short sharp unpleasant names. These he just laughed off. That was Henry. Let’s not argue, let's go fishing, that can resolve most problems.
I said earlier it was the ‘Golden Years’ of farming in Zimbabwe as the controlled crops such as wheat, maize, barley, cotton and soya were a negotiated price giving a return on an average cost of production. Therefore, if you could produce more than the country's average yield, which was not hard, especially with irrigation, keep your costs below the country’s average, easier for me being only sixty-five kilometres from suppliers and market, and grow good quality, prices were based on grades, you could make good money. I remember thinking at the time how easy it was, pity those days did not last after the first ten years of Independence. In fact, things were so good I started looking for yet another farm to buy with better soils for row crops. Hard to find as it had to be red clay soil for seed maize and seed wheat with access to water. Our area was granite sands, good for groundnuts and tobacco not so for maize and wheat. It would take me a couple of years of searching to find something suitable although nearly an hour's drive away. That is another story.
Farewell Dave and Joan Craft
This past week I received some sad news about the passing of Dave Craft, a manager of ours I have mentioned in the past. Dave came to me just before the land invasions, along with our introduction of producing broccoli for sale by contract to a vegetable freezer. Dave had served in the regular airforce as an armourer and also at times as a chopper technician. A ‘Chopper Tech’ made sure the machine would fly. In the Rhodesian war where contact was a daily occurrence for the 7th Squadron (helicopter), a hard job late into the night, and also in flight when required to man the helicopters armaments. If you were a tech on a G Car, troop carrier, you would man the twin browning machine guns and if in a command helicopter, K Car, the twenty-millimetre cannon. It was a job with long hours and guaranteed daily action. Not for the faint-hearted.
When Dave joined us he had farmed for a number of years coming to us as a senior manager. Dave was one of those rare men, hard-working, honest, and complaining little, his family meant everything to him. There is no doubt about his bravery, even in civilian life when he was nearly killed going to the rescue of one of our neighbours during the farm invasions. I can still remember his face as he recounted his close shave to me that evening. Pissed off rather than scared. Dave, we enticed up to Zambia when we moved after losing the farms where he successfully grew our first tobacco crop up there. He later changed sides and went from grower to join the ranks of the tobacco buyers. A few years ago he left to join his daughter in Australia following his wife Joan’s ill health. Joan, a lovely lady, passed away in October last year and David, unfortunately, joined her last week. Dave and Joan over the years became close friends, Joan being Rozanne’s bridge partner in Zambia. Both will always remain in our hearts. Rest in peace Dave and Joan, you certainly deserve it.
Disclaimer: Copyright Peter McSporran. The content in this blog represents my personal views and does not reflect corporate entities.
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