The Rat Catcher Started It

You can go into a pub, meet a rat catcher and your whole life can change right there.

I was back in Herefordshire after some years away, trying to get a sense of the place, sitting in country pubs in the evenings, listening mostly.

The rat catcher came to just one of these pubs and always sat there with the same woman. In those days men in pubs didn’t show much affection for their wives, for various reasons we won’t bother to analyse just now, and so I reasoned that she wasn’t a wife, or if she was she wasn’t his. I was actually more interested that he usually had a demijohn of cider under the table, from which he used to top up his glass when the landlord, Nudge, wasn’t looking.

Rat catchers, like rats, get everywhere, and he had his runs and boltholes all over the county.

In those days there were three known cider makers in the county – Bulmers, Westons, and Symonds. Later, when we started to deal in cider and cider apples, I used to go to Bulmers cider factory in Hereford delivering cider apples that we didn’t want or need. Everyone went over the weighbridge in their cars and tractors, trailers and pickups, and unloaded their apples into the canals. You booked in to deliver either cider apples or jam apples, and they only cared which kind you brought because they could pay you less for jam apples. Otherwise you just tipped all the apples into the canals, and the waters diverted from the Eign Brook carried them off to be pulped and pressed inside the factory.

So they had lost control of any possibility of making quality cider right there. They had no idea if your load contained the sharp but aromatic Foxwhelp apples, or the famous Kingston Blacks, known for a juice that balanced acidity and tannin to perfection. You might have the light, pale White Normans’ introduced from Normandy by the gentlemen cider-makers of the eighteenth century, or maybe the Styre Wilding, an apple discovered growing wild from a seed dropped in a hedge, that was found to be worth propagating. Bulmers neither knew nor cared, or if old Mr Bertram cared he was overruled. Making distinctive and particular kinds of cider was ruled out before they started.

You could argue, of course, that they weren’t really making cider. If you saw the sugar tankers going in, the obvious conclusion was that they were using water to dilute the juice, adding sugar and chemicals, and fermenting a liquid with maybe 30% apple juice if you were lucky. It was said that the pipes that fed water into the fermenting vessels were labelled ‘X-apple Special’ in the absurd hope of fooling their own employees.

So the rat catcher’s cider was interesting, because it wasn’t produced by any of the three known cider makers. I had tasted cider early, helping myself at the age of four from the wooden barrel trammed up in the hop kilns where every night my father stoked the fires, drying the hops, and I had also followed a horse-drawn dray taking barrels of frothing fermenting juice from the Red Witchend Farm to be stored down at the watermill. I had drunk cider from the jars wedged behind the thripples of the drays at harvest time, and so I was predisposed to cider. It seemed a good line of inquiry to follow to find a way back in to my home county.

The rat catcher went everywhere where there were rats, and so he knew that there were still a few places where proper cider was being made. There were the Duggans of Kimberton, whose modus operandi was to send barrels of cider up to mid-Wales for shearings and gathering days, where the farmers left the barrels lying around empty gaining notes of vinegar until they needed them refilled the following year. There was old Slasher* Davies up at Lyne Down, making superb perry from the delicate aromatic juice of his own Moorcroft pear trees. There were a few small farms over beyond Dymock making proper cider. One of them had an orchard of a pear called Rock, almost unique to the parish of Tirley, that makes the strongest perry of them all. The rat catcher knew some of these places, and we soon started discovering some more.

The rat catcher’s favourite cider-maker was Harry Allen of Brimfield. I have no qualms about naming Harry. I have nothing but good to say of him. Thinking of him reminds me of Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, with its gentle evocation of the unassuming lives of the country people now buried in that churchyard after years of ploughing and mowing and raising children to do the same, and it is a pleasure to remember a man otherwise as soundly forgotten as the peasants in Gray’s churchyard, where ‘the rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep’ …’each in his narrow cell forever laid’.

Harry’s cottage was set among sheds and damson trees. Bean poles and useful timbers were stacked leaning against the fruit trees, and his cider making tack – a scratter to mill the apples, a few half-barrels and an old wooden screw press – stood in the garden protected from the rain by sheets of tin. Every shed held rows of wooden barrels, some so big that he had to dismantle them to get them out. He would clean them thoroughly – something revealingly rare in country cider making – and reassemble them carefully inside the sheds when it was time to fill them with fresh juice.

During the autumn you would see him jouncing around the village on an old borrowed tractor and trailer collecting apples here and there, a slight reminder of a rural economy where mutual aid and obligations, favours and counter favours, were once central to country life, and no money changed hands. He knew the names of all the apples and he liked to mix them as he milled them to produce a juice with the right balance of the bittersweets and bittersharps, the sharps and the sweets, the classes into which true cider apples are divided. And he never added any water to the juice. In his world, and in the past from which he grew, adding water was despised as the sort of thing done by mean grasping farmers to adulterate the cider that was once part of the wages of farm workers. He came more from the world of cooperating peasants sharing the resources, not from the world of grasping farmers.

I make no claim to share the gentleness and humility of this old countryman, or any of his other virtues, as in his lugubrious patient way he lived his life in the small brick cottage where he and his brother had been born. I see him making his best shot at cooking a Sunday roast, laying down fresh newspaper on the table for the occasion. I see him making sure there were logs and morning wood in the bucket by the door. I imagine him, like all country people born before electricity, keeping a torch beside his bed in case of something surprising in the night. I remember him lining out the seed rows with two sticks and a length of hop twine. Above all I remember him sometimes because he deserves to have someone remember him long after his death, and my brother and I owe him that small favour.

And I owe him because he inspired us to start making cider to the same simple principles, and to sell it from a simple wooden shed. My brother and I were absolutely without question the very first revival cider makers in Herefordshire. As the sons of a farm worker ourselves, we might claim not to be revivalists at all but the last of the native cider makers. As time went on our cider business grew until we made 12.000 gallons of cider and perry every year, and slowly other people started setting up small cider companies. People came great distances to buy our cider. A motorbike journalist from London regularly road-tested new bikes by using them to collect a jar or two, and a Guardian crossword compiler, the uncle of Paul McCartney, hearing the rare Redstreak apple discussed in the tasting sheds,  included it in one of his crosswords. On one occasion I was quick-witted enough not to look too hard at a cheque, recognising the signature as that of the Chief Cashier of the Bank of England, found on every bank note. Some passing Romanies, hearing me playing my squeezebox, showed me their broom dance on the floor of the cider tasting shed, a totally demotic meeting place that burned to the ground this summer.

I don’t have the slightest idea if our cider-making inspired anyone else to become cider-makers themselves, though I know we inspired a legendary maker of flutes to quit his safe day job. and I like to think that Harry would not have suspected that his work could ever inspire anyone. Maybe we just caught the spirit of the times that led people to leave their jobs in broadcasting and make new lives creating artisan ciders. Either way, after we moved on with our lives, and whatever the causes and influences that were at work, there is now a market for proper cider apples and proper cider, and some hope of the old orchards surviving and giving homes to beetles and woodpeckers. Maybe we helped pass on to the revivalists some of the spirit of the cider making country man we imbibed from Harry Allen. I know we passed on our respect for the almost extinct Foxwhelp apple, now planted in Dunkertons’ cider orchards and lending its name to a team of Morris dancers.

When we started out Bulmers’ slogan was ‘Join the Great Cider Revival’. I enraged their managing director by driving around in my old car with the slogan ‘Join the REAL cider revival’. I am told he thought better of taking me to court. Bulmers is now part of some multinational drinks corporation, but we can now get real cider everywhere. There is even a small firm making cider using a horse mill, and I recommend you try it, and raise a glass to Harry Allen, late of Brimfield.

*Ivor Davies was called Slasher because he was always Bold Captain Slasher in the Mummer’s play, back in the days when the Mummer’s play was a live tradition, performed, as Thomas Hardy observed, with an air of dreary obligation that marked it as a real tradition, contrasting with the enthusiasm of modern revivalist Morris dancers. The blacksmith at Picts Cross was called Dr Baylis - he