On the afternoon of the EGCS AGM 10th September 2008 the meeting was shocked and saddened to hear of the death that morning of Mrs Sheilagh Andrews.
Sheilagh had travelled to Cornwall on the Tuesday afternoon to be present at the AGM but had suffered a stroke and died. Her death brought home to all of us that there are more important things than Guernsey politics.
Sheilagh was EGCS president in 1992 and I have just been reading the article she contributed to the Guernsey journal that year. It makes wonderful reading and sums up everything about Sheilagh.
She was involved with Guernseys from 1947 and over the years had Championships at all of the major shows. She and Wilf reluctantly sold the milking cows after she suffered her 1st stroke about 5 years ago and I was pleased to be able to help them find a buyer for the whole herd. They went to Devon to the Greenslade family who had just taken on a larger farm and Sheilagh’s comment to me was just so typical “I’m so pleased that they have gone to people who will love them”.
The Bath and West and South West Dairy shows will not be the same without her.
The following piece is reproduced from the 1992 Guernsey Journal written by Sheilagh and it is so typical of the good lady we felt it deserved to be seen once again.
The ‘Happy Valley’ herd was first registered by my mother in 1947, although there had been Guernseys in Happy Valley for some years before that. Also in 1947 came our first premier prize award at the Mid-Somerset Show, the Show bug had surely bitten! In 1951 Leweston Lady Easter 16th was purchased at the Leweston dispersal sale and her influence is still with us. I counted up some eighteen descendents milking in the herd today and another foundation cow ‘Fancy’, purchased in 1946, has produced some of our best milkers. Currently after eight generations, ‘WAY OF LIGHT’ has been selected by the Breed Improvement Committee as a prospective bull mother.
1959 was our first year to show at the Bath & West and the Royal, what memories, full bull classes averaging twenty-two entries in each, we got a fourth prize in one class and were over the moon! Times do change!
When my mother died in 1961 the Guernseys had been transferred to me, albeit by name alone, and so in reading in the local paper that father was selling the farm I had to move and fast! Thanks to a good friend in R. B. Taylor’s offices we found a very run down farm in Ham Hill, Pitts Farm, 123 acres of bracken, gorse, scrub and ragwort, all for £11,000, £9,000 of which was Bank money! Two years on I was offered a lot of money for part of Pitts Farm and so the herd moved once more, but we cleared the Bank and had enough left over to purchase Oxleaze Farm outright – what a great feeling!
Wilf, whom I had known since I was seventeen, had looked after Oxleaze for the previous owners, so we went first into partnership and then, in 1969, we married. That was a very good year, our first red rosette at the Royal. In the early 70’s we added a further 62 acres to the original 80 acres. Gradually the buildings were improved and modernised and a parlour built, all for the ‘Golden Girls’. Many of the show cows come to mind, ‘What Next’, ‘Promise’, and ‘Dawn Herald’ in the 60’s and 70’s. ‘Sorrel’, our first Bath & West Champion in 1974. ‘Bracken’ and dear ‘Princess’ who lived to have an eighteenth birthday party and won us so many Championships. ‘Daffodil’, Champion at the Royal in 1986 and Bath & West in 1987 and now her daughter, winning for us in the 90’s, including the 1991 South West Dairy Show Championship.
I look out at the Ford Cargo in the drive and the hundred head of cattle in the yards and I am so grateful in my heart to the ‘Golden Girls’ who have given us so much over so many years, not least of all the great friends we have made through being involved with the beloved breed.