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While still a teenager, Robin Monckton developed countryside skills and the adaptability he would need to survive as a farmer in later life. He began with 25 chickens on his grandfather’s small farm, next to his home in Crowborough, East Sussex. Selling eggs enabled him to buy two pigs and then three cattle. By buying and selling more and more stock, and with hard graft, thrift and a bank loan, he bought 65-acre Brook Farm, five miles, away in 1964, when he was just 25 years old. The idea was to supplement the income from his new herd of Jersey cows, by renting out his pretty 15th-century oak-beamed farmhouse. His first tenants were a London couple with their 18-year-old daughter, Lesley. One day she knocked herself out on an overhead beam in the milking parlour and was caught by Robin as she fell.
They sold two fields to pay off their overdraft. Robin does hedging, fencing and bailing for local horse owners, and picks up odd jobs large and small for neighbours. Lesley has turned three bedrooms over to bed and breakfast and works in the kitchen of a secondary school – anything to top up the dwindling farm income. Robin says: 'It’s not farming as I understand the term. For many farmers like me, traditional farming has had it and become a part-time activity. It’s partly to do with today’s consumers who don’t spend the same percentage of the family income on food as they used to. But it is more to do with ridiculous EU regulations forcing us to reduce the amount we produce to the point that it’s not economic. We should be allowed to produce what the country eats. It’s daft that we are forced to import foodstuff such as milk, pig meat, eggs and fruit that we could produce ourselves. EU rules have ruined farming.'
Royal Society of Portrait Painters People's Portraits collection at Girton College, University of Cambridge
Cambridge
Title
Robin and Lesley Monckton, Farmers
Date
2000
Medium
oil on panel
Measurements
H 50 x W 60 cm
Accession number
485
Acquisition method
on loan from the Royal Society of Portrait Painters
Work type
Painting
Royal Society of Portrait Painters People's Portraits collection at Girton College, University of Cambridge
Huntingdon Road, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire CB3 0JG England
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