ADAM’S ANIMALS

For British poultry farmers, preparation for the Christmas dinner turkey begins in mid-summer. Farmer and Countryfile presenter Adam Henson explores the history of this seasonal tradition

When did the Christmas turkey become our much-loved festive centrepiece?

For millions of us, Christmas without turkey is like Wallace without Gromit or gin without tonic. Unthinkable. But it hasn’t always been that way. In the Middle Ages, goose, swan, peacock and even boar’s head were the festive feasts in Britain and, although the first turkeys were brought here in the 1500s, it was centuries before they became the undisputed kings of the Christmas table. For a long time, chicken was the economical and available choice for most families. It wasn’t until the 1950s, when turkey became more affordable, that it took the top spot.

CHRISTMAS STARTS EARLY

Turkey time isn’t confined to mid-December for a freerange poultry farmer. They turn their minds to Christmas in July when the first turkey chicks, known as poults, arrive. They’re incredibly efficient livestock and in the first few weeks poults rapidly put on weight, kept under heat lamps for the first three or four weeks while they’re still covered in down. They’re then released into sheds and paddocks to peck, feed and strut. They love eating any available foliage and some breeders will let their flocks stray around orchards, feasting on windfall cherries, apples and nuts.

DROVING TURKEYS TO MARKET

I grew up with Buff turkeys on the farm at home, where they would run around the yard and take to the trees to roost. The Buff, developed by the Victorians, has brown plumage, enormous brightly-coloured wattles and can lay a large number of eggs. But they don’t have the broad breast of today’s turkeys and couldn’t compete on the commercial market. In the 1980s, there were only two Buff breeders left in the UK, bringing the bird close to extinction.

Turkeys might be cumbersome and less than pretty but I like the way a Pathé newsreel feature from the 1940s described them: “a proud and stand-offish bird all fitted up with a portable tail fan”. It fits the description of the standard British breeds, including the Cambridge Bronze, Crimson Dawn and the best-known Norfolk Black.

Last Christmas, I had the pleasure of meeting one of the county’s turkey-farming legends. James Graham from Thuxton is the fourth generation of his family to rear Norfolk Blacks and he takes particular pride in hatching all the chicks and growing the corn he feeds to his turkeys. Since his grandfather helped save the breed from extinction, James has created a profitable niche market for his traditional, non-intensive birds.

Tales are still told of the old days when hundreds of thousands of turkeys and geese were walked along the drovers’ routes to the London livestock markets in time for Christmas Eve. There was great competitiveness between the turkey breeders and the goose farmers to see who could arrive first, so James helped the Countryfile crew with a festive challenge to recreate the scene at journey’s end. Ellie Harrison drove geese, and I drove a flock of James’ turkeys on foot over a mile from outlying farms to the village green at Banham. It wasn’t as easy as you’d think, with turkeys going AWOL, and we were pipped to the post by Ellie and her geese. But I’m ready for a rematch this Christmas to restore my dented pride, as long as I can find a few well-behaved Norfolk Blacks.