The tractor attraction
QUESTION What’s the best tractor?
Before you begin to sharpen your pitchfork and light your torch, I recognise this is highly subjective.
Clearly, modern 500 hp-plus behemoths are incredibly powerful. If satnav, air conditioning, front axle suspension systems and a host of electronic switches float your boat, so be it. However, I prefer the classics.
To my mind, the best tractor is the Massey ferguson 135. Produced from 1964 to 1975, this was the most versatile machine ever made, with all the features that farmers and smallholders need.
It was loaded with options, including live power, a multi-power transmission, 12 forward and four reverse speeds, power steering and a two- stage clutch. The 45.5 hp engine, later increased to 47 hp, had plenty of oomph.
Its AD3.152 Perkins diesel engine is considered one of the most reliable to power an agricultural machine.
The Mf 135’s simple design makes it easy to repair. replacement parts are abundant and inexpensive to source.
At less than £5,000, if you’re looking for a tractor in the 30 hp to 40 hp range,
the Mf 135 is great value. And it’s simple and inexpensive enough to be disassembled and shipped around the world.
In the 100 hp range, the ford 7610, in its classic blue livery, punched well above its weight and was a lot of farms’ first big tractor.
There’s also the John Deere 7010 series, manufactured in Waterloo, Iowa, from 1996 to 2003. A full-frame chassis design, it is a modern classic in instantly recognisable green and yellow livery and with a commanding stature.
The most powerful tractor in the range is the 7810 powered by John Deere’s legendary 8.1-litre PowerTech diesel engine, which provides 175 hp on tap, with a power boost to 196 hp.
These models are so popular that their prices are steadily appreciating.
Ken Warner, Pembridge, Herefordshire.
QUESTION Why do we come a cropper? Who or what is a cropper?
froM the 18th century, anyone who took a heavy fall from a horse was said to have fallen neck and crop. Come a cropper was
a colloquial way of describing falling head over heels. The phrase was extended to mean to fail badly.
Neck and crop is memorialised in a 1791 poem by Lady Carolina Nairne:
‘A man on horseback, drunk with gin
and flip,
Bawling out — Yoix — and cracking of
his whip,
The startish beast took fright, and flop The mad-brain’d rider tumbled, neck
and crop!’
The crop, or cropper, is derived from the back end of the horse — the croup or crupper. This sense is found in the old french croupe, which appears as croup in Middle english, and describes a piece of harness that extends from the saddle under the horse’s tail.
It was also the source of the gambling term ‘croupier’. In early usage, this referred to someone standing behind a gambler giving advice.
The phrase is first cited in robert S. Surtees’ novel Ask Mamma: or The richest Commoner In england, 1858:
‘[He] rode at an impracticable fence and got a cropper for his pains.’
L. R. Moss, Chelmsford, Essex.
QUESTION Were the impenetrable works of 17th-century author Sir Thomas Urquhart a practical joke?
SIr THoMAS UrqUHArT was a
Scottish aristocrat, writer and translator. It is unclear if he was eccentric, a conman or Scotland’s finest practical joker.
He was an idiosyncratic polymath and author, best known for his original and vivid translation of the works of the french humanist francois rabelais.
Despite hailing from the Highland town of Cromarty, Urquhart was a staunch royalist who fought for Charles I against the Scottish Covenanters in 1639 and was knighted in 1641.
In 1642, his father died, leaving him a heavily indebted estate. In an attempt to pay his creditors, he published a mathematical treatise, Trissotetras, or A Most exquisite Table for resolving Triangles, which he claimed could enable a student to learn a year’s worth of maths in just seven weeks.
It was impenetrably obscure, featuring bizarre Urquhartisms such as ‘Amfract uosities . . . the cranklings, windings and involutions belonging to the equisoleary Scheme’; and ‘Cathetobasall . . . of the Concordance of Logogononsphericall moods, in the Datas of the Perpendicular, and the Base, from determining the Maine question’.
After his involvement in a failed royalist uprising at Inverness in 1648, he was declared a traitor by Parliament.
In 1651, he joined Charles II’s calamitous attempt at regaining the throne, which culminated in a decisive defeat at the Battle of Worcester.
He was captured and imprisoned for two years, first in the Tower of London, then at Windsor. He lobbied oliver Cromwell to release him by writing a series of bizarre pamphlets.
one was The Pantochronachanon, in which he traced his ancestry through 153 generations back to Adam and eve, claiming notable relations such as his 109th great- grandmother, who had discovered baby Moses in the Nile’s rushes, and the queen of Sheba.
Cromwell paroled Urquhart in 1653 on the condition he forfeit his properties. He left Britain for the Continent, where he dedicated himself to translating the works of rabelais.
While his Works of Mr francis rabelais were accepted as the standard english version for years, he could not resist including trademark embellishments.
He expanded a list of nine animal sounds to a catalogue of 71, including the ‘curking’ of quails, ‘nuzzling’ of camels, ‘smuttering’ of monkeys, ‘drintling’ of turkeys, ‘ bo- ing’ of buffaloes and ‘crouting’ of cormorants.
He reportedly died in 1660 in a fit of maniacal laughter on hearing that Charles II had been restored as king. Richard Murray, Aberdeen.