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Early
in 1972 Miss Lupton who owned the Wayward Herd expressed
dissatisfaction with the standard of judging of the Anglo-Nubian. The
judges at that time appeared to be trying to force Swiss standards on
A.N.’s. When a certain
black and white A.N with British Alpine marking became a breed champion
she thought something should now to be done.
She
encouraged our small group Miss “Winky” Tavener, Miss Jean Porter,
Valerie Booth, Glen Everington, Mr. Norman Fisher, Mr. Fred Holmes and
me (Margaret Edginton) to form a society. Many meetings took place at
Miss Taveners (Cheswadine) house on Miss Luptons estate, to discuss how
to proceed, after weeks of measuring our own A.N. goats and visiting
others who kept A.N.’s at the time drew together a detailed breed
standard, the B.G.S. rejected it saying
it was too long There was considerable resistance to us at the
time from the British Goat Society, their limited breed standard said “Roman nose, long ears no tassles”. We persevered with our version
leaving out none essential words but it would be a couple of years
before the revised version was finally accepted. Mrs. Paine who was a
judge at the time was heard to say “I suppose I will need a slide rule
and scales to judge Anglo-Nubians”. It should be noted that at the
time only the Golden Guernsey had a Breed Society.
At
a number of shows including the Royal Highland the A.N.’s were in the
A.O.V. classes, it was thought that a rosette should be given to the
best A.N. at a show but in what colours?. Looking about the room it was
noticed that Jean Porter had on some orange and green striped socks, a
vote was taken, orange and green would be the ANBS colours for our in
house hand made rosettes for the new society. The rosettes continued to
be hand made by a member of
the committee until 1975 when Mr. David Will offered to make them on a
machine he had using the ANBS stocks of material
The
above named eight founder members called the ANBS inaugural meeting at a
school in Wyke near Bradford West Yorkshire to judge the interest from
other Anglo-Nubian breeders. At that meeting Mrs. Paine and Miss
Rochford (Berkham) attended to see what we were doing, however they did
not join us at that time. After the meeting we applied to the B.G.S. to
become an affiliated society. The B.G.S. replied to our application
asking for the rules, we had not thought of that so we “borrowed” the Yorkshire Dairy Goat Societies rules and sent those in, they were
accepted.
Our
original aim was to educate judges in the breed standard, it was decided
to send our breed standard to them, our other aim was to promote the
best males with a stud goat scheme.
After
the inaugural meeting at the end of 1972 we had 25 members with some of
us as officers, one of our group Miss Glen Everington designed our Breed
logo we still use today. She used her male Highstones Impresario for the
head study, the female in the logo was his dam Cheswadine Imburu with
her kids. The following
year the membership had risen to 50 and we held our first Breed Show at
Mr.& Mrs.Astle-Bates (Nenevalley) Farm
in Northamptonshire.
The
membership peaked at over 400 in the eighties but has declined slowly
since then as legislation made it uneconomical to sell spare milk,
recent legislation making it even more difficult to move animals.
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