Meet the pioneering 83-year-old who took over the running of her 150ac family farm at just 16 in 1959
The year was 1955: John A Costello was Taoiseach, Mass was still being said in Latin and RTÉ was three years away from its first official TV broadcast. In the village of Castledermot, Co Kildare, 16-year-old Norma Cook was about to take on the challenge of her life.
fter her father suffered a sudden debilitating illness, Norma — now 83 — was left to manage their 150ac mixed farm alone. A teenage girl, managing more than a dozen male farm workers in 1950s Ireland — and with the financial future of her entire family on the line — it was a challenge that Norma simply had to meet.
“My father lost the use of his hands and he couldn’t walk,” she recalls. “No-one knew what was wrong with him. His brain was working very well. My mother had to take him to England to a specialist and she had to stay with him.
“So I had to manage the farm as best I could. The men (farm labourers) were all very good at doing their jobs.
“My father would dictate a letter to my mother, a 10-page letter every week, and she would post it to me. That letter would lay out what each man should be doing on the farm. My father had a great insight.
“So every morning the men would line up in the barn and I would give them instructions on what they needed to do each day. It was a big responsibility, but I had to do it. I was the only one who had the insight for what needed to be done on the farm.
Norma aged three with her father, Jim Ashmore, in the early 1940s
“Every week my father sent a 10-page letter and, to my great disappointment, I burned them all. They were very detailed. If it was too wet to work on the land, there would be instructions for a certain man to do a certain job.”
In 1957, Norma’s father returned to Ireland and hired a manager to run the farm.
“I went to Dublin and got a job as a dental nurse,” says Norma. “I also did a secretarial course, which I wasn’t very good at.
“My father, when he returned, wasn’t able to go out. He wasn’t, at first, able to feed himself or walk. But he learned to walk eventually and he even learned how to ride a horse, with his hands through the loops of the reins. He was a very determined man.”
Norma’s father, Jim Ashmore, ran a remarkably diverse and progressive farm. A mixture of tillage and livestock, it was one of the first farms in the area to have a tractor as well as a small Ford van.
“My father was a good jockey, and he also bred and trained thoroughbreds. We had turnips, beet, barley, oats… it wasn’t just horses, there was a lot going on,” she says.
Norma soon knew how to do all the diverse and complex jobs on the farm. Her attitude then, as it is now, is that you can’t ask someone else to do a job if you don’t know how to do it yourself.
“I used to be out on the tractor a lot,” she says. “I learned to drive from an early age. I suppose I was about 10 or 12 years old when my father would let me out on his Ford van. He would tell me to get out into the fields, and if I can’t stop it, just keep driving until it stopped itself.
“I wanted to know how to do every job myself. I felt that I couldn’t give instructions (to the farm labourers) unless I was able to do the job myself.
An old water pump which was originally in her father’s home
“I remember I used to drive the Massey Ferguson tractor and my father would be on the back. I would drive around and he would fork out beet for the sheep to eat.
“We also grew a lot of potatoes. I remember we had shire horses, they were very big. I could never harness them myself, I always had to get someone to help harness them. They were huge animals.
“I used to do a lot of the cart work. We had cattle in sheds who needed to be fed by hand.
“When we harvested the potatoes, the women would go around the drills with baskets collecting them. I came along with the horses and cart, the women would throw the potatoes from the baskets into the cart.
“I would steer the horses down to the yard, a mile away maybe. We would then tip the cart and divide the potatoes into seed potatoes and eating potatoes. They would be covered in straw and put into a pit to keep them for the winter.
“I did have a go at ploughing with a tractor — I wanted to have a go at everything. Farming was very labour-intensive in those days.”
She married Patrick ‘Paddy’ Cook, and lived for a time in Wales, before returning to a small holding “on the side of a mountain” in Blessington, Co Wicklow, and built a house.
Starting off with just 5ac, Norma grew this farm to include sheep, goats, horses, chickens, Kerry bog ponies and even a peacock.
“It started off with one lamb, which Paddy found lost in a ditch on the way home from work one evening,” she says. “I brought it inside and kept it beside the Aga. One thing just led to another, that was the start of me becoming a sheep farmer.
Norma with her father on her wedding day
“When I first came back from Wales I took a lorry driving course and got my licence. So I was able to transport the sheep to market myself.
“I then took two of my father’s horses, point-to-pointers, and I schooled them. That felt like home. Farming, the green grass under my feet. I loved it.”
In 1979 and 1981, Norma was a finalist in the Farm Woman of the Year Award and had to compete against five other female farmers at the Spring Show in the RDS.
Norma holds a painting of her two donkeys, Freddie and Freakles, competing at the Tullamore show
“We had to do a project on how you would spend £1,000 on your farm,” she says. “I put together a plan for building a new shed for the sheep.
“You had to make an outfit for Ladies Day at the Spring Show in the RDS and you also had to put in a recipe for a meal.
“On the day of the Spring Show, we had to change the tyre of a tractor with a low loader. We had to lift barrels of water with a tractor and move them onto a platform. That was no problem to me, I had loads of experience on the farm.
“That was always the case with me. I wanted to know how to do everything myself. There is no point pontificating to other people unless you can do it yourself.
“I never felt like I was breaking new ground, I just did what I thought was the right thing to do at the time.”
A lifetime on the land and in roles with farm organisations
Throughout her eight decades on the land, Norma Cook has been involved in dozens of farming organisations.
A founding member and former chairperson of the Kerry Bog Pony Society, she served as secretary of the Kildare IFA for six years and she also supplied animals to the annual live Christmas crib in Dublin’s Dawson Street.
Her involvement with farming organisations started in the early 1970s when she joined the National Sheep Breeders Association and then her local branch of the IFA.
“I suppose at that time they thought a woman would do the secretarial work better than a man would, so that led to me being put forward for secretary of the Kildare IFA. I served as secretary for four different chairpersons,” she says.
“When I first came home from Wales, my mother gave me money to spend one Christmas. I went straight in and spent it to become a member of the Royal Dublin Society. I have been a member ever since then, and for a few years I served on the RDS Agricultural Committee.
“We organised a pets’ corner at the back of the main arena of the RDS, I supplied animals like chickens and goats to that every year. I even supplied a peacock. Unfortunately the peacock kept going off to roost outside our farm and eventually it was run over by a car.
“The pets’ corner led to me supplying the live crib in Dawson’s Street for years. My animals went to a man in Dun Laoghaire who would bring them in at 6am every day and bring them away in the evening for the full fortnight of the crib. I was very disappointed when that came to an end.”
Norma also served as the Irish representative to the Jacob Sheep Society in the UK and as a judge at shows for the Irish Pony Society. At once stage she kept 80 goats and supplied goat colostrum to the Irish National Stud for mares who could not feed their foals.
Now 83, Norma is still going strong.
“I am back down to managing two donkeys of 24 years of age. I don’t have many animals left. I also breed Kerry bog ponies. They are a native breed.
Norma with her two donkeys, Sarah Jane and Cuddles
“I compete with them from time to time,” she says.
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