Working on Pendray’s dairy farm in Saanich
Dairy farms and milk delivered in bottles (with their distinctive musical jingling against the wire baskets) is part of my DNA. As a Saanich lad, growing up beside Swan Lake, I was surrounded by family dairy farms.
In fact, our back fence was of barbed wire because it was the southern boundary of Charlie Pendray’s farm. I think he called himself Swan Lake Dairy although his brother Tom Pendray, with the property next to his that wrapped around the northern end of the lake, may have done so. Or was Tom ‘s the Lakeside Dairy? (Obviously, I wasn’t always historically conscious.)
At the foot of our street, and to the left, were the Black and McLean properties. The Blacks had long retired from active farming but their barn still stood, a favoured playground for us kids. John McLean, their son-in-law, continued to operate smalltime, next door, as a dairy farmer in my time.
I remember he had quite a mixed bag of cows, with Jersey, some Holstein, and a lot of (to my inexperienced eye) indeterminate progeny.
As John still hayed his in-laws’ fields immediately beside the lake, he also was my inadvertent introduction to the electric fence
But my farming career, one summer long, was spent at Tom Pendray’s, when I was 13. It was the summer between junior and senior high school and my parents were building a new home in the Lakehill district. It was about two miles, as the crow flies, north of the Pendrays’ yet, in some respects, a world away.
Once we made the move, in time for me to begin Grade 10 at Mt. Douglas High School, I never, as they say, looked back. Too bad. It had been a great summer, if a hard one for a youngster whose idea of physical exertion was hauling firewood. Having to load bales of hay onto a truck and then up into the hayloft is a great way to harden untaxed muscles.
Not to mention working in the July sun (who wore a hat or sunscreen in those days?), and my first real introduction to thirst, dehydration and serious sunburn.
I’ve often regretted that I didn’t continue my connection with the Pendrays and Harry the hired hand as they’d treated me well and shown me considerable patience (I realise now).
I mean, I was unskilled labour at its worst although I did what I could
I even came to enjoy sweeping and hosing out the barn in the mornings when the cows were released into the fields. The smell of urine and cow patties has never offended my olfactory senses because, even then, I accepted it as part of the natural order of things. Not like the smell of diesel fumes, at all.
I learned, too, that cows have their own personalities. Only two stick in my mind now, Peachie (so-named for her beautiful black and tan colour scheme and friendly disposition) and Cherry, a kidney-striped Jersey with a sour personality and a penchant for head-butting if you weren’t paying attention.
As I drive by Cowichan dairy farms today, I realise that something so natural as cows grazing in a field is almost passe. Heifers from time to time, but not milkers. No, they spend most of their adult productive lives in and about loafing sheds, hardly changing position, 24-7.
This can’t be healthy because it’s sure not natural
Which reminds me of the best part of that summer at the Pendrays’: Driving the cows out to the fields in the morning, and back to the barn for milking. On looking back, I realise that there’s something truly idyllic, idealistic, even romantic, about a boy walking behind a herd of cows with a stick in his hand, issuing commands where none were needed if only to make himself seem important, and taking almost perverse satisfaction in holding up traffic on Saanich Road.
Ah, yes, they truly were the good old days for me. That was the summer I remember most. And I still regret that, upon beginning high school in September, I consciously turned my back on my days on the farm as part of my ‘childhood.’
It was the subdivision of the Charley Pendray farm, even before we moved to Lakehill, that ended my love affair with Saanich. Even at that age I wanted a semi-rural lifestyle and the Saanich I’d known had everything a growing boy could ask for.
Almost incredibly, all these years later, the Tom Pendray farm property is still there, undeveloped, as part of the Swan Lake Christmas Hill Nature Sanctuary.
To make the point of how dramatically urban development transforms rural lands, just glance at the Uptown development, at Saanich Road as you drive into Victoria. Today, it’s a mini-city of glass and concrete.
When I was a lad, that was pastureland. I played in it until the coming of the highway sparked the beginnings of what has been completely commercialized. I knew the area as Parkdale, with massive maple trees that shaded the west side of Boleskine Road. Opposite, where there’s now a Ford dealership, were Chinese greenhouses.
Those really were the good old days, I see now. Too bad they’re not making them any more.
What a terrific stroll down memory lane, TW, even if it is littered with patties!! I truly enjoyed this piece, it reminds me quite a bit of my experience growing up in Edmonton where one of our family members ran a big farm just outside the city limits. We’d visit every year, and the experience sticks with me today. Great article, thanks for sharing!
Speaking of patties… Just a week or so ago, two escaped heifers charged into my yard, chased by two guys waving halters. I was cutting the lawn and just had time to shove my dog inside and help them try to corner the cows.
Afterwards, my neighbour said I handled them like a pro. To which I replied, I am a pro. I did that 100s of times as a kid on the neighbours’ farms. Talk about deja vu…
Oh, and there’s still a patty beside the road as a souvenir. –TW
I knew Dave Pendray in my teens & both of the 2 Simmonds families, one with their Carnation greenhouses & the Saunders Family.. all living on Blenkinsop Rd. I rode horses at a farm where they later built Reynolds School. Those were the days.
Hi: You’re obviously referring to my Wednesday coloum, ‘Cowichan Chronicles,’ in the Cowichan Valley Citizen. You say you rode hoses at a farm where they later built Reynolds School? Yes, the Cousins farm with Shetland ponies. Across the road was what was left of the Borden Farm but their barn was on the same side of Reynolds Rd. as the Cousins ‘ranch.’ Who, today, could picture this highly developed commercial area as farmland? Yet it was just that, as recently as the 1960s. This was the area I hung out in as a young to mid-teen; Brett Ave., Swan Lake are where I spent my childhood.
Having moved Lake Hill in 1958, I did become familiar with Lost (Blenkinsop) Lake and the neighbouring farms (John Pendry, son of Charley Pendray whose dairy farm adjoined our back fence on Brett). Dave Pendray was his son,right? I believe he passed away just a few years ago after a long battle with a crippling disease.
Thank you for responding, and please keep reading my ‘Chronicles.’–TWP
PS: Sorry, it’s been a long day.I just realized you have responded to my post on Blenkinsop Lake. –TWP
We used to live at the corner of Saanich and Greenridge and one summer when I was around that same age, Harry paid us (I think it was 50 cents) to feed the cows a couple of times. One half pail of oats each, if I remember correctly. I never saw you walking the cows down Sannich, but I saw Harry out there doing that countless times. What year was that, that you worked there? I even have a photo around here somewhere of Harry chasing one cow that escaped over night, back down the road to the barn.
Hi, Mark: Ah, yes, Harry, A really decent guy. I remember him telling me that he’d worked in the famous Britannia Mine before starting with Pendrays. On Saturday nights, a bachelor, he’d get all slicked up and don a suit to go to town to–? My summer there was either ’57 or ’58, more likely ’57 as we moved the next year to Lake Hill and I started high school and drifted away from the farm scene, much to my regret. I really wish now that I’d continued to help around the farm; I’d have learned more and got a good start on my work ethic which is now well established but, back then, seemed to have trouble getting off the ground!
Oh, besides Harry and Tom and Mrs. Pendry there was Bob, in his early 20s, who delivered the milk. I accompanied him numerous times with the bottles jangling in their metal baskets in the pickup box and imprinting me with a sound I’ve never forgotten. I even remember the pickup, a ’57 Ford or Merc, two-tone green with lots of chrome. And having to take a pee one day when there was no washroom or privacy for hours until we made it to French’s swamp on Vernon Rd. Real torment. Ah, those were the days!
We live (for the last 46 years) on Landeen Place which is up Greenridge Crescent. It was a brand new house when we moved in. We dug out the horse barn in our back yard. Was this part of Pendray’s Farm?
I remember sitting and waiting in the car on Saanich Road for the cows to cross coming back to their barn in the evening. From our house, You could hear them moo in the morning and evening. We could also hear the cows at the MacDonald Farm across Mackenzie Avenue (Christmas Hill). Saanich Road was a meandering country road then, not the busy connector it is now. Great memories
Hi: Going on memory, isn’t Greenridge Crescent on the hill above the farm (across Saanich Road)? Pendrays may have owned that land before it was subdivided (when I worked at the farm) but I don’t recall it ever being used for farming. How I loved Saanich in the late ’50s. Then it began to change with Charlie Pendray’s farm at Saanich and Falmouth Road being subdivided and, of course, it just isn’t the same even though much of the land around the lake is now a nature preserve. As much as I hated the development I miss the fields below the Brett Ave. trestle which is now a jungle of willows. Guess I can’t have my cake and icing too, eh?