Separating the wheat from the chaff was hard work

AT Whitehall we had a fanners in the loft – hand-powered – every farm had one. Some farms had two and were used to clean up grain for selling or for seed.

Many farms had two lofts, if not three, and each loft had its own fanners as they were relatively cheap and it was easier to have one in each loft rather than tediously moving one around. They were not too heavy but a bit clumsy for moving through doors and down and up stairs to different lofts, although moving it along the floor of a loft to each heap of grain was easy. At Lower Dounreay from November 1953 to May 1956 we had three lofts, each with its own fanners, though we did not use them much.

At Isauld we had a good fanners taken up from Lower Dounreay in 1956 but we had an excellent new Garvie threshing mill that cleaned grain to perfection – full finishing, double fan, adjustable wire screen, loft conveyer, bruising as we threshed.

Fanners preceded proper thrashing mills by quite some time and were the forerunners of the threshing mill. In 1784 Andrew Meikle, a Scotsman, put together the simple hand mill and the even older fanners to build his first proper threshing mill. This he patented.

He improved his design which has lasted the test of long years and is still the basis of most threshing machines and the combine harvester. The only attempt to move away from Meikle’s old straw walker system came from Massey Ferguson, which quite some years ago built and sold a cylindrical straw walker combine which worked well enough but is, I think, now forgotten. It did not do too well with damp straw, of which Caithness has plenty. It worked well enough in North America where the harvest conditions were so very much drier, but that machine did not last long in production.

WINNOWING grain consisted of throwing it into the air and letting the wind blow the chaff and bits of straw to one side. This is still done outdoors in some of the poorer parts of the world for rice or millet.

There is the well-known feature of two opposing winnowing doors in nearly all old roofless croft barns still to be found everywhere.

The old system of having two doors opposite each other in the barn for winnowing only worked if the wind was blowing. Often grain was taken outdoors and winnowed on a clean flagstone-floored stance kept for that purpose.

Or on a bit of hard-beaten clay ground outside the barn door.

The invention of the fanners was much needed, but it was a tedious task, one man turning the handle, one man filling the hopper with a scoop box from the grain heap and taking away the cleaned grain.

Then they would change round for a spell. They were a much-needed adjunct to the flail and to early threshing machines which did not do a good job of cleaning chaff from grain.

I have done that work in my younger days, turning the fanners handle at a certain measured pace – not too fast, not too slow.

That determined the force of the blast of air which separated the grain from the chaff and controlled the quality of the grain you wanted to sell or put to the meal mill. It was quite heavy work if you were at it all day.

I was told there was a design of fanners where there were two handles, one either side.

The idea was to maintain a steadier flow of air from the fan as, with the handles being opposed, one man was pushing while the other pulled.

It would have needed three men to work it and did not find favour. I never saw one.

AT first there was only one grain outlet at the side but fanners soon developed with two outlets, with heavier grain out of one and lighter out of the other. Chaff and bits of straw flew out over the end.

There is an excellent fanners at Laidhay Museum, supplied by W. & A. Geddes, Wick.

I was informed that the company made its own fanners long since but it could have sold on ones made elsewhere. Back 100 years ago many farm articles were made locally by skilled men. To make fanners in Wick would not have been difficult. The foundry in Thurso, McKidd followed by Hutchinson, made many bits for them and for others.

Two Shearer brothers who came from Canisbay went to Turriff, Aberdeenshire, and set up in business as millwrights. They could have learned their trade with Geddes.

They manufactured and distributed many good, small hand mills suitable for crofters and also made good fanners.

Like so many other small businesses, as a firm it is long gone.

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