For the love of a longwool

THE place to be seen in turnof-the-20th-century Lincolnshire was Henry Dudding’s livestock sale at Riby. He would send wagonettes to railway stations to collect potential buyers, who would be wined and dined in the manner of operagoers, while his Lincoln longwool sheep and shorthorn cattle were paraded around a raised parade ring as if they were stars at Glyndebourne.

Dudding’s Lincoln longwool sheep were world renowned; an 1897 article in the described them as ‘the best flock in existence’. In 1906, a ram sold to South America for 1,405gns. Dudding was lying ill in bed and, on