Cockburn Name
in History

The Cockburn Name
in History

John Cockburn

Progress in agriculture inevitably depended on the willingness of landowners to accept new techniques as much as on the inventors of them. John Cockburn, a member of the Scots and later of the British parliament and a lord of the Admiralty, set about reforming his family's estate in East Lothian in the mid 18th century.  He had the resources available to put new ideas into practice. Cockburn was born at Ormiston. His father, Adam, was at various times in his career chief adviser to William of Orange and a lord justice clerk of Scotland.
As a landlord, Adam Cockburn saw at first-hand the evils of short-term leases in land tenure, and introduced a system of long leases to give security and self-esteem to his tenant farmers. It was this enlightened self-interest of his father's that made available to John Cockburn a body of tenant farmers who were ready to co-operate with the innovations he hungrily seized upon while in England for sittings of parliaments.

Cockburn was unashamed in his importations. He sent his tenants' sons to England to train in the new methods. He imported English tenants, brought in an Irishman to supervise his linen bleachfield and a Dutch expert on flax. He brought seeds from France, Norway and Turkey.
At Ormiston tenant farmers were encouraged to grow wheat, turnips and grasses, the latter being turned into hay to feed livestock through the winter.  The barley grown on the estate was used in a brewery and a distillery. Finally, Cockburn insisted on simple, spacious houses for his tenants, built from local materials and no higher than two storeys.

The rotation of crops, the planting of trees, the enclosure of fields and pastures and the construction of good roads were the main pillars of Cockburn's system. In his tenant Robert Wight, who occupied some hundreds of acres, Cockburn found the ideal partner in improvement, turning what had been heath and marsh into productive and profitable soil. Wight was probably the first tenant in Scotland to raise turnips in drills and cultivate them with the plough. On one famous occasion he raised a turnip weighing 34lbs, which was exhibited as an agricultural curiosity at John's Coffee House in Edinburgh's High Street.

The enclosures Cockburn made were composed of both the practical and the ornamental: whitethorn and blackthorn, roses, honeysuckles, elder and privet. In the hedgerows he planted hardwood trees, while in his garden he cultivated artichokes and grapes.

It is in Cockburn's letters to his gardener Charles Bell, written from London between 1727 and 1744 that we get the full flavour of the man: "Plant the tall horse chestnuts and yews as you propose. You know the chestnuts must not be too much exposed to winds. If you plant walnuts the ground must be well wrought for a good depth and also a large hole for them. Their roots are tender and if they have not open earth for shooting their roots down in, and also round, they will sit. Ashes mixed with the mould will help them much as it will keep it open."

In December 1734 he wrote to Bell: "Your ink and my eyes are both so bad that I can scarce read your letters. I won't have my woods managed as they have been, neither can I be eternally plagued with repeating orders. Doing things by half is the foolishest way of throwing money away."