Noel Lusby: Derry cattle breeder Noel Lusby, who died on October 8th, was a premier-league showman in the days when Irish show business had as much to do with the cattle ring as the stage.
Year after year, his cattle were supreme champions at the Royal Dublin Society's agricultural show in Ballsbridge, an event that was popular in 1960s Ireland with fashion models and farmers alike.
Lusby, his wife Anne, and many of their nine-strong brood travelled en masse from Derry to show the family's top animals. Breeders and their entourages slept in the showgrounds and sometimes, if a cow was calving, in the stalls themselves. There was plenty of rivalry and as much camaraderie. A hard day's showing was as often followed by a long night's drinking and storytelling.
Lusby was a big man in every sense of the word and, to him, cattle breeding was an art and a passion. These were the days before genetic printouts of animals, when a breeder's skill lay in having a keen eye and a well-honed intuition.
"My father could look at a black-and-white photograph of any cow and he could tell you what her great-grandparents were," remembers his son Mark. "If you asked my father what my birthday was, he probably wouldn't be able to tell you, but if you asked him the birthday of any of the calves and cows - well, that would be another story."
Lusby inherited a small holding from his father Herbert, a Yorkshire man who married an Irish woman and was persuaded to move back to Derry with her. In 1921 Herbert bought 20 acres of land on the Waterside and two dairy cows. When Noel and Anne took over, the farm had grown to 40 acres.
For the next two decades the couple invested whatever they had in the business, eventually developing it to 340 acres of owned land and 340 acres of rented land. Lusby prided himself on being first to the fields in the morning and the last to leave at night. By the 1960s, they had one of the largest dairy herds on the island.
It was a family affair. "About half our family photographs are of cows. You got into the other half if you were lucky enough to be standing beside a cow at a show," says Mark.
Both Herbert and Noel Lusby were instrumental in establishing the Ayrshire breed in Ireland, importing cattle from Scotland and breeding them on the farm. In those days even the smallest town held a mart or annual show, and Lusby travelled to all of them with his prized animals. "Part of his charm was that he engaged with everybody, whether it was the small farmer at the mart or the large cattle baron at the big shows," says Mark.
When the town of Derry began to encroach on the flat surrounding farmland in the 1980s, Lusby moved uphill and into beef farming. He turned his breeding skills to the French Limousin, eventually becoming chair of the Northern Ireland Limousin Cattle Club. Not content with importing just from the South or from England and Scotland, he and Anne travelled to rural France to deal directly with breeders there. "They had an instant rapport with the down-to-earth pedigree breeders of France," says Mark.
Lusby is remembered as one of the great ambassadors of the cattle industry and a colossus from an era now past, when small town marts were the highlight of the local social calendar and the big agricultural shows were as glamorous as it got.
Anne Lusby died in 2004. Noel Lusby is survived by his eight sons and one daughter, 19 grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren.
Noel Lusby: born December 22nd, 1929; died October 8th, 2007.