Thursday 11 June 2020

Give that boy a medal! Oh... they did.

Emailed in by Tim W, from The Times:

Henry ‘Bud’ Flintoff, GC, obituary

Labourer whose bravery in rescuing a farmer from a raging bull as a schoolboy won him the highest civilian award for gallantry.

Henry Flintoff, known since boyhood as “Bud”, was a lad of 13 when he was faced by a situation that only swift and courageous action could resolve. In June 1944 he was a schoolboy working on a farm near his home in Yorkshire, a wartime practice for which many youngsters volunteered, when he heard a cry for help from the next field. He ran to the scene to find the farmer being attacked by a fully grown bull.

While being driven into the field the bull had turned on the farmer and charged, knocking him to the ground. The beast was kneeling on the farmer’s chest when Bud reached him. Although the farmer’s stick lay close by, Flintoff realised that it would be worse than [rest behind paywall]


2 comments:

formertory said...

Years ago in the Northern Isles I was witness to a memorable little tableau involving an escaped Belgian Blue / Limousin cross* bull (no, don't confuse it with a smurf - these things are the Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson of the bull world), an Aberdeen Angus bull (about 2/3 the size of the BB), a gate, and an elderly farmer (72) and his very elderly father (98).

The BB had escaped its field, trotted half a mile down the road, and found the Angus looking at it over a gate - so they were nose-to-nose at the gate of a field full of cows the Angus was supposed to be serving. Not a recipe for a fun time; both snorting and rumbling at each other and getting more and more wound up. Nick of time job, enter the two elderly farmers in a van. Out they leap (well, kinda), each armed with a 4-foot piece of blue alkathene water pipe which they applied to the BB's hindquarters with a will. After getting its attention, they herded it back up the road and into its field. Wilf (the son) came up to about the Blue's shoulder.

So a stick? Nah. Alkathene pipe - stings more, he said. Rather you than me, I thought.

* I meant cross-breed, but it was pissed off too!

Mark Wadsworth said...

FT, nice one. The bulls will tolerate this sort of thing 999 times, and the 1,000th time they snap.