Showing Sheep: Beatrix Potter's Prize-Winning Herdwick Flocks

The first trophy came in 1928, at the Hawkshead show, for a shearling ewe. It was a modest start. But by 1930, Beatrix Potter's Hill Top ewes were unbeaten across the Lake District, and would remain unbeaten for nine years. This is the story of how she entered one of the most competitive worlds in Lakeland farming. She earned her place in it by the steady accumulation of prizes, over fifteen years.

---

Into the Show Ring

The agricultural show was not simply a competition. In the Herdwick farming world, it was where reputations were made. A flockmaster who could fill a pen with winning animals was taken seriously. One who could not was not, regardless of how many acres they farmed. Beatrix was an off-comer — known to the wider world as the author of Peter Rabbit, not as a sheep farmer. The show ring was the only place where credibility could be built from nothing.

She came to it through her shepherd, Tom Storey. When she hired Tom to manage Hill Top Farm in 1927, she told him plainly what she wanted: "I want to show Herdwick sheep, and I've heard you've done a bit." Tom had a remarkable ability to recognise individual animals. He started a focused breeding programme at Hill Top that season.

The first result came at Hawkshead in 1928 — first prize for a shearling. One year later, the programme was showing real results. And in 1930, Beatrix's sheep won prizes across the whole show circuit.

---

The 1930 Season

In the late summer of 1930, Beatrix wrote to an American friend about what had been happening on the show circuit. "We had our pretty little Baa's at Ennerdale Show last week, and yesterday at Keswick," she told her. "The sheep have been very successful in the female classes — 16 first prizes, and several shows yet to come, including Loweswater."

Sixteen first prizes in a single season. And there were more shows still ahead.

The big prize that year was something she described with careful restraint. "My sheep have got a lot of prizes this year," she wrote, "including a silver challenge cup for the best ewe in the Lake District. I hold it for a year; if I take it 3 years it becomes mine; I think next year is pretty safe, as my younger sheep was never beaten — but 3 years would be a stroke of good luck!"

She won the silver challenge cup again the following year. And the year after that.

---

Water Lily

The best-known animal in the Hill Top flock was a ewe called Water Lily. She was one of the founding animals of the prize-winning Hill Top line that Tom Storey bred. In the Herdwick Flock Book for 1929–30 there is a photograph of Tom standing beside Water Lily at a Cumberland show that year. It is a still, proud image — the shepherd and his best animal, at the height of their form.

Beatrix's Hill Top ewes, building on the line that Water Lily helped establish, remained unbeaten at the shows for nine years. Over that decade she won silver tankards, salvers, and teapots. As an abstainer from alcohol, she always gave Tom the tankards. She kept everything else.

Tom's own account of those years makes clear that the cups and prizes were not vanity. In the Herdwick world, the show pen was where authority was built. Each prize Beatrix won bought her a little more respect among men who would not have granted it on her name alone.

---

The Show Circuit

She attended most of the major Lakeland shows through the season: Ennerdale, Loweswater, Eskdale, Gosforth, Hawkshead, Keswick, Cockermouth. Her husband William drove her in his little Ford car. Tom went with her to most of them, managing the sheep in the pens while she walked the circuit.

On a wet day she was fully practical about it. At one rain-soaked show, Tom remembered, she arrived with a hessian bag worn as a hood over her head and shoulders, and another draped from her waist. The sheep were being judged. She was going to be there, regardless of weather. Her usual outfit at shows was a suit made of Herdwick tweed — the coarse, durable fabric spun from the breed's own fleece. Tom recalled that she once gave him three fleeces from show ewes to have a suit made up. "That suit was cut in the late thirties," he said in old age. "It's rough tweed — but still wears well."

She kept careful notes in the programme at each show: the top prize winners, a particularly good lamb, a noticeably inferior animal. She was a serious judge, not a spectator.

Not everything went smoothly. At one Keswick show, Tom told the story of Beatrix walking down the line of pens with a farm hand and stopping to talk about sheep. She pointed to a ewe in a pen and spoke admiringly about it. Tom, watching from nearby, said quietly: "Them aren't yours. Yours are in the next pen." Her face went red. "I don't think she liked it," Tom said, "but she daren't say anything. I was only telling the truth."

---

Earning the President's Prize

In 1935, Beatrix's standing on the show circuit was formally recognised. She was named president of the Keswick Agricultural Show — an honour extended to prominent figures in the regional farming community. "I guess they think it's time I should give some prizes as well as take some," she wrote to a friend, "so long as I am not expected to make a speech."

That same day at Keswick, her ewes were again unbeaten. The challenge cup was presented to her by S. D. Stanley Dodgson of Armaside, whose father had helped found the Herdwick Sheep Breeders' Association. A fortnight later she took the Loweswater challenge cup for the third time, earning it outright.

By 1937, at the age of seventy-one, she was asked to be a co-judge at the Lowick show for all the Herdwick classes and the collie dogs. "Dear dogs," she wrote to her friend Louie Choyce afterwards. "I would have liked to give prizes to half a dozen instead of 3."

At the important Cockermouth show she was still a serious competitor. She won another cup outright there, plus two further prizes with the same ram.

---

What the Prizes Were For

Some of the local sheep men were dismissive, especially in the early years. They saw the famous author in her dowdy Herdwick tweed and clogs, and assumed she was a sentimental woman who loved sheep but knew nothing about them. Lear records that she "did not care a two-penny bit" what they thought.

She was right not to. Beatrix had spent years studying the anatomy of animals — rabbits, mice, and many others — through close observation and drawing. She could read a Herdwick's body: its bone structure, leg, head, and wool. She knew what a good animal looked like. She sometimes confused individual sheep, but her eye for a good animal was accurate. Little by little, as the prizes accumulated, the grudging respect came.

In March 1943, at the annual general meeting of the Herdwick Sheep Breeders' Association, that respect reached its formal expression. Beatrix Heelis was voted president-elect of the Association for the coming year. No woman had held the presidency in the Association's history. She was already sitting in the chair at meetings. In a letter to a friend in America that year, she put it plainly: "I am in the chair at Herdwick breeders' Association meetings. You would laugh to see me, amongst the other old farmers — usually in a tavern! — after a sheep fair. We are serious enough, about the future."

She never took up the presidency. Beatrix Potter died in December 1943, a few months before she would have assumed the role.