These butchers are also great senders of live cattle to London. At the great market they stand pre-eminent. The Messrs Martin, who stand at the top, send as many as 100 or 150 cattle, worth from £35 to £50 a-head. Messrs Stewart, Knowles, Wishart, and Wisely, &c., send yearly splendid lots. Messrs Wishart and Wisely, as feeders and dealers, are gradually drawing to the top. They feed a great many superior cattle, and put an immense number through their hands. Many of them they send alive to London, but they also send an enormous quantity of dead meat. No men in the trade know their business better. Mr Martin, however, must still stand at the top. As an example, I may mention that he exhibited a four-year-old Highlander at Birmingham, London, and Liverpool in 1868, which gained the first prize at each of these places. His head now adorns Mr Martin's shop in New Market, alongside of the royal arms, the firm being butchers to her Majesty. It is a perfect model of what the head of a Highlander should be. Deacon Milne, however, surpassed them all for several years, if not in numbers, in the quality and value of the animals he forwarded to the great Christmas market. For several years Mr Skinner, Woodside, has sent about 100 valuable animals to the Christmas market. He is one of the greatest senders of dead meat, and he also feeds a large lot of bullocks. To speak of all the senders of dead meat, butchers, and jobbers, in the city and the provinces, would be a hopeless and an endless task. I believe there cannot be fewer than 500 in Aberdeenshire alone; and, long as I have been connected with the cattle trade, I could not name one in ten.
I have briefly noticed the cattle trade in connection with the Aberdeen butchers: let me now glance at the shippers and jobbers of the provinces, as it is from them that the raw material is furnished. The following remarks apply to Aberdeen, Banff, and Moray shires: our provincial jobbers are a host in themselves, and are a very heterogeneous multitude: from the man who can pay thousands, through all the intermediate stages, down to the man that buys a beast and cannot lift it unless he can sell it there and then for a profit. We have a large class of the first, who can not only pay their hundreds but their thousands. We have an intermediate class that job, generally occupiers of two and four horse farms. There is no end to their peregrinations, toil, and industry; in summer, in winter, in fair and foul, by night and by day, by moonlight and by starlight, they scour the country, and collect cattle from all points of the compass, and sell them at the fairs to farmers, butchers, and dealers. We have also the dealer of smaller pretensions, who can only afford to buy a beast or two, which he drives to market himself; such a beginning, however, I have known end in becoming the proprietor of £25,000 worth of landed property. We have the cow-jobber, and it is sometimes a very lucrative business; many have been very successful in the trade. Mr Forrest was a cow-jobber: he rented all the grass land round Hamilton Palace for many years from the Duke of Hamilton. He bought nothing but cows, and it was said he would ride 100 miles to buy a farrow cow. He died worth a fortune, and proprietor of a good estate. We have the jobber who buys only lean store cattle, and the jobber of fat cattle alone. Banffshire can claim a Stoddart, and Morayshire the two M'Kessocks, the Laird of Ardgay, and the tenant of Balnaferry; and I do not know which to admire most, the daring and skill of the laird, or the caution and skill of the tenant, Macdonald of Blervie, through whose hands three-fourths of the store cattle in Morayshire pass. We have in Aberdeenshire Mr Reid, Greystone, in the Vale of Alford; Mr Stoddart, Cultercullen; the Messrs Bruce in Alford, Clova, and Strathbogie; and Mr Mennie of Huntly. Mr Reid, Greystone, has attained the highest position as a feeder and grazier amongst British agriculturists. His stock have for many years taken a most prominent place at our national shows at London, Birmingham, Liverpool, York, Newcastle, Leeds, Edinburgh, &c. &c.