A New LifeFrancis Humphreys tells Barry Roche how nowadays more than his cows enjoy his choice of music
A grey drizzle is starting to meander lazily across Coomkeen valley above Durrus village on the Sheep's Head Peninsula in West Cork as Francis Humphreys heads across his farmyard towards his office housed in a cut limestone building.
It's from here that Francis - once a full-time farmer - now busies himself running the West Cork Chamber Music Festival, selecting performers and matching them to repertoire for the festival which this year celebrates its 10th anniversary.
The festival has grown from humble origins when, in 1992, Francis teamed up with the then local vicar of St James's Church in Durrus, Rev Chris Peters, to organise a concert to mark the 200th anniversary of the church.
President Mary Robinson attended as did the owner of Bantry House, Egerton Shelswell White, who suggested that Francis should consider organising concerts in the library of the stately 18th century home. From such casual suggestions do burgeoning music festivals grow.
The first West Cork Music Festival took place in 1996 with the RTÉ Vanbrugh String Quartet doing the honours and it has never looked back. This year, music lovers can feast on no fewer than 36 concerts in nine days.
For Francis and his wife, Corrie, it's been quite an odyssey from the early days of trying to juggle running a farm and raising four children with organising a music festival that now injects €1 million into the local economy.
"We spent £58,000 that first year and took in £52,000," recalls Francis. "We had a deficit from year one - we took some enormous financial risks with no resources, only the deeds of our house and farm sitting in the bank, underwriting it all as collateral."
For the first three years, Francis combined farming and running the festival but thanks to some good advice from RTÉ head of music, Niall Doyle, he set up a company in 2000 which allowed him to devote himself full time to programming the festival and be paid a salary.
Not that it was the first time that Francis had made such a change. A native of Wiltshire in England, he read politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford - just the sort of preparation, he says with a rueful smile, one requires for running a small farm in West Cork.
"I came over to Ireland in the early 1970s seduced by the beauty of the place," says Francis as he reveals that when he bought the small farm at Coomkeen in 1977, it was just 40 acres but he has now built it up to 60 acres, with a further 20 acres on a long-term lease.
Knowing little enough about farming, Francis has, at various stages over the past three decades, reared cattle, sheep, pigs and even goats but it was on dairying and sheep rearing that he and Corrie concentrated as they struggled to cope with the rigours of the quota system.
"We started off with four or five milking cows and built it up to 20," says Francis before pointing out rather poignantly that when he began farming, six families around Coomkeen had dairy herds. EU quotas and regulations have now reduced that number to just one.
During those years, Francis's neighbours quickly came to learn of his love of classical music as he set up speakers in the milking parlour so that he, and the cattle, could listen to his favourite pieces above the hum of the milking machine.
"For some reason baroque music used to go down best with the cows," says Francis cheerfully before Corrie recalls an incident when their son, Tiernan, put on The Steve Miller Band only for it to lead to almost instantaneous bovine bowel movements.
Admitting that he enjoyed the solitariness of farming - " I don't think I'd have been doing it otherwise" - Francis confesses that he doesn't particularly enjoy the public duties of making speeches at Bantry House during the festival.
He doesn't miss the hard laborious work of farming and he certainly doesn't miss the all-pervasive and unavoidable stench of winter silage though he regrets no longer working outdoors and the exercise that brings, while he also misses the animals.
"It's interesting in health terms. The positive for me was that I used to have terrible back trouble and, although it flares up occasionally, it's definitely got a lot better since I gave up the farm work. Though, on the other hand, I now have terrible asthma which I never had before.
"Of course, Rex, our border collie, misses the change of life so much - he looks at me so reproachfully at times - 'What has happened, why aren't we going out, why aren't we moving cattle, why aren't we moving sheep?'" says Francis.
"Of course, a lot of my job now is listening to pieces that haven't been heard before as well, of course, as the more established repertoire - I spent most of my time listening to recordings so hearing it live at the festival is the reward - that's the beauty of the week."
West Cork Chamber Music Festival runs at Bantry House from June 25th to July 3rd. For information on the festival, please contact 027-52789 or www.westcorkmusic.ie