knew the answer. Quite appropriately, his column series was called “What the Textbooks Never Tell You About…”. Dorset was also the place where he started his long career in pigs, when he became a manager of Taymix, a large pig farm, after having graduated from Aberdeen University, where his interest in agriculture began. He then worked for RHM as well as Dalgety Spillers, before deciding to stand on his own legs as an independent consultant from the age of 53. Besides finding a monthly job as columnist with Pig Progress, he also contributed to a wide range of other national and interna- tional magazines, including the British title Pig World. Again, according to his own calculations, he topped 3,000 articles on pig production. Apart from that, he wrote four textbooks about pig production, some of which were translated into Chinese as well.


A passion for writing The vast number of publications already reveals it: Becoming a successful and lasting contributor to many pig journals re- quires something else apart from a deep interest in pig pro- duction. John continued to write for Pig Progress until the end – his last column arrived in my inbox about a month before his death. His daughter Alison once explained to me that writing was his “lifeline”, and there is much truth in that. He had a quality which is not found in many pig people – it’s that of the storyteller. It could be seen in virtually every aspect of John’s passions outside the world of pig production, most notably in the daily diary he kept during many years of his life, which he called the “Omnium Gatherum”. The diary, complete with an index, even- tually came to consist of 170 volumes with at least 36,000 il- lustrations, mostly photos, and approaching five million words. The British newspaper The Daily Telegraph once called it “very probably the longest illustrated diary in the world”. A short video on YouTube, shot in 2013, zooms in on the “why” of his diary. John is filmed saying: “I started off my aide mem- oir, to remind myself of who I met in business. I was meeting


then perhaps 400 or 500 people a year. And I forgot who they were, so I noted these down. That was quite important, be- cause most people keeping a diary give up after the first year. It’s just like swimming, you are very keen to start and then it gets to be a pain and you give up. These aides memoires kept me going and got me through that wall of resistance.” Now storytelling is not only about telling, but also about the stories – about listening to them, about curiosity, about expe- riencing, imagining and collecting. No wonder then that his- tory was a place where all those passions came together – from prehistoric subjects like Stonehenge to modern-day events – and from the author T.E. Lawrence to local archives, each subject had his entire interest. John had a particular en- thusiasm for the Great War (1914–1918) and he made various journeys across the Channel to track the events that had tak- en place at the battlefields. And as may be expected, these trips were also documented in detail.


Always an informed opinion Even at the age of 90 he held well-informed opinions about more topical issues, like for instance Brexit or Covid-19, and would not hesitate to share those in our email correspond- ence. Though he did not contract the virus, it was as if he knew what was coming. About Covid-19, he wrote in mid-May 2020: “If I do catch the virus it will be from those carers who come in weekly, as they look after lots of other ‘oldies’. I’m not worried – what will be, will be. I have had a wonderful life and 62 years of a marvellous marriage; my dear wife’s ashes under an English oak sapling in the corner of a wood 400m away. I will end up too, next to her, and what is left of us will be to- gether again for all time. A fitting end to one of life’s great love affairs, as it has been.”


John leaves behind a daughter Alison, who kindly volunteered to assist putting this review together. He also leaves behind, among other things, a 170-volume diary, which can be viewed in the Dorset History Centre, Dorchester, UK.


▶ PIG PROGRESS | Volume 37, No. 1, 2021 13


British pig ex- pert John Gadd loved to write – not only was he a regular col- umnist for Pig Progress, he also kept an illustrat- ed diary for decades.


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