In 1955 David Ensor published his book Thirty Acres and a Cow. It related Ensor’s experiences in running dairy farms in the 1940s and 1950s in Hampshire and Dorset.
Before the Second World War, Ensor had been a lawyer working in Newcastle and London, becoming Clerk of the Peace for the County of London. At the end of Thirty Acres he stated: “You can keep your criminals. I will have my cows,” but by the late 1950s he had become an actor best known as a judge in the TV series The Verdict Is Yours.
In Thirty Acres he advocated the retention of flogging “in spite of what the socialist party and the rest of the long-haired boys say”. From 1964-70 he was the Labour MP for Bury and Radcliffe. l
Stephen Brasher
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