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 Early in 1972 Miss Lupton who owned the Wayward Herd expressed dissatisfaction with the standard of judging of the Anglo-Nubian. The judges at that time appeared to be trying to force Swiss standards on A.N.’s. When a certain black and white A.N with British Alpine marking became a breed champion she thought something should now to be done.
She encouraged our small group Miss “Winky” Tavener, Miss Jean Porter, Valerie Booth, Glen Everington, Mr. Norman Fisher, Mr. Fred Holmes and me (Margaret Edginton) to form a society. Many meetings took place at Miss Taveners (Cheswadine) house on Miss Luptons estate, to discuss how to proceed, after weeks of measuring our own A.N. goats and visiting others who kept A.N.’s at the time drew together a detailed breed standard, the B.G.S. rejected it saying it was too long There was considerable resistance to us at the time from the British Goat Society, their limited breed standard said “Roman nose, long ears no tassles”. We persevered with our version leaving out none essential words but it would be a couple of years before the revised version was finally accepted. Mrs. Paine who was a judge at the time was heard to say “I suppose I will need a slide rule and scales to judge Anglo-Nubians”. It should be noted that at the time only the Golden Guernsey had a Breed Society.
At a number of shows including the Royal Highland the A.N.’s were in the A.O.V. classes, it was thought that a rosette should be given to the best A.N. at a show but in what colours?. Looking about the room it was noticed that Jean Porter had on some orange and green striped socks, a vote was taken, orange and green would be the ANBS colours for our in house hand made rosettes for the new society. The rosettes continued to be hand made by a member of the committee until 1975 when Mr. David Will offered to make them on a machine he had using the ANBS stocks of material
The above named eight founder members called the ANBS inaugural meeting at a school in Wyke near Bradford West Yorkshire to judge the interest from other Anglo-Nubian breeders. At that meeting Mrs. Paine and Miss Rochford (Berkham) attended to see what we were doing, however they did not join us at that time. After the meeting we applied to the B.G.S. to become an affiliated society. The B.G.S. replied to our application asking for the rules, we had not thought of that so we “borrowed” the Yorkshire Dairy Goat Societies rules and sent those in, they were accepted.
Our original aim was to educate judges in the breed standard, it was decided to send our breed standard to them, our other aim was to promote the best males with a stud goat scheme.
After the inaugural meeting at the end of 1972 we had 25 members with some of us as officers, one of our group Miss Glen Everington designed our Breed logo we still use today. She used her male Highstones Impresario for the head study, the female in the logo was his dam Cheswadine Imburu with her kids. The following year the membership had risen to 50 and we held our first Breed Show at Mr.& Mrs.Astle-Bates (Nenevalley) Farm in Northamptonshire.
The membership peaked at over 400 in the eighties but has declined slowly since then as legislation made it uneconomical to sell spare milk, recent legislation making it even more difficult to move animals.
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