Parsonage Farm II – cats, ducks, cows, daisies - and seagulls

It’s summertime and it’s fun for the Pym children - Michael and Frances – to play on the duck house and pick daisies.

Arnold W Pym, chief accountant for Imperial Tobacco, Bristol, had a gift for filming animals and children as is evident from the shots here of two seagulls courting, two cats lapping milk and his two eldest children playing on the farm’s duck house, the resident ducklings tottering about. Michael and Frances are also seen crossing the farmyard with their mother, braving the horned cattle gathered there, and picking daisies to make a chain and a posy.

Arnold William Pym (b.1902, South Shields, Durham, later moving to Edinburgh with his family) married Jenny Zaaijer (b.1910, Zaandvoort, Netherlands), a botanist, in the 1930s. They bought Parsonage Farm, Publow, near Pensford, Bristol, where they created a garden of note and brought up four children – Michael (b.1936), Frances (b.1938), John (b.1944) and Andrew (b.1946). The family regularly visited Whitesands Bay, St David’s, Pembrokeshire, and Frances moved to the county in 1986, one of her daughters living in Ceredigion.