The Final Taxi

Down here in the South people tend to depend on their farm tools a lot and will grow attached to them. Many people love their trucks and tractors and it shows with the rise in clothing with the John Deer logo on it. But it is not just a Southern U.S. thing as a man in the UK has asked that his Final Taxi be a ‘final tractor.’

A Yorkshire farmer, Jimmie Haythornthwaite , owned three vintage Massey Fergusons and used an adapted 1960s model to go shopping and pick up his pension.

A tractor fanatic, Haythornthwaite told his son that his last wish was to have his body towed to his funeral on his favorite tractor. That wish was granted when he died and his coffin was pulled to a crematorium on a trailer attached to his beloved red 1956 model driven by pal Colin Moses.

Daughter Vicky, 35, said: “It was his last wish to be towed behind his favorite tractor and that his ashes should be scattered at the farm.”

Her father was a well known character in the area and could often be seen standing outside his home surveying the countryside.

She said he lived an old-fashioned life alone in his house that had hardly changed in decades. It was several hundred years old and still had a butchery area and between 1870 and 1878 was a brewery serving the men who built nearby Ponden reservoir.