Whitlock Bros and The Dinkum Digger

By Paul Sadler, A Ferguson Club Member

The first Dinkum Diggers were made circa 1954 and I used to see them as I passed by Whitlock Brothers Ltd on the school bus. I started working there in 1957 as an Apprentice Engineer and locked the gates forever in June 1975 as Production Engineering Manager, having spent eight enjoyable years as a Design Engineer along the way and kept it all going through the early 70’s three day week winters of discontent. (The hardest years)

It was a happy place to work and employed approaching 500 people, including my wife.

Obviously, the machinery became more sophisticated as the years passed. In the 50’s, there was a connection between the two Whitlock brothers Carlton and Roy with Australia and some products were exported there in the early days. My understanding is that the Australian front line infantry men in the First World War were known as “Diggers” and there was an expression “Fair Dinkum” applied to things that turned out well, leading to them being called ‘Dinkum Diggers’.

I am also vaguely aware of an Australian cartoon series featuring Dinkum Digger and Platypus. Whitlock also built a crawler machine called Platypus and a photograph of that hung on the drawing office stairs wall at one time.

As I say, this was about four years before my time there. The parallogram linkage on the main boom. The advantage was that this meant that the lift ram was extending on the main bore end to raise the boom and could provide more lifting capacity. See photo.