What the Papers Said

by Willy Carson

On the following few pages you might expect to find the story of some fellow vintage enthusiasts and their efforts to restore, rebuild, collect or demonstrate interesting items from our past. That’s exactly what I expected…but! I made an appointment to visit a man in a shed, find out about the engineering gems within, take some photographs and then write all about my trip. Then the fellow rings to tell me that he has to self-isolate. We rearranged the visit for a later date but then Rebecca came home from school with ‘you know what’ and had to self-isolate. Someone had to stand guard at the wardrobe door so another appointment had to be scrapped. When it looked like it was safe to go outside again, the weather man reached for his A to Z of storms and we were back to square one. I decided that this might be a good excuse to delve into my stack of boxes containing old magazines, journals and reports spanning back over a hundred years, so I made a mug of tea and sat down to read.

I have a dozen Royal Agricultural Society of England journals published in the years following WW2 which would hopefully describe how the country returned to a new normal after six years of conflict had disrupted both urban and rural life. In 1947, under the guidance of Lt.Col. Sir Archibald G. Weigall Bt., K.C.M.G., the Royal Show returned to take its place on the farming calendar. Having prepared the site with few materials available due to post-war shortages, and having worked through the worst winter in a generation, the RASE welcomed, to the Lincolnshire site, 240,323 members of the public (a record number at the time) who were eager to see what the future held for British agriculture. Commenting on the livestock entries, the Show Supplement noted of the Dairy Shorthorn breed that, “It was gratifying to see proved stalwarts winning prizes….In the pedigree world the many owe much to the few....it is not exaggerating to say that each breed depends for its improvement almost entirely upon a small band of enthusiastic leaders.” I suppose if you’re happy to adapt a famous quotation to make your point, you could do worse than start with the famous words of Winston Churchill himself. In the milking trials held during the show, based on three milkings during a 24 hour period, the popular Dairy Shorthorn produced 59lb 6oz, the Ayrshire gave 65lb 9oz and the emerging breed, the British Friesian poured an impressive 77lb 2oz into the bucket. This spelled out the future of dairying in black and white.

RASE Journal vol. 110 of 1949 began with a summary of farming in Oxfordshire. Of North Oxfordshire, it was noted that, “The Banbury area is one of very mixed farming, with a preponderance of small farms and no very large ones….The smaller farms rely mainly on milk production and a progressive 100 acre dairy farmer in this area might be milking about 20 cows and carrying their followers….have about 30 acres of old grass, 30 acres of leys, 20 acres of oats, 5 acres [of] roots and green crops, 5 acres of potatoes and 10 acres of wheat.” With cows to milk and all these different crops to plant and harvest, farmer Brown of Bottom Farm would own one tractor and a range of implements to make life easier for himself and his two farmhands.

In the 1951 edition of the journal, there was an analysis of the previous year’s Machinery Census concentrating on the size and distribution of tractors throughout England and Wales. “There are substantially more tractors on farms of under 50 acres to-day than there were in the whole country when the first Census was taken in 1927. Even so, more than 23,000 farms of over 50 acres still had no tractor at all. Only about 1 percent of all tractors in the country were owned by whole-time contractors.” Advertisements appearing in the pages of the journal show how the tractor manufacturers were making great advances in design and production as their factories reverted from producing wartime material to the machines that were needed to feed the nation and help balance the chancellor’s books. “Export or Die,” was the new rallying call. As a result of this policy, an innovative vehicle appeared to fill a short-term production hiatus at a former aircraft factory in Solihull. Due to steel shortages, allocation preference was given to firms which could secure foreign currency by exports, and Maurice Wilks had come up with a design which fitted into the new manufacturing order of things. His design

would solve transport problems in parts of the world where poor roads made travel difficult and, by using war-surplus aircraft grade Birmabright in place of steel, he didn’t have to worry about materials supply. His brilliant idea was, of course, the Land-Rover.

In the issue of Commercial Motor, dated 30th April 1948, this revolution in vehicle design was described as combining, “the functions of a light van or a car and trailer, with those of a light tractor, thus providing a single vehicle which will meet the majority of needs of the small farmer.” Overseen by the technical editor, extensive tests were carried out the following year with the following conclusions, “A fuel consumption trial was made when the machine was attached to a Ransomes No. 3 Motrac two-furrow plough….set to a depth of 7in….At the end of the hour’s fuel test, 6.3 pints were required to replenish the tank to the original level. A medium-weight wheeled tractor uses 6 pints of fuel per hour when engaged in the same class of work. We estimated that half an acre had been ploughed during the hour.” Appearing on the newsstand shelves the same week, The Motor was equally enthusiastic about this new wonder, “In launching this new vehicle the Rover Co. has displayed an enterprise which should be well rewarded, and there is no doubt that a big market exists for a machine such as the LandRover. There is no doubt, also, that in its design the Rover Co. has applied a wide knowledge and experience not only of vehicle manufacture, but of agricultural and industrial requirements.” As a ‘short term’ manufacturing venture the Land-Rover seemed to have done the trick and was to continue to do the trick for the next 70 years!