Agricultural History Review, Volume 56 Part 2 (2008), p. 239

When this book arrived on my desk my musician son looked rather sniffily at it and then expressed some pity that I had perforce to read such dreary stuff. Perhaps he had a point, I thought; after all, a number of authors addressing the subject of the history of farm machinery have managed to produce tomes of unutterable tedium and of little academic, to say nothing of literary, value. But, as I began to read, it became clear with every page that Peter Dewey had risen far above the slender achievements of that unhappy pantheon. His is the work of the mature historian, combining economic and business insight with a deep understanding of the practical aspects of the agricultural machinery industry and its role in the success of British farming over the past two centuries. It is a work of considerable scholarship tempered with agreeable lucidity.

Based substantially on archive material from repositories the length and breadth of Britain, Iron Harvests leads us chronologically from the efforts of the wheelwright and carpenter of the late eighteenth century through to the creators of the behemoths stalking the fields of modern-day Britain. As he describes each generation of new machinery, with specific examples being covered in some detail, Dewey is careful to set developments alongside the national and international economic background and changes in the fortunes of the home-based agricultural economy. Indeed, one of the book’s great strengths is its success in explaining the sometimes subtle relationships between technological change, social conditions and the relative success or failure of the many agricultural engineering firms whose beginnings lay in the industrial foment of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Driven by the spirit of innovation and inventiveness, firms like Ransomes of Ipswich, Bamfords of Uttoxeter and Blackstones of Stamford marched triumphantly through the cutthroat world of Victorian capitalism, maintaining their competitive edge by constant and undivided attention to business, enterprise and entrepreneurship. Dewey writes elegantly on the structure and function of these businesses, of their successes and failures and of the personality clashes between the often larger-than-life characters running them. The relationship between the great machinery dynasties, their workers, the government and the farmers themselves are also carefully considered.

The quantum increases in agricultural prosperity in the third quarter of the nineteenth century stimulated demand for field, barn and dairy equipment of every description. Once the government prohibition on the export of farm machinery had been lifted in 1849, the growth of companies was underpinned by an expanding export market. In effect, British agricultural machinery dominated the world market in the years before the Great War. Subsequent to 1914–18, when war work had been a priority (with Foster’s of Lincoln alone producing no less than 2,909 tanks between 1915 and the Armistice), the fortunes of the industry were linked closely to the booms and slumps of the period, the state of European trade and the degree of harmony in the home labour market. While there were significant technical developments, the overall environment was one of loss of exports and a degree of restructuring leading to a slimmer industry whose output by the mid-thirties was a mere two-thirds that of 1914.

The substantial profits accruing to the industry during the Great War were mirrored in World War II as outputs of farm machinery grew dramatically to satisfy the needs of the ‘Plough-Up’ campaign and munitions, armaments and aircraft parts flowed from agricultural engineering factories to meet the insatiable demand of the war machine. But a cloud lay just visible on the horizon. Fordsons, David Browns, Marshalls and other home-built machines were no longer the sole mechanical power units in Britain’s fields, and by the end of the war they could be seen working alongside the Allis-Chalmers and Minneapolis-Moline tractors which had arrived via ‘lease-lend’ from across the Atlantic. Nevertheless, if the USA had become the world’s largest manufacturer of tractors, Britain still lay in second place immediately after the war. Meanwhile as technical developments led to significant increases in tractor efficacy and efficiency, British companies like Bamford, Dowdeswell, Palmiter, Tasker, Simplex, Alfa-Laval and Gascoigne were at the forefront of innovation in field, barn and dairy machinery by the mid-1970s.

During the next thirty years these and many other firms came face-to-face with the inexorable tide of foreign competition, to the extent that Britain’s tractor industry, in terms of relative size, stands today where it did in the early twentieth century. India is presently the world’s largest producer of tractors. Yet, in today’s environment of computer technology and satellite navigation, there still remain a large number of British farm machinery makers serving regional, national and international markets. Many of these are relatively small family-run businesses which continue in the tradition of innovation and entrepreneurship characteristic of the early days of the industry. Their survival and ready preparedness to embrace new ideas should remind us (despite the irresponsible nostrums of the organicist elite) that if Britain and the rest of the world are to survive the crisis of food security that looms ahead, every available technology will need to be exploited to the limit.

It is, of course, easy to quibble with some of Dewey’s observations. I doubt, for example, whether Neolithic men in their right minds ever totally abandoned hunting and gathering in favour of settled agriculture, and I am not altogether convinced that the failure of the machinery industry to attract graduates in the 1980s had any material effect on its progress! Marginally more seriously, I am suspicious of his definition of ‘a Quarter’ as 28 lbs (see p.3). If this was the case, as opposed to the Quarter of 8 bushels of approximately 56 lbs per bushel, then with wheat at more than 126 shillings per quarter in 1812, little wonder that bread riots were commonplace!

But these are trivial whinges. Dr. Dewey has produced a tour de force which is unlikely to be bettered in the near future. His beautifully illustrated and scholarly book is a major achievement. Whether they sip it like a good wine and savour it in small amounts, or swallow it whole like a Galway oyster, a generation of agricultural, economic, business and urban historians will benefit from Dewey’s efforts.