Agricultural History Review, Volume 57 Part 1 (2009), p. 142

The history of the steam engine exerts a powerful fascination on the public mind, and that of the agricultural steam engine especially so. However, previous work on the subject, largely concerned with technical and engineering aspects, has fought shy of answering the central and most interesting question. This is, in Jonathan Brown’s words ‘… the story of the application of steam power to British agriculture – its use and extent, and how the promise of the new technology of steam was turned into reality’ (p.6). To answer these questions is his aim, and he succeeds triumphantly in doing so.

The story of the agricultural steam engine may be said to have begun in the first decade of the nineteenth century, when some fixed engines were used for threshing. But this was a false dawn, and interest in steam threshing waned thereafter, to resurface in the 1840s. By then, some manufacturers were developing the wheeled ‘portable’ engine, which could be moved around the farm by horses, and was capable of powering a threshing machine, and performing ancillary operations (feed preparation, drainage, sawmilling). Many of the leading firms in the business had begun in earnest by the end of the 1840s. Thereafter, the portable achieved astonishing success, and by the early 1870s almost all the farmers who were going to use one had bought their engines.

Steam ploughing was a particular, although limited, success story. This had been a dream of many inventors, and the holy grail of some of the early steam enthusiasts such as Alderman Mechi. However, in the damp climates of northern Europe, the use of the heavy steam engines to plough directly on the land would have been very harmful to the soil. The solution to the problem was the cable ploughing system, chiefly that sold by John Fowler of Leeds, whereby one or two engines on the field boundary hauled a plough or cultivator across the field using an iron or steel cable. This was operational by the early 1860s, although it was much improved in later years.

By the 1870s almost all hand threshing by flail had disappeared, to be replaced by the fixed or portable engine and threshing box (usually operated by threshing contractors). The portable engine had won an indispensable place in the stackyard and barn of the larger farm; many acres (chiefly in the Fens, eastern and south Midland counties, and in Sussex) were now worked by steam plough. Steam power seemed to have conquered British farming.

But there were limits to its success. As Brown remarks (p.36), given the enormous output of steam engines in the late nineteenth century (what was probably the largest manufacturer, Clayton and Shuttleworth of Lincoln, had produced 40,000 by 1914), ‘… one might expect farming to have been awash with steam engines … the reality was different’. He estimates that there might have been about 20,000 on British farms around 1880 (so that about 10 per cent of all farms may have had a steam engine), before the agricultural depression weeded out some, finishing up with the 16,959 recorded at the 1912 British farm census. In addition, there must be counted the engines used by the threshing contractors, amounting to a (roughly) estimated 15,000. There were only about 700 cable ploughing sets by the late 1870s (almost all double-engined by then), which were used to plough (and especially cultivate) about one million acres. This sounds a lot, but was only about seven per cent of the cultivated land of England and Wales, so, as far as field operations was concerned, the farm horse still reigned supreme.

The apogee of steam’s success was in the 1880s. Thereafter, a saturated home market and the financial depression in arable farming led to a slowly declining domestic stock of engines, and the manufacturers turned to export markets. The First World War provided a short-term boost, but after 1918 the story was one of steady decline, as the tractor made halting headway in British farming. The manufacturers’ horizons were sometimes brightened by the odd special order; Mussolini’s famous drainage of the Pontine Marshes in 1927 was done by eight very large Fowler engines. But the shrinking domestic stock of steam engines was ageing, and was not being replaced. The Second World War would not be as profitable for the steam contractors and manufacturers as the First had been. In 1939 the Ministry of Agriculture’s officials needed to be reminded as to what the ‘Steam Cultivation Development Association’ stood for. It was the Fordson tractor which was the preferred technology in 1939–45, and not the double-engined steam ploughing system.

The appearance of Jonathan Brown’s book is to be warmly welcomed, as being the first to address seriously the question of the actual role and significance of the steam engine in British farming. His treatment is judicious, pithily written, and full of knowledge lightly worn, drawing extensively on the rich collections of steam engine makers’ records held at the Museum of English Rural Life at Reading University. These have been augmented by many excellent and apposite illustrations from the MERL collections. In all, this is a book which will become indispensable reading for all historians of modern British farming, and will undoubtedly be the standard by which future work on the subject is judged.