The Grass is Greener

by Tom Fort

  While not ranking beside Kay’s flying shuttle, Hargreaves’s spinning jenny, or Cartwright’s power loom, John Lewis’s invention was a significant step forward. Hitherto the surplus fibres, known as nap, which were raised from the spun cloth by teasels, had been lopped off by men with shears. The skill and precision required of the shearmen had made them the best-paid section of the workforce, and the most intractable. With the arrival of John Lewis’s horizontal or helical mechanical cutter, its tireless blades able to whirr away for as long as there was cloth to be napped, their day was pretty much done. Not that their passing, nor the readiness with which the machine was adopted throughout the industry, seem to have brought much benefit to the Lewises. They kept going at Brimscombe until the late 1830s, then subsided into oblivion. It was left to others to exploit the fruits of John Lewis’s clever mind.

  Mid-way between Brimscombe and Stroud was another mill, Thrupp. The name survives, attached to the village which straggles along the hill above the main road. But the mill – or, indeed, mills, for at one time there were two, a hundred yards apart – have long gone.

  To Thrupp, sometime in the late 18th century, migrated a family called Ferrabee. In previous generations they had lived in Uley and Owlpen, calling themselves variously Verebee and Vereby. William, born in 1698, became a blacksmith or millwright, instead of emulating his father, a broadweaver. William’s son, Edward, confirmed the family’s switch away from clothmaking, working as a machine-maker and repairer. By the time he died, the Ferrabees were established at Thrupp, secure in their name and calling. The previous year, Edward’s elder son, John Ferrabee, had leased Thrupp Mill with permission to convert it into an engineering factory. It became the Phoenix Ironworks, for the manufacture of machines for the clothing industry, water wheels, steam engines, agricultural machinery; indeed, almost anything made of iron.

  John Ferrabee is one of the two heroes of my story. We know nothing at all about his character, his virtues or his failings. That we know anything about the bare facts of his life and antecedents is because of a Mr H. A. Randall, of Ashford in Middlesex, to whose investigative efforts I am happy to pay grateful tribute. As a youth, Mr Randall was apprenticed to the Phoenix Ironworks, and he subsequently married a niece of one of the four maiden Ferrabee aunts, who were the daughters of John Ferrabee’s second son, James. According to the records deposited by Mr Randall at Stroud Museum, all four sisters lived into their nineties, sharing a house in Thrupp but never speaking to each other, and taking their tea from four teapots at the same table.

  The path which brought our second hero, Edwin Beard Budding, to Thrupp is obscure. There had been Buddings (or, variously, Boddyneges, Bodings and Bodyinges) in the Stroud district since the mid-16th century. Edwin Budding was born in 1796 and baptized at Eastington, west of Stroud. He came to Thrupp in the 1820s, possibly as an employee of the Ferrabees, possibly as the lessee of his own machine shop. He defined his trade as that of machinist or mechanician, suggesting a social position somewhere between that of employer and mere craftsman.

  What is sure is that John Ferrabee and Edwin Budding – factory owner and mechanical wizard – became collaborators and financial partners. That they also became friends is strongly suggested by Ferrabee’s will of 1831, in which he appointed Budding his sole trustee, with the task of managing his estate until his youngest son should attain the age of 21. But we can only guess, unprofitably, about the nature of their relationship. No personal records survive, and with the two men living next door to each other and working together, there is no reason why there should have been any.

  The Phoenix Ironworks was conveniently placed for the clothing mills of the Golden Valley. The Lewis brothers had their horizontal napper made there. An improved version, devised by the Lewises and their partner, William Davis – in which the horizontal blade was twisted into a spiral, to achieve continuous cutting – was also manufactured by Ferrabee. So, too, were a number of variants on the same theme, at least one of which involved a crank turned by a belt driven by a shaft.

  We can assume that Budding helped make many of these machines, and saw them in action. He would have watched those spiralled cutters coming down on the furry nap, taking it off clean. And somehow the idea came to him. Was it a sudden leap, lighting up his imagination with its possibilities? Or did it grow as a seed of grass, nestled in comfortable earth until warmed into germination? I have no idea, nor any powerful preference. It is enough to imagine the scene in the ironworks: the steam, the smoke, the racket, the belch of flame, the rasp of the shovels in the heaps of coal, the clang of hammers, the hiss of the hot moulds in water, the high-pitched cries of sooty urchins and the answering softness of West Country burr; and in the midst of it, the working of the mind of a man about whom almost nothing is known, following its course.

  Included in the land attached to Thrupp Mill were a number of meadows, which lay between the factory buildings and the river. It may well have been that these were occasionally scythed, and that it was this conjunction which stimulated Budding’s mental leap, from grass to machine and back to grass. Whatever the spark, the idea was born and a prototype was made. There is a story that Budding and Ferrabee tested it at night, to protect it from prying eyes, either on the meadows or on the grass outside Ferrabee’s house. I like to picture them hauling their brainchild out, and heaving and shoving it around by the flickering light of waving lamps, the grinding and crunching of cogs and cutters mixing with the excited mutterings of the two men as they speculated on the fortunes they would surely make.

  Whatever the nature of the gestation, the child was born in 1830. Articles of agreement between Ferrabee and Budding were signed on the 18th of May of that year – ‘whereas the said Budding hath invented and applied a new combination of machinery for the purpose of cropping and shearing the vegetable surface of Lawns, Grass-plots and Pleasure Grounds, constituting a machine which may be used with advantage instead of a sithe for that purpose’.

  It would be wearisome to quote the articles of agreement in full. Their essence was that Ferrabee would supply the cash to enable the invention to become a marketable reality; that any profits would go to Ferrabee until his outlay was covered; and that thereafter they would be equally divided between the two. A penalty of two thousand pounds was specified should either party break the agreement. The document was witnessed by a Mr A. Merrick, of whom we know nothing for sure; although it may be more than coincidence that, a year later, Loudon’s Gardener’s Magazine should publish a letter extolling the virtues of the Budding machine from a ‘Mr Merrick of Cirencester’.

  The patent was obtained in October 1830. The accompanying specification describes the machine in turgid and indigestible detail, a great block of print clogged with references to pinions, drives, cylinders, toothed wheels, brass rings, spiral cutters, bevelled steel plates, chase mortices, ratchet wheels and the like. But in the two accompanying diagrams – of the mower from the side and from above – the beauty and brilliance of Budding’s concept burst forth. There, in every essential, is the cylinder mower as it exists today. There are the elegant upward curve and flattening of the guiding handles, the roller which controls the cut; and there are the six tempered cutters, arranged in agreeable harmonious congruity around the central axis. And you think: yes, there is the mower in my shed, my mower. In that recognition is the recognition of the genius of Budding.

  In the specification which accompanied the patent, it is perhaps possible to discern an echo of the voice of the inventor, as he advances its merits: ‘It is advisable to employ the machine when the grass or vegetable is dry. Grass growing in the shade, too weak to stand against the scythe to be cut, may be cut by my machine as closely as required, and the eyes will never be offended by those circular scars, inequalities and bare places, so commonly made by the best mowers with the scythe, and which continue visible for several days. Country gentlemen may find in using my machine themselves an amusing, useful and healthy exercise.’

 
It is through that last sentiment – tentatively and awkwardly expressed – that Edwin Budding lifted the curtain on the new world made possibly by his cleverness. In the old world, grass was cut by a hired hand, in damp weather or at dewy dawn, with an implement which by its nature militated against the achievement of smoothness and evenness of texture; or it was not cut at all. Suddenly we have a vision: in which the grass may be cut when the sun is shining, at a time of day when a reasonable person might think of being outside for recreation, with an implement requiring neither great skill nor long practice; in which the care of grass becomes the duty and pleasure of its owner, rather than one more task for the paid labourer; and therefore one in which the lawn is not just an adornment of the domains of the privileged few, but a source of pleasure for the many. What Budding and his friend had done, in that workshop and on those unkempt meadows by the Frome, was to create something which might bring within the common grasp the beauty and beneficent quality of cultivated grass. They made possible a small, peaceful revolution which, in a small, peaceful way altered the face of our land.

  Budding plays no further active part in the story. But he deserves a decent farewell, for there is a stirring romance in the fragments of his life, the manner in which he emerged from his natural obscurity, made his mark, and returned to the shadows. It is not known how long he remained at Thrupp, nor what caused the parting of the ways with Ferrabee. There is no evidence that his great invention made much material difference to his life. It may well be that the comparatively comfortable estate he left his widow was nourished by the proceeds from another of his inventions: an adjustable spanner identical in all essentials to the one in use today, which was made in large numbers by Ferrabee and was still being advertised by the family business many years later.

  Its creator moved to Dursley, not far away, but far enough, perhaps, to hint at a cooling in the relationship with Ferrabee. On the other hand, some sort of cooperation persisted, for at the Great Exhibition of 1851 the company advertised a later Budding patent, an agricultural chaff-cutter which employed the same spiral principle as the mower. While at Dursley, Budding associated professionally with George Lister, whose second son was to found the celebrated engineering works with which the town is identified to this day. George Lister had come to Dursley from Yorkshire in 1817, setting up in business as a maker of cards, implements used to sort out and line up fibres before spinning. Together with Lister, Budding developed a new carding machine, which provoked unrest among manual workers fearful for their jobs. There is a record of Budding – an improbable candidate as industrial tyrant – being placed under police protection.

  He lived in a modest, wisteria-clad cottage on the way to Stinchcombe Hill, and died there in 1846, at the age of 50. A later George Lister, in some notes written in 1952, recalled attending a school run by Budding’s daughters. According to these records, Budding’s widow, Elizabeth, survived him until 1874. There is no hint of what brought Budding to his grave. He lies in the churchyard in Dursley, in the heart of a town which thrived on the reputation of its great engineering works, and is now sadly decayed. We cannot know if Budding followed the fortunes of his great gift to the nation. If so, let us hope that in the year of his death, he read with pride a note in the Gardener’s Chronicle from one who signed himself ‘Ortolano’ and who had seen the Budding machine at work:

  ‘On a visit to a suburban residence … it appeared to answer perfectly … it is scarcely possible for any lawn to look more smoothly and nicely … it would be impossible to keep the lawn in so condition by the scythe’.

  If there was a rift between Budding and John Ferrabee, it seems unlikely that it sprang from disputes over how the proceeds from the lawnmower should be divided; for the spoils were pretty meagre. In 1832 Ferrabee did issue a production licence to the agricultural machinery company, J.R. and A. Ransome of Ipswich. In time, of course, the name of Ransome was to become almost synonymous with mowing excellence. But the firm’s founding fathers were hardly swift in exploiting the potential of Budding’s invention. By the time its creator died, they had sold no more than 1200 of the machines, a rate of about eighty a year. Orders from the Phoenix Ironworks may have been more brisk, but the mower proved no goldmine.

  John Ferrabee died in 1853, the business being passed to his sons James and Henry. The brothers went their separate ways two years later, with James retaining the ironworks, and continuing to market ‘Budding’s machine’. In 1858, however, it had become Ferrabee’s Improved Lawn Mowing Machine. In advancing its claims in an advertising leaflet on that year. James Ferrabee asserted – with a certain air of desperation – that: ‘Notwithstanding the pretensions of others, who have done little else but imitate, all the most valuable improvements in Mowing Machines have originated with Mssrs Ferrabee; their long practical experience has enabled them to avoid change without advantage, and to reject useless novelties’. The sad fact, which, in attempting to refute he implicitly acknowledged, was that Ferrabee had been left behind. The rich harvest from the act of genius which his father had helped nourish would be gathered in by others.

  In 1863 James Ferrabee left the Phoenix site, and moved upstream to Brimscombe, where he began making cloth as well as continuing with some machine production. But diversification failed to provide any relief from the pressure exercised by his competitors. Ferrabee’s fortunes declined. In 1872 he wrote to his son to caution him against drinking ‘stimulants of any kind beyond a glass or two of beer’, and informing him that from the beginning of the year ‘you will be on your own resources because of the need to observe the strictest economy at home and in every other way’. He died three years later, and was honoured by some affecting lines in the local newspaper:

  ‘Science hath lost a favoured son,

  His task complete, his laurels won;

  He rests from toil, from care he’s free

  And wreathed by fame is Ferrabee’.

  As for the Phoenix site, it was eventually occupied by another engineering company, George Waller and Sons, makers of pumps and other precisely engineered machines. This grew and prospered, and later declined, and eventually succumbed to the fate which has overtaken once proud centres of mechanical skill throughout the land. These days, the name Phoenix survives, attached to a trading estate between the swift little river and the weedy canal. The place of the old ironworks is taken by a publishing house. Of the mill and the workshops, that is no trace. All is submerged beneath the tarmac of the carparks, and the grey metal warehouses with green roofs.

  But the place of this place in our history, and the men who made it that, are not wholly forgotten. Over the door of the publishing house is a plaque: ‘Here in 1830 John Ferrabee manufactured the first lawn mower to the design of Edwin Budding’.

  The Budding’s Flowering

  Grass is at once the symbol of our life and the emblem of our mortality … the carpet of the infant becomes the blanket of the dead

  J. J. INGALLS

  In those early days, John Ferrabee must have had high hopes of realizing high ambitions for his friend’s invention. Almost at once, he brought off what must have seemed a considerable marketing coup, by enlisting the warm support of the pre-eminent gardening authority of the day. Within a year of the mower’s registration, Loudon’s Gardener’s Magazine carried a tribute to it from Mr Curtis, head gardener at the Zoological Gardens in London, which was based on a four-month trial. Mr Curtis was reported to be ‘entirely satisfied’ with his Budding, finding that ‘with two men, one to draw and one to push, it does as much work as six or eight men with scythes and brooms; not only in mowing but in sweeping up and lifting into a box, performing the whole so perfectly so as not to leave a mark of any kind behind’.

  Loudon was impressively alert to the machine’s potential, albeit typically sententious in discussing its merits. ‘It promises’, he wrote in his notes in the September 1831 issue of the magazine, ‘to be one of the greatest boons that science has conferred upon the working gardener
in our time.’ One of its chief attributes – that it worked best when the grass was dry – was seen by Loudon as having an important moral dimension:

  When it is used, men cannot be set to work at it very early in the morning or late in the evening. In this emancipation we rejoice. The nearer that all labourers are brought to a level, in point of severity as well as skill, the better, for various reasons; and the progress of improvement has decidedly this tendency.

  Loudon loses no time in appropriating Budding’s concept in the name of that ideal of human advance so characteristic of his age. There is no thought in his head that the labourer should labour less; that, having cast aside his scythe, he should be allowed to lean against a gatepost and have a smoke. His emancipation is to be able to toil when the sun is up, rather than during hours designated by the Creator for rest; to be able to exchange scythe time for fork time or spade time. It was not the labour force which was emancipated, but productivity. Extra capacity simply made it possible for more to be done, in gardening just as in factories. As for Budding’s suggestion that gentlemen – such as Loudon – might care to try it for themselves, the great arbiter seems to have preferred to ignore it.

  Loudon’s mission was to map out the direction that liberated ambition should take. He saw the Budding as another means to empower the swelling ranks of those with money and leisure. But in the confidence of his prediction – ‘we are much mistaken if it does not soon come into use in all large grounds’ – he misjudged. Even though, a few months later, the Gardener’s Magazine carried a much longer article about the Budding, complete with detailed instructions on how to operate it, and drawings illustrating its inner workings, there is no evidence of widespread interest in it. Apart from the encomium offered by Mr Merrick of Cirencester, there is no mention of it in the magazine’s pages for five years, until November 1837, when Mr Samuel Taylor, of Stoke-Ferry in Norfolk, wrote in praise of ‘that very ingenious contrivance, Budding’s grass-cutter’.