by Tom Fort
Mr Taylor’s letter offers some clues as to why the mower had failed to ignite public enthusiasm. He himself deplores the ignorance of others – ‘the use and value of this instrument do not appear to be so well understood as they deserve to be’ – before exposing the defective state of his own knowledge by asserting that ‘the wetter the grass the better it seems to cut’; and, further, that the earth left by the worms ‘seems to put an edge on the knives rather than to injure them’. Mr Taylor concludes his testimonial by offering the improbable hope that ‘I shall be the means of selling Mr Budding several machines’, and by recording that ‘my garden abuts the turnpike road and I am seen at work by everyone passing’.
There is no record of what sort of spectacle he presented as he manhandled his Budding through the soaking grass. But it is unlikely that he would have resembled at all closely the figure in John Ferrabee’s original advertising material, who was supposed to reinforce the contention that this was an amusing exercise for the gentry. This nattily whiskered beau ideal, in top hat, tail coat, tight white trousers and boots, is seen in effortless control of his Budding against an Arcadian backdrop, for all the world as if the machine was powering itself. The reality, a foretaste of the eternal chasm between aspiration and achievement in grass cultivation, was very different.
In fact, the mower made strenuous physical demands of its operator. Being made of cast iron, it was extremely heavy. The clutch had to be held in position to obtain the drive, while a firm downward and forward pressure had to be maintained to keep it moving and cutting. In the early models, a small iron roller was placed between the cutters and the big roller at the back, which made it difficult to control the height of the cut, the blades tending to alternate between revolving in the air above the grass and scalping it.
Advertising material issued by Ransomes in the 1830s reflects some of the drawbacks of the new technology. In one illustration, the first cousin of Ferrabee’s top-hatted country gent is sauntering behind an apparently self-propelled Budding. But in another, an unmistakeable member of the labouring class is bent into his machine in a pose eloquent of effort, his back leg stretched out behind as if he were a muleteer trying to shift an obstinate beast. On the far side of the considerable expanse of grass which he is endeavouring to cut stands a mansion in which the quality are doubtless diverting themselves without a thought of the fun to be had from changing places with him. The accompanying text proclaims that ‘persons unpractised in the art of Mowing’ are now able to ‘cut Lawns, Pleasure Grounds and Bowling Greens with ease’. But there is no evidence of a rush to test the assertion.
The general state of enlightenment is probably reflected with reasonable accuracy in Cobbett’s The English Gardener. Having delivered himself of a mass of common sense on a great range of horticultural matters, Cobbett considered briefly the matter of grass. It is evident from the edition published in 1833 that he had never heard of Budding or his contraption; though of the lawn – or grass-plat as he calls it in his old-fashioned way – he clearly thinks highly. Cobbett has no time for sowing seed; cut the turf from some ‘very anciently and closely-pressed pasture where the herbage is fine’ is his counsel. If anything, he is sentimental about the use of the scythe: ‘A good short-grass mower is a really able workman; and if the plat have a good bottom, he will leave it very nearly as smooth and as even as the piece of green cloth which covers the table on which I am writing.’ While Cobbett is properly appreciative of the charms of turf – ‘grass-plats are the greatest beauties of pleasure grounds if well-managed’ – he has a warning: ‘If, however, you do not resolve to have the thing done in this manner, it is much better not to attempt it at all.’ Then he grumbles: ‘The decay of gardening in England in this respect is quite surprising.’
But perhaps not so surprising. The Georgian age, of grand houses in grand parks kept tidy by armies of retainers, had exhausted itself. The social upheaval attending the birth pangs of an industrial society had shaken and loosened the grip of the landed aristocracy. Many of the grand old estates had become economically too much for their owners, and had either been broken up or had fallen into the hands of people with a more hard-headed idea of what constituted necessary expenditure. The march of the new moneyed classes was only just gathering momentum, and the gardening pioneers were tending to concentrate their energies on the vast range of new species of tree, shrub and flower, or on novelties, such as the heated glasshouse. Loudon, directing operations, was attempting to organize the disparate elements into a discipline, and it took time for his voice to impress itself upon his audience.
Loudon marketed his guiding principles under the sonorous but meaningless label ‘gardenesque’, which he employed to legitimize anything which took his fancy. Philosophically he advocated the primacy of art over nature, the garden as an expression of man’s ingenuity and energy. In practice, this meant a tremendous enthusiasm for plants from abroad, and for technical innovation. He occasionally made a fool of himself: one vision of progress was of a series of gigantic glass palaces, each enclosing a sample eco-system from a distant land, complete with birds, plants and animals, and a handful of appropriate natives ‘habited in their particular costumes’, to keep the place in order.
Loudon is seen by the majority of authorities as the father of modern gardening, an inspired and indefatigable tutor who opened a generation’s eyes to the joys of this divinely approved pastime; and by a handful of sceptics as the corrupter of an art previously practised by men of refinement into an amusement for the vulgar middle classes, encouraging through his own lack or suppression of higher sensibility what was to become the Victorian mania for exotic species, garish colours, dreary and fussy arrangements of shrubberies and flower beds, and assorted other crimes of tastelessness.
All that concerns my story is that Loudon never deviated from his allegiance to the lawn. In every one of the countless models he produced – whether for plutocrat, aristocrat or humble professional, whatever variation he permitted in the provision of bloom, shrub or tree – the lawn was the indispensable. But this status was accompanied by responsibilities. It was by no means enough just to lay the lawn down. The owner had a duty to keep his grass, like his workers, healthy:
It is a great mistake to suppose that anything is gained in the way of economy, by suffering the grass of lawns to grow long before mowing in order to save the expense of once or twice mowing during the season; for, in proportion as the grass is allowed to grow long before mowing, in the same proportion are the roots strengthened and enabled to send up still longer leaves and stems; whereas, if the lawn were kept short for two or three years in succession, the plants of grass would become so weak that not one half the mowing usually required for even slovenly kept lawns would be necessary, and the turf would be much finer and neater in appearance.
Working one’s way through this doughy prose, one wonders fleetingly if the great fount of wisdom talked like that. The opinion he expresses – that grass infrequently mown grows faster than grass frequently mown – is nonsense. But that is beside the point. Loudon’s purpose is to set out one of the gardener’s obligations. To have a garden is not an amusement (although there is nothing actually wrong in enjoying it). It is to undertake a responsibility approved by society. Failure to discharge it properly, it is implied, will be interpreted by society as a symptom of unfitness to belong. A man may as properly have a fork or a spade in his hand as a Bible. But should he cast aside his implement before the job is done, he will be judged.
That homily is quoted approvingly by his wife, Jane. She, having accompanied him on his endless horticultural pilgrimages, acted as his secretary and amanuensis, cared for him during his bouts of ill-health, and finally buried him, continued with his mission to inform. Mrs Loudon’s books – among them, Gardening for Ladies and The Ladies’ Companion to the Flower Garden – were immensely popular, and, by sanctioning gardening as a suitable pastime for women, were in their way as influential as his.
On the pl
ace of the lawn, her sentiments were identical with those of him whom she continued to regard as the source of truth: ‘The chief beauties of the lawn’, she parrots, ‘are the uniformity of its surface and uniformity in the kinds of grass which cover it and produce a uniform tone of green … Everyone must have felt the relief afforded to the eye by a broad strip of lawn, bordered by trees and shrubs not in a formal line on each side, but running into numerous projections and recesses.’ Mowing, she intones, must be done very frequently, certainly every fortnight, although she concedes that ‘it is an operation which a lady cannot easily perform for herself; unless, indeed, she has the strength to use one of Budding’s machines’.
Loudon died in 1843. The records are silent as to whether he ever mowed his own lawn with his Budding. I am inclined to doubt it, since, in general, he showed no inclination to extend his pleasure in lecturing the labourer into a readiness to take his place.
During the early Victorian years, the cause of the mechanical grass-cutter advanced but slowly. One can only guess at the level of sales. As we have seen, Ransomes were selling no more than eighty a year. Ferrabee’s probably exceeded that volume, since in 1858 James Ferrabee announced – with what degree of accuracy we cannot be sure – that total sales of the Budding had passed seven thousand. Modified versions of the Budding remained the standard choice throughout these years. But horizons were expanding. The year before Loudon’s death, an engineer from Arbroath, Alexander Shanks, registered the patent for his grass-cutting machine. Although the operation of its cutters followed the Budding principle, Shanks’s mower was much bigger (the prototype was 27 inches wide, compared with Budding’s 16 inches), and was designed to be pulled rather than pushed.
The man who commissioned it, Mr Lindsey Carnegie of Kimblethmont, was thrilled:
Its success surpasses my expectations. The lawn of two and a half acres is now cut, the grass swept up and the ground effectually rolled by my gardener, assisted by the pony, in two-and-a-half hours, and the execution leaves nothing to be desired. Where the ground is much fugged [i.e. the grass left long], a surface is produced very similar to velvet.
Shanks’s second model was 42 inches wide, and it cost around £20 (a hefty sum, not much less than the annual stipend of some ill-favoured country curates). It was clearly much better suited to large gardens than the Budding, and the fact that it was drawn made it less likely to chew up the ground.
Shanks and Sons evidently did good business. By the late 1840s they were advertising models between 15 and 42 inches, with a selection of testimonials from notable clients – including Lord Kinnaird, who recorded that his Shanks, propelled by a man, a pony and a woman (in that order) could cut and tidy an area of two and a half acres in seven hours, which previously had kept four scythemen and three women occupied for three days. Shanks’s machines were being hauled round the new Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, and Regent’s Park, the horses being equipped with made-to-measure leather boots to minimize the damage to the turf. The 42-incher was shown at the Great Exhibition, and a few years later was displayed in Paris, where Napoleon III ordered one.
Other manufacturers entered the fray, among them Wood and Sons of Banbury, Green of Leeds, and Samuelson, also of Banbury. All their mowers were, in essence, Buddings. But the general advance in the making of machine tools opened the way to improvements. Thomas Green solved one basic problem with the Budding design, by placing a small wooden roller in front of the cutting cylinder, which provided stability and restrained the tendency of the blades to dig rather than cut. Another serious social failing of the Budding was the atrocious racket it made as its gears and cogs and shafts ground together. Green solved this, too, introducing in 1859 the magnificently named Silens Messor (the ‘Silent Reaper’). This made use of a chain drive (as on a bicycle) in which a toothed wheel at the side of the rear roller revolved a chain, which in turn drove a much smaller wheel attached to the cutters.
Down at the Phoenix Ironworks, James Ferrabee, doubtless infuriated by the way others were cashing in on his family heirloom, strove to regain the market initiative. He promiscuously adopted modifications developed elsewhere, and claimed them as his own. His Improved Mowing Machine, introduced in the late 1850s, had the smaller roller placed in front of the cutting cylinder, which – with the fixed blade and adjusting mechanism – could all be detached for repair and cleaning. A few years later came Ferrabee’s Noiseless Lawn Mower, chain-driven like Green’s Silens Messor. He also sought to undercut his rivals. His 12-inch machine – with which, he claimed, a ‘strong boy’ could cut five hundred square yards in an hour – retailed at five pounds fifteen shillings, compared with six pounds ten shillings for Ransomes’s equivalent.
By the 1860s the number of lawn enthusiasts was clearly multiplying rapidly. The swift expansion in mower manufacture, and the extravagance of the boasting by the companies involved, caused difficulties for the consumer. For enlightenment they were able to turn to the publication that soon established itself as a crucial element in the flowering of gardening as a pastime for the masses. This was the Gardener’s Chronicle, the weekly newspaper introduced in 1841 as a record of ‘everything that bears upon horticulture or garden botany’. Founded by the devoted apple-grower and horticulturist John Lindley, and Joseph Paxton, the gardening colossus of the Victorian Age, the Chronicle remains an amazing testimonial to the depth and power of the passion that had been awoken in the British. The paper fulfilled its promise. Anything and everything to do with the pursuit was gathered in, examined by expert eyes, commented on, rejected, endorsed. For anyone with an opinion or an experience nourished by the garden, it was the only vehicle for expression.
Thus, when Mr Pettigrew of Cheetham-Hill, Manchester, had trouble with his Budding, the readers of the Chronicle knew about it: ‘The wooden roller of the unimproved implement was most objectionable’, Mr Pettigrew complained in 1852, ‘as it caused the machine to be difficult to hold and draw.’ But he still loved it: ‘I am enamoured of the mowing machine, though I know many gardeners prefer the scythe. At this place it takes four men with scythes thirty-one hours to cut our grass – 124 hours of mowing. Two men with a machine take thirty-five hours – i.e. seventy hours.’
Three years later there was a cry of anguish: ‘Can anyone inform me which is the very best mowing machine? For some years I have used a Budding … Samuelson’s will not answer.’ Back came the answer from another correspondent: that Samuelson’s Improved Budding would answer perfectly well – if the operator would remember to take the travelling wheels off it.
In the issue of 15 June 1857, there was a letter from James Ferrabee at the Phoenix Ironworks, protesting plaintively that no one had told him about a recent trial of mowing machines at Chiswick Gardens. The following year the Chronicle supervised another test, to which Ferrabee was invited; although in hindsight he probably wished he had missed that one, too. Four machines were ranged against each other, supplied by Green, Shanks, Ferrabee and Deane. They were given six-and-a-half-minutes to perform, and were assessed according to the area cut, the quality of the cut, the excellence or otherwise of construction, and the ease of manoeuvre. The Green machine was the clear winner, mowing a greater area (1,600 square feet) more smoothly than any other. Although Ferrabee’s Budding cut the second biggest expanse (1,503 square feet) the quality of the work was judged the worst. In the overall table published in the paper, Green was top, Shanks second and Ferrabee third. The Deane machine was considered a general failure on every count.
James Ferrabee’s reaction to this humiliation can only be guessed at. That of Alexander Shanks was conveyed in a later issue of the Chronicle. He described the contest as ‘purely ridiculous’, and stoutly maintained that ‘our machine stands second to none’. These trials of mechanical strength were popular with the public, but less so with the manufacturers – unless they happened to win, in which case the triumph was noised abroad at maximum volume. Some years later the Chronicle published a report alleging dissatisfaction amon
g the members of the All-England Croquet Club with the quality of the playing surface provided by its Green mower, which was compared most unfavourably with a new-fangled American import, the Archimedean. The immediate response of Thomas Green and his son was to hasten from Leeds with their own 18-incher and proceed to cut the Club’s lawn ‘rapidly, cleanly and evenly’.
The manufacturers were jealous of their reputations, the Chronicle’s correspondents increasingly confident in their own judgements. Mr Conaty of Tadcaster was pleased with his Green, which was capable of cutting four to five acres of grass a day drawn by a ‘steady, active pony’. His Ferrabee 30-incher, though, ‘played strange pranks on uneven ground or crossing gravel paths, answering the two-fold purpose of paving spade and cultivator’. To Mr Radcliffe of Okford Fitzpaine, the lawn produced by the Reverend R. Price in partnership with his 10-inch Green verged on the miraculous, ‘being smooth enough for billiards’. Such a toy suited Mr Price, but for the man with wide open spaces to keep in trim – such as Thomas Challis, head gardener at Wilton House – the Shanks 42-incher reigned supreme. His seventeen-year-old machine, he informed the Chronicle in 1868, cut the fifty acres of lawn each fortnight. He had, he said, ‘discontinued the use of the scythe altogether’.
Although the occasional sentimentalist would pipe up on behalf of the scythe, there was overwhelming recognition that, in the context of cultivated grass, its day was done. The editor of the Gardener’s Chronicle, writing in 1870, observed:
Twenty years ago mowing machines were but coming into notice and but little believed in. Now they are all but universal, and the time-honoured scythe (to learn the use of which was such a severe trial to many a young gardener) is rapidly disappearing. What a revolution! What a saving of time! And how much more healthy are our lawns kept under the new than the old system.