by Tom Fort
I became aware that my time was up, though my ancient host’s civility would not have permitted him to say as much. He had a column to write for Monday, preparations to make for Albania next week, maybe Sudan in July. As I drove away, I recalled him describing how he had been sent by his newspaper to a school where the headmistress had wept as she described to him the poverty that had forced some of her girls to prostitute themselves. That had been in Lancashire, in 1937. I wondered how much grass he had cut in his time, how big the mountain of cuttings would be.
The Mowermen
The lawn is a living fossil in a modern human zoo
WALTER KENDRICK
The two brothers, John C. Dennis and Herbert R. Dennis, began with bicycles in the 1890s, soon added motors to them, then expanded into the van and bus market. In 1924 Dennis Brothers of Guildford introduced their Motor Lawn Mower thus:
The present is the Mechanical Age. Every labour-saving device is not only an individual economy, it makes for general efficiency. The self-propelled vehicle sweetens travel and cheapens transport; the self-propelled lawn mower makes grass-cutting a pleasure …
The words are suffused with confidence, and the brothers had made a machine to justify that confidence – not an adaptation of an existing mower with an engine bolted on, they hastened to add, but ‘newly designed, from start to finish, as a complete unit’.
There were two models: the 24-inch, which cost £75, and the 30-inch, at £90. There was also a booklet, on whose cover was reproduced a masterpiece of commercial artwork, which is like a glimpse through a peephole into a forgotten world. It shows the ground-floor frontage of some broad-windowed country mansion. Between the windows are coils of luxuriant wisteria, beneath them beds bright with pink and white flowers. At the centre, the pillared entrance frames a trio of elegant upper-class ladies, in hats and slender skirts, as fragrant as the roses scenting the late morning air. Along the front of the house runs a wide gravel path, and beyond it a lawn enclosing a bed bursting with colour, with another path, running at right angles, and more lawn on its far side. The paths are as flawless as the complexion of the ladies, the edges as straight as rulers, and the grass is cut in stripes of complementary precision. In the foreground is the machine, a thoroughbred at rest, in burnished silver and glowing green, with the name Dennis inscribed in gold across the front of the box, the proud capitals framed in modest curlicues. Behind it, legs astride, hands gripping steel handles, is the mower man, in apron and sturdy shoes, wearing a tie but with shirtsleeves rolled up; not for a moment to be taken as having a blood tie with those scented society females, an unmistakeable member of the labouring class, but with a status defined by his relationship with the machine. His lordship may have signed the cheque, but this is the man’s mower, its work his work.
The scene is powerfully pervaded with the flavour of its time. It is the England of late Galsworthy and early Agatha Christie, of eccentric lords and feckless sons, of coming out and the season, of bright young things and tennis parties; of the Drones Club and dressing for dinner, of ancient residences standing in ancient parks, built by the first Earl and maintained by retainers faithful to the fifteenth; an England still organized according to the principle of accident of birth, in which the right of those of the upper tier to enjoy themselves while everyone did the work remained pretty much unchallenged, except by a handful of socialists and other assorted troublemakers. It is an England which has been expunged. The lawns and borders and shrubberies are probably covered in ‘executive-style homes’ ; if they still exist, it will be because the mansion is now a hotel and conference centre. The descendants of the fragrant ladies will be in banking or stockbroking, those of the gardener in information technology, and the size of their mortgages will not be so very different. There will be one survivor. It is a fair bet that, somewhere, in the hands of some enthusiast for the Mechanical Age whose coming Dennis Brothers celebrated, that mower is still cutting stripes of light and shade.
The commercial drawback of the Dennis mower, Tony Hopwood explained to me, was that it was simply too well made. It may have been the Mechanical Age, but it was also the age of innocence, and the notion of planned obsolescence had not been invented. The design of the Dennis was, in its essentials, flawless, and it remained unchanged for the best part of fifty years. The quality of the materials and the construction meant that people who bought a Dennis did not need to come back to buy another. They merely had to send it periodically to the workshops at Guildford, from which – after attention at the hands of devoted craftsmen – it was dispatched literally as good as new. Over the years, the proportion of potential customers who became actual customers swelled, until there was hardly anyone left who might want a Dennis and did not have one; at which point the curtain came down on Dennis Brothers of Guildford.
Tony Hopwood is not a lawn man, which – in view of the fondness of badgers in his part of Worcestershire for pursuing worms through his turf – is as well. He can tell you nothing about the pedigree of his grass, has nothing against daisies and moss, and is wholly indulgent towards the badgers. The delight he takes in mowing his acre or so of lawn springs partly from the common desire to keep things neat, but, much more potently, from the opportunity it gives him to cement and celebrate, on a weekly basis, his bond with his machine. He is a mower man, a Dennis man.
He is also rather brainy. He has one of those angular, mobile faces behind which, you know at once, a good mind is at work. And he has clever hands to go with it. He trained as an engineer and ran an engineering business, but – after a late career change – now refers to himself as a geophysicist. His speciality is the sun, and the influence of its behaviour on climate. He was soon expounding to me his views on global warming, assuring me that its primary cause was not the excesses of the human race, but the activities of the great fiery ball in the sky; and that these would soon diminish in intensity, resulting within a few years in long, bitter winters with the snow lying deep.
From his office came the chugging of a battery of devices monitoring assorted solar phenomena, which were churning forth charts decorated with spiky readings of the comings and goings of ultraviolet and cosmic rays, heavy particles, electric fields and the like. Elsewhere, surfaces were littered with a host of ancient radios and their parts, while shelves sagged under the weight of scientific treatises and obscure histories inspired by the development of telecommunication. Outside, in the middle of the lawn, was a contraption of strange aspect, which Mr Hopwood said he had invented to measure flare activity around the sun. He tried to describe how it worked, but I could not begin to follow him; and, anyway, I was anxious to make the acquaintance of his Dennis.
It and his other mowers were berthed in a brick and beamed barn built by Mr Hopwood on the other side of the chocolate box cottage. First, he pulled out a Ransomes Mark Seven of 1933; ‘an engineering cock-up’, he called it fondly, on account of the misplacing of the gravitational centre which meant that, left to its own devices, it tipped over backwards. There were other machines in the shadows, an Atco mower of the thirties, an oil-powered Crossley mill engine salvaged in Rochdale, a Myford lathe beneath the window.
But my eyes were for the Dennis. Mr Hopwood smiled with an almost paternal pride as he produced the child which had been fourteen years old when he was born. It bore the number 5155, and had been rolled out of those Guildford workshops in 1926 – the year of the General Strike, the deaths of Houdini and Rudolph Valentino, of England’s first Ashes win over Australia since before the Great War. Unlike the Dennis my father had bought twenty-odd years later, this had the flat-topped petrol tank (I preferred the curved, Mr Hopwood the flat – we Dennis men are like that). Otherwise every feature was familiar to me, from the gleaming levers standing vertical at the back to the pregnant swell of the grass box at the front. And the scraping and grinding of the back roller as Mr Hopwood dragged it out into delicious early May sunshine were the same, as evocative as a tune once tinkled out on the nursery piano and heard a
gain.
Mr Hopwood itemized its attributes – the 500 cc Blackburn engine, the cone clutches, the aluminium gear case, the hardened steel faces and soft centres of the cutters. He had but one cavil about the design, the awkward protrusion of the magneto. But what was that, weighed in the balance against the magnificent efficiency of the engine, and the brilliant concept of supporting the grass box on arms acting as pivots, which enabled the contents to be tipped out with an easy swing, rather than laboriously lifted? Mr Hopwood shook his brainy head in admiration. The Ransomes, the Atco, the Webb – nothing could compete with the glory of the Dennis. ‘It is’, he said, glowing with affection, ‘the king of mowers.’
But would it perform? Even the sturdiest septuagenarian can be fallible, and he was clearly nervous. The first two turns of the starter handle produced nothing more animated than a raspy cough. But at the third, the life came flooding in. There was a deep, deep roar. Half a ton of metal throbbed and pulsed. Mr Hopwood smiled in relief and pleasure, hopped on to the curved metal seat at the back, rumbled across the gravel to the grass, thrust forward the inner of the two levers to join the outer. Grass speckled with daisies leaped forward, like a wave on to the beach.
Would I like a go, he shouted above the clamour? Of course – I must, it was what I had come for, a sentimental journey into the past. I knew there could be no reliving the experience. For that, I would have needed our lawn, free from flare-tracking machine, various decrepit apple trees and old stumps and the trenches left by the badgers, and our Dennis, seatless, in its slightly deeper green livery, and rounded petrol tank. But there was enough in my two circuits of Mr Hopwood’s lawn to taste the flavour of long ago: in the crunch as I engaged the cutters, the throaty crescendo as I depressed the accelerator, the whirr of the cutters, the spray of the grass; enough to make me meet Mr Hopwood’s smile of delight with a grin appropriate to that spotty, gangly, clumsy, gloomily virginal schoolboy of long ago.
He had found the Dennis on a scrap yard in Tring thirty years before. It had previously been the property of the Thames Valley Constabulary, and he had paid £15 for it. To bring it back to working order began as an exercise in exploring the possible, and became a labour of love. He spent countless hours with it in his workshop, repairing and replacing the defective parts. And when he had finished resurrecting this masterwork of engineering, he went out and found another victim of abuse and neglect – Denise, he called the invalid sister, with a suitably embarrassed laugh – and started all over again.
Tony Hopwood was in the grip of a self-confessed passion for the workings of what he persisted in referring to as the ‘internal confusion engine’. To him, unlike me, these were not mysteries, but aspects of a beautiful harmony, which – in the hands of those nameless craftsmen of Guildford – had reached its highest peak of achievement. He had nothing but contempt for the trumpeted technological advances of our own day; ‘Mickey Mouse stuff’, he called it. He was sure that the brother and sister – when she was back on her rollers – would outlive him. A Dennis, unlike its owner, had been built to last.
It is somehow characteristic of our age that, even as we have severed ourselves from our traditions of manufacturing excellence, so should we have developed a taste for wallowing in nostalgic tenderness for its artefacts. In the not so dim past, the notion of a rusting assemblage of old metal occupying useful space in the garage having an intrinsic worth, even beauty, would have been considered absurd. Brainwashed into embracing the new, people threw out the old, whether or not it still functioned usefully. Then they found that the new – however beguiling its image and ingenious its design – fell to bits before it had performed a tiny fraction of the service of its predecessor. And they became sentimental about the passing of an age in which machines had been made, not by other machines programmed by computers, but by craftsmen, to last.
In time that pining for times past came to embrace the humble lawn mower. Once, old mowers could be found – like Tony Hopwood’s Dennis – in junk yards, on the scrap heap, in skips, at dumps. Not even the least pretentious of country auctions would take them, though you might fall over one thrust into an unconsidered corner at the local jumble sale. But gradually – as the large-scale manufacture of top-class cylinder mowers was becoming another part of history – the nostalgic passion asserted itself.
A man – always a man – who had, over the years, almost unwittingly, accumulated a few old mowers in his shed and had fallen into the habit of tinkering with them at odd moments, would find himself one day at the sale in the village hall; where, as he crouched beside some rust-ravaged Atco or battered Ransomes, he would become aware of someone else regarding the machine with the same air of informed admiration. And they would get talking, swapping tales of a Shanks salvaged from the tip, a JP Simplex found in the mother-in-law’s shed, a Webb Witch snapped up at the cricket club’s annual sale. And one would ask the other if he had ever bumped into so-and-so, who had a Dennis in perfect order and maybe a Samuelson, or an early Qualcast; and if he hadn’t, he soon would. Thus a brotherhood was born.
There was an innocence about this species of collecting. The obscurity and cheapness of the desired object was part of it. To the pleasure of the hunt and the kill was added that of discovering the affinity with other hunters. Suddenly an association was born, of kindred spirits who could never have come together in the normal course of work or family life. Thus, ten years or so ago, the Old Lawnmower Club was born.
In collecting, the age of innocence lasts as long as supply comfortably outstrips demand. There comes a time when the awareness of a hitherto unsuspected appetite permeates the second-hand market. The collectors find that the old sources are becoming barren, that the channels of supply have come under the control of professionals alert to the fact that desire to possess translates into willingness to pay. Innocence and the profit motive cannot co-exist; and the fragile flower of innocence is the one trampled on. It happened ten or fifteen years ago with old fishing tackle. Within a short period, the admiration of the few for the elegance and durability of equipment made to assist in the catching of fish spawned a hot, selfish lust for ownership. Amateur collectors turned into professional dealers, laymen were elbowed out, tackle buffs who had once pooled knowledge now kept secrets; and soon the London sale houses were holding auctions of fishing tackle at which men with sharp faces arranged matters among themselves while the rest of us goggled and gasped at the prices.
The Old Lawnmower Club began as a loose association of like-minded enthusiasts, but has become much more than that. It has around 250 members (of whom one is female). It organizes rallies and shows and outings, negotiates with museums, takes itself quite seriously. Its energetic and assiduous secretary, Keith Wotton, produces a neat and lively magazine called Grassbox, which dispenses information and pronounces on the issues of the day. Of these, none is more pressing, nor more indicative of the shedding of innocence, than that dealt with in a recent editorial under the headline: ‘Where have all the mowers gone?’
The obvious answer is that most of the mowers of yesteryear were scrapped when their owners had no more use for them. Some, that shrinking residue of such burning interest to the members of the Old Lawnmower Club, are still lying around waiting to be snapped up. A small number are in museums. The rest are in the hands of collectors, most of whom are like Mr Hopwood, with a handful of cherished models. But there are a few who, because their appetites were keener and their circumstances more congenial, have accumulated on a grander scale. Among these, two stand out: two cousins, Andrew Hall and Michael Duck, who – having independently and coincidentally been bitten by the bug – separately and later together have pursued the passion with an unrivalled energy, persistence and cunning. The fruits, known as the Hall Duck Collection, are contained in a warehouse in Somerset: somewhere between 700 and 800 offshoots in the vast family tree which has the original Ferrabee Budding at its head.
I assume that Andrew Hall is the senior in the partnership. He is a man o
f Sheffield, and is concerned that he should not be taken for anything else, given to lingering over his vowels in a manner designed to repel any soft southern notion of cultural oneness. Behind his gleaming forehead and its spectacles is a repository of knowledge about lawn mowers vaster still than the hoard which bears his name. He is a man who glories in his learning. A favourite prelude to an Andrew Hall pronouncement is: ‘What you’ve got to understand is …’, after which he will exhume some detail from the history of the side-wheel mower manufactured in a corner of Milwaukee around 1888 or so, and present it to you with the air of someone who has just found a missing piece of a jigsaw down the back of the sofa. Mr Hall will not permit himself to be bested in the knowledge stakes. Whatever anyone else knows about mowers, he knows. Whatever they do not know, he does. Whichever mower they may have, he will have one, too; usually better, earlier, rarer, more authentic.
There is a story to each heap of old metalwork in the Hall Duck Collection, and he loves to tell them. Many begin as tales of good fortune: how some ancient treasure was glimpsed among nettles in a backyard, or half-buried in a skip. But they swiftly metamorphose into accounts of the hunter’s perspicacity, historical awareness, ingenuity and determination. The conclusion is invariable – the trophy is added to the Hall Duck Collection. I never heard of the one which got away.
The first time I met Mr Hall he was preparing for a trip to America, to organize the shipment back to the Collection of an assortment of prizes which he had managed to pluck from beneath the noses of American collectors. The next time I saw him, he told me about one of these coups. It concerned a tiny Thomas one-wheel edge-trimmer – 1883, in original order, naturally – which he had spotted tucked away in an antiques shop in Massachusetts. The climax to the narrative came – not with the amazement of his companion when shown the discovery, boundless though that was – but in the settling of the account with the female assistant. The machine cost thirty-seven dollars, and was exempt from some tax or other because it was for export. The assistant asked how she should know it was going abroad. ‘Do you know what I said?’ Mr Hall said to me, with the air of a conjuror.