Vertical integration
Located, as it is, in North Yorkshire, Giggleswick was the ancestral seat of the Spagforth family; a dynasty that controlled virtually all of the real estate, including three pubs, the famed limestone cliffs (annexed from the neighbouring Bolloxonians in
It was the Spagforth family’s largesse that brought electric lighting to Giggleswick in 1879, just one year after London, but with this came a formidable maintenance program, as the early lights were brittle and extremely high in maintenance requirements. Because the lights were mounted high above the street, servicing was a time-consuming affair, involving workers scaling ladders which had to be manually moved between locations, often on unstable surfaces. These workers came to be known as Humpty Dumpties, due to the frequency of painful contact with the street below. It fell to Spagforth design engineer Barney Grumble to design a vehicle that could rapidly streamline the lighting maintenance program. His creation, the Spagforth ABRV (Accelerated Bulb Replacement Vehicle) was designed to work in teams to allow the processes to take place without actually stopping the machine, which could operate quite satisfactorily at 0.3 mph, or 1/10th of walking pace. The forward operator of the team would open the glass panel, remove the spent bulb or arc lamp, and move on to the next without loss of pace. The second operator would similarly install the replacement, close the glass panel, and move on in regulation.
At the specially-constructed Spagforth test strip, the process worked quite satisfactorily, however on the actual streets, littered with hazards such as horse manure, street furniture and drains, much less so. Eventually, the ABRV project was abandoned, and the two prototypes sent to the western New South Wales township of Tamworth, which was the first location in Australia to fully illuminate its streets in 1888.
Despite exhaustive tests, no orders were placed, and the two Spagforths were thereafter consigned to the Gulargambone
Municipal Museum. Many years later, one of the Spagforths was recommissioned and demonstrated at the Calder Raceway in Melbourne during the celebrations to mark Edgar Jessop’s visit to Australia to preside as starter/judge at the 1977 Australian Speedway Championships. Fittingly, the ABRV was demonstrated at Calder by Edgar Jessop’s great nephew, Wilfred Jessop.