Land of hope and glory for early tractors
Industrialised farming has changed England’s green and pleasant land irrevocably. David Behrens looks back to where it all began.
TRACTORS WERE starting to appear in rural Britain at around the same time as cameras, and while it was questionable which were the greater novelty, there was no doubt that photographers were drawn to this new way of working the land. As these rare pictures attest, they have been favourite subjects ever since.
The first lightweight petrol tractors, before the turn of the last century, were crude affairs, and it was not until the First World War, with the arrival of machines from America, that their effect on the everyday lives of agricultural workers began to be felt.
Even so, in an age before industrial farming, the early models were too unreliable, inefficient and, above all, expensive for all but the most ambitious landowners – and it was not until the 1930s that they were able to reap the benefits of design improvements and cheaper processes.
By the build-up to the Second World War, the first production tractors could be seen on farms. These used the three-point hitch system of attaching ploughs and other implements that had been introduced by the Irish-born but British-based mechanic and inventor, Harry Ferguson.
His legacy was not limited to agriculture – he was the first person in Ireland to build and fly his own aeroplane, and the first to develop a four-wheel drive Formula One car. But it is his hydraulic tractor system, still in use today, that stands as his most enduring innovation.
Mechanised agricultural machinery was at one time as important to Yorkshire’s urban economy as to its farming landscape. From 1955 until 1982, the American company International Harvester manufactured tractors at Five Lane Ends, Bradford, on a site where a branch of Morrisons now stands. In its first 10 years alone, some 100,000 machines were built there.