My first post and its a New Year Supprise

We unearthed a picture in the post Christmas tidy up and thought you might like it

Making Ploughshares At The Britannia Ironworks, Bedford

Hello everyone, Cameron's Dad here, I've had this genuine print for some years now, it was purchased appropriately from a gallery in Bedford Town, not that far from the iron works. The print is dated 1874 and I would say represents the very peak of horse plough production at the works. The scene is a very industrious one and is illustrative of prodigious output necessary to supply the Empires ploughing needs. These production sheds survived in the most part right up until the early 1980,s when they were demolished, a gated housing development now occupies the site, with just the wonderful gatehouse arch surviving. It is an interesting exercise to overlay modern Health and Safety requirement upon this scene, especially when one considers that the earliest of the child labour laws were only just being introduced at this time. Social authors such as Charles Dickens made frequent references to such working conditions and were part of a growing movement to improve such working conditions

New Year update

Well folks its another year on and we are hitting hard times at the moment so I have added a "Paypal Donate" button so we can do more research  sadly there is less and less we can do free from our Hampshire base of operations so I ask you to donate whatever you can so we can do things like check online archives which sadly costs money to do.
We will be trying to find as much out in the new year as possible but we are coming up against a wall at the moment, Our plans for this year are the Great Dorset Steam Fair in the summer and maybe the Bedfordshire Steam And Country Fair if we are lucky, there is an engine that was made by Howards that usually turns up apparently so I hope to be taking some photos of that, I should be free around then as the course I am currently on finishes this July so I will try my best to attend.
Anyway I am now back online from Christmas and hope to be keeping you up to date on the restoration of the plough so look forward to some pictures and maybe some feeds.

All that remains for me to say is Happy new year and if you have any photos or information send it in to my Email (we will include your name if unless you say otherwise)

Cameron and Christopher