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

Plough

Hi folks,

there is a plough going through on eBay it looks like an early tapered version to view it click here 160901685368 or just go to eBay and copy and paste the number, It is currently just £22 with 9hours 16minutes and 29seconds to go.

that's all for now

Cameron

Pictures

Hi Howardees

I have received more pictures, this time they are from Christopher (Dad) and Aingeal (Sister), they are mostly made up of our plough, we haven't put the jockey wheels on yet so I apologise for the incompletion's of it.

There are also some pictures of Aingeal and Christopher sitting my our newly polished fire, Interesting fact about the fireplace is that the bricks came from Birmingham from a village that Inspired J.R.R.Tolkien in his writings of the Hobbit and eventually The Lord Of The Rings, I know its not related to this blog in particular but It is a nice farmhouse scene.

Email from Ron, Pictures

Hi Howardees,

I have had a new email from Ron, basicly he is saying here are some pictures he goes on to explain ech picture. Here is the email.

Hi Cameron, I was rummaging thru some of my Howard info and was not sure if you had these pics. If you have no problem, if not they may be of interest.

The Howard colonist pic is from the book "Chandeliers and Billy Tea" and was the one I ID'd my plough from originally and an early Howard 1879 add - this I got from the Trove site. There are a number of similar adds in early Aust papers.

The other pic is of my two furrow Howard plough that I got at auction recently. This is a remarkable find and is possibly one of the rarest ploughs in existence in Australia at this time. It is obviously a later model than mine but still has the exact same frame and wheels and is still made of wrought iron. I will use bits from this to fully restore my other plough with 100% original parts and make up another 3 wheeled plough with 90% parts - this one I will put up for sale eventually.

I think I told you I had stripped my plough and have had it sand blasted and primed. Re-assembly will proceed as time permits.

Cheers

Ron

Here are the pictures.

That is all for now.

BYE

Cameron

The latest...

Well its been difficult but I have managed to find more information for us all to read,

Manufacturer Details

Howards of Bedford

The firm known from 1850 as James & Frederick Howard, later J. & F. Howard Ltd, owes its origins to a business established in Bedford in about 1813 by John Howard.

John retired in 1850, when his sons, James (1821-1889)and Frederick (1827-1915) took on the business and expanded it greatly. The Britannia Iron Works, which they opened in 1859, became one of the largest agricultural engineering works in the country.

The firm was known especially for its ploughs. James had developed a new design of iron plough in 1840, and by 1851 they were already offering about ten types of plough. Howards’ Champion ploughs became one of the leading brands of plough in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

As well as ploughs, Howards produced a wide range of implements, including rollers, harrows, cultivators, horse hoes, horse gear, barn machinery, carts and steam engines. In 1853 they started manufacturing steam cultivating equipment to the designs of William Smith of Woolston. This system of steam ploughing, often known as the roundabout system, used one portable steam engine drawing a continuous cable round the field to take the plough across. The Howards added their own patented improvements to Smith’s system, but ultimately this type of steam ploughing did not compete successfully with the Fowler system.

In the later years of the nineteenth century, horse rakes, baling presses and portable light railway equipment were added to the firm’s product range.

After the First World War, Howards became a constituent company of Agricultural & General Engineers Ltd, and closed in 1932 when that larger organization collapsed.

The above text came from the Reading university website, I am going to contact them and see if they can give me any more information. if you want the exact page CLICK HERE.

and as ever if you have any information please contact ME by clicking there. I would also appreciate if you donated some money via paypal so we can continue to further our research, Thankyou. 

We finished painting the plough...

Hello Howards Messieurs FANS,

We have finished painting the plough today, sadly it is only Black as we dont yet know the official colours of the Howards Messieurs ploughs but here is the end result.

For those of you not blessed with the art of X-RAY vision we have even painted the underside of the plough and seen that the normally adjustable toe of the blade is completely seized, we did however expect this.

sadly its not the type of seized that means you call you your mate "Put the kettle on" and then pour it over as it might not even shift with an Oxyacetylene Torch. 

I still haven't managed to get to the Bedford Archives but I am still planning the little excursion to once and for all find out the colours that the plough would have been.

"Oh before I forget our friend Ron has emailed me, he has finished taking his plough apart and sadly he found no paint flecks under any bolts. Its not a total loss though as we can tell from this that the ploughs would have been painted AFTER assembly rather that before"

As a footnote to this I am wondering if the colours for the Howards Messieurs ploughs were indeed as I have herd rumors of, a deep blue and red. I am thinking this as I know as a fact that Howards Messieurs took over Ransoms (or vice versa).