Harry Ferguson: Inventor and Pioneer

Colin Fraser

• Publisher: Old Pond Books
• Year: 1998
• ISBN:
  9781910456859
• Topic: Tecnologia e ingegneria
• Subtopic: Agricoltura

This classic biography deftly interweaves Ferguson's life and work, giving complete details of the development of the TE20 and the Ferguson System. It uncovers Ferguson's business dealings and examines his aviation and car pioneering.

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

A Hard Childhood

Northern Ireland is blustery and rain swept, with grey houses squat as though designed to stay out of the windflow that has bent the trees and hedgerows permanently to its will. The country has none of the softness that green fields bring to Devon or Eire. Most of the inhabitants are descended from the Scots who migrated to Ireland during the Plantations encouraged by James I, and until the partition of Ireland they were a Protestant minority in a Catholic country. The character of the people has grown out of this background; the already tough nature of the Scots has been further tempered by the atmosphere of adversity in which they have lived, thus creating the Ulster grit and determination of which they are so proud. Certainly, the small country has produced an inordinately large number of famous men; several American presidents had their origins in Ulster, as did many well-known generals, another indication perhaps of the fighting spirit of its people.

The farmers of Northern Ireland have always had to work hard to make a good living, but James Ferguson was better off than most in the latter half of the last century, for he owned his own farm of just over 100 acres – a large holding for Ulster. He lived at a tiny village called Growell, not far from Dromore in County Down, about 16 miles south of Belfast. The Fergusons of Growell could trace their family in Ireland back to the Plantations from Scotland some two hundred years previously, and they were proud of their long standing in the area. It would be incorrect to assume that the family was well off, but neither did it live in the poverty some journalists have claimed. It is a fact, however, that only by unremitting toil were James Ferguson and his wife Mary able to provide reasonably well for their family of eleven children, three girls and eight boys. The fourth of these was born on November 4th, 1884, and though christened Henry George, he was always called Harry.

Lake House, Growell, the whitewashed farmhouse in which they lived, was not a happy home. James Ferguson, an austere, bearded, wrath-of-God figure, exercised the sternest discipline on his family. He was a Plymouth Brother and an extreme bigot. For the effect on the Scots who settled as a minority group in Ireland has been not only to breed in them an extra toughness, but also to inspire in many of them an implacable loathing for Roman Catholicism. If we consider the hatred and intolerance which today sparks off such deplorable riots and street fighting between the two religious factions, we get an idea of how deep the anti-Catholic feeling must have been when Ireland was one country and the Protestants feared that a Catholic government might be set up in Dublin to rule the island.

Fortunately, the bigotry on the father’s side of the Ferguson family was mitigated slightly by the sweet nature of Mary Ferguson and the progressive attitude of her father, Graham Bell. Bell’s first wife had died and he had two other daughters by his second. With their father’s encouragement, these two girls became the first women doctors in Ireland. Not surprisingly the Ferguson children found it a relief to get away from the oppressive atmosphere emanating from their father; visits to the Bells at Newry came to mean freedom and happiness, elements missing in the hell-fire-and-damnation upbringing meted out at home.

Harry was a spirited child and began to assert himself from an early age. When about four years old, he was playing in the yard when a farmhand wanted to come by with a wheelbarrow but found the tow-haired child in his way.

‘Move, Harry! You’re in the way,’ he said.

‘No,’ the child said, defiantly holding his ground, ‘you’re in Harry’s way.’

The child also showed a certain mechanical aptitude. There was a large chest of drawers in the house in which each brother and sister had a drawer for their own particular treasures, and each drawer had its own key. The treasures did not amount to much more than the odd marble, rag doll, broken penknife, piece of string or some pebble precious for its shape or colour, but the children were mystified by the regular unlocking of their drawers and disappearance and reappearance elsewhere of their possessions. It was easy to deduce the identity of the culprit; his cunning was less developed than his ingenuity and his own possessions remained miraculously unmolested. One day an elder sister caught Harry in the flagrant act of taking his own drawer right out, and then successively opening the locks of each drawer below and pulling it out so that he could rifle the contents.

The children were expected to help on the farm from a very early age and at that time there was little or no machinery to make the work easier. Hamerton summed up the agricultural scene when he wrote in his Sylvan Year: ‘Oh, the toil and endurance that are paid for the bread we eat!’

Tractive power on the land, in the years around the turn of the century, was provided almost exclusively by draft animals, and for these there were quite adequate ploughs, harrows, and other tillage equipment. There were also efficient horse-drawn binders and mowers on the market, and some of the barn milling machinery driven by oil engines was well designed and built. But most of this machinery was only within the reach of estate owners and large farmers.

The sole means of mechanised ploughing in the British Isles when Ferguson was a child were enormous steam-driven rigs. These consisted of traction engines, weighing in the region of 10 tons, with a large winch-drum mounted horizontally under the boiler. A pair of traction engines would work together, each standing at opposite ends of a field and winching a plough to and fro between them. The plough was of the balance type, that is to say it was two ploughs in one, like the reversible ploughs of today that have mouldboards which will turn the furrow-slices to the right or left. One set of mould-boards was at work as the plough was winched across the field in one direction, while the other set was cocked up in the air; at the end of the run, the second set was lowered into the ground for the return journey so that the furrows were always turned towards one side of the field. The traction engine drivers signalled to each other by blowing their steam whistles when the plough was at the end of its run and it was ready to be winched in the other direction. Steam enthusiasts still talk wistfully of the days when the steam whistles of the giant ploughing rigs shrilled out over the countryside; but had they been forced to man them as their daily task they might have been less enthusiastic, for there was arduous work involved in keeping the rigs going. They needed fresh supplies of coal and water about every three hours. Most serious, however, was that steam ploughing tackle – which first came into use in about 1850 and continued until well into this century – could only be afforded by wealthy landowners, and the smaller farmers needed far more economical means of mechanised tillage.

On the Continent, and still applying the principle of hauling the plough to and fro across the field, efforts were made to use electric power to drive the winches. It proved even less economical than steam, except on some sugar beet farms in Germany where the beet-processing factory’s steam-raising capacity could be used to generate electricity.

The first attempts to provide direct tractive power for British agriculture were made in the years around that of Ferguson’s birth. In 1881, J. Braby published a design for a small three-wheeled steam engine, and in 1882 a man called Grimmer produced something similar. Grimmer’s engine, small though it was by standards of the time, still weighed two-and-a-half tons. It was an awkward looking device with enormous front driving wheels and a single small rear wheel to steer it; the plough was mounted under its belly and it was said that it would work from two to eight inches deep in the land around Grimmer’s native Wisbech. But Braby’s and Grimmer’s efforts were doomed to failure; their devices were still too expensive, and those very few who could afford mechanised ploughing preferred the steam winching tackles made by such famous firms as Fowler, Foden, Foster, Burrel, and Wallace and Stevens.

All over Europe and North America, therefore, the draft animal was overwhelmingly the main source of farm power. Even the Canadian prairies were cultivated almost entirely by horsepower, though from about 1900 onwards, gangs of ploughs were sometimes hitched behind 10–12 ton traction engines so that as many as sixteen furrows were being ploughed at once. This was a rapid way of covering a large acreage, but at the same time it was harmful to the land: the weight of such heavy machinery compacted the soil and tended to produce a hard stratum, or pan, under the ploughed surface layers. The presence of such a pan prevents proper drainage and root formation.

Tillage with horses was painfully slow: a team of two could plough about half an acre a day, and even that was at the cost of exhausting work for the ploughman. Gray was right when he wrote of him homeward plodding his ‘weary way’. And added to the sheer effort of controlling the plough all day, and manhandling it around on the headlands, was the tedious job of harnessing and unharnessing the team, rubbing them down, and generally tending to their needs. But perhaps the biggest drawback of all to the use of horses was that in a year a pair consumed the produce of five acres, representing a serious reduction in the land available for cash crops, or for produce which could provide milk or meat rather than merely power. This encroachment by horses on the cash-producing acreage was particularly hard on the small farmer.

Harry Ferguson’s personal experiences with horses were also unhappy. Right through his life he remembered with bitterness a particular occasion when, as a child, he accompanied his father to market to buy some cattle. On the return journey, his father rode in the trap while Harry drove the cattle. For almost eight miles he walked, and then about half a mile from home, James Ferguson told his son that he could ride in the trap. In this way, the father had only to open the gate of a field and let the cows in before he himself went into the house, but Harry was left with the unharnessing, rubbing down, feeding and watering of the horse before his day was done.

Harry Ferguson deeply resented this sort of treatment, and as a strong-willed boy he had numerous points of difference with his father. The family edict that the Bible was the only permissible reading matter irked him particularly. Both he and his sisters smuggled books into the house and read them under the bedclothes in their quest for wider knowledge and understanding. Perhaps this clandestine reading was the root cause of the eye trouble that afflicted Ferguson all his life, but it certainly helped to make up for the very basic education he received at the two local schools. His attendance at the first of these schools was of short duration: the master caned another boy for what Ferguson considered unjust reasons. He told the master so and had a bitter row with him.

At fourteen he left school and returned to work on his father’s farm where he came to hate the toil of farm work. His small stature – the smallest in the family – and light build, were quite unsuited for heavy manual work. A sister remarked that ‘he always gave the impression that he considered himself more put upon than the others’ when there was farm work to be done.

He also became rebellious over religion in the home. When he was about sixteen he had violent arguments with visiting lay preachers who were staying in the house, for he refused to accept blindly, as was expected of him, the edicts of the family’s particular creed. This urge to enquire and discover the truth had, in fact, been with him from a much earlier age and is illustrated by an anecdote that his brother Joe recounted many years later: when Joe was about fourteen and Harry about ten, they were often told to bring the cattle home from the fields. In the dusk of one particular autumn evening, and with mist forming over the low-lying land, they were driving the cattle towards a small bridge over a stream when suddenly a dense cloud of fog swirled wraithlike out from under it. With their background of what amounted virtually to religious and spiritual hysteria, the boys were convinced they were seeing a ghost. Their fright was increased when the cattle stood for a moment as if petrified and then bolted in the other direction. Joe grabbed his smaller brother by the arm and tried to drag him away, but though he was white with fear, Harry insisted on moving forward to investigate, telling Joe to come with him. The elder brother was scared almost witless and ran off. Only then did Harry give in to his fear and leave also.

CHAPTER TWO

Apprenticeship

It was not surprising that the Ferguson boys were anxious to find a life off the farm. The first-born, Joe, had himself apprenticed in 1895 to Combe-Barbour, the Belfast linen spinners, as a maintenance mechanic. He was particularly interested in cars and motorcycles, but the linen companies offered a much safer career than did the embryonic automotive trade at that time. However, it gradually became evident with each passing year that the automotive trade did have a future, and finally in the autumn of 1901, with some minimal financial help from his father, Joe set up a car and cycle repair shop in a tiny premises in Shankhill Road, Belfast.

His brother Harry was still an unwilling farm labourer, and also an unwilling member of the family circle at Lake House. For his rebelliousness over religion was now crystallising into agnosticism. In the last years of his life he wrote a letter describing that process.

‘I was brought up to believe, and did believe into my teens, that there was a Hell of torment into which countless millions of people would go and suffer the most awful agonies for all eternity. As I got older, I began to have doubts about this. It seemed a dreadful thought. These millions going to Hell could not have existed if God had not created them. When He created them, being God, He must have known that they would go to Hell. So why create them?

‘These were the kind of thoughts that passed through my mind. My conscience forced me to believe that I should investigate all religions possible, in the light of all the discoveries that man had made in science and in other ways. I did so, and I think I could sum up my final conclusions by saying that I do not believe that anybody will be rewarded or punished in whatever the next world may be, for anything they say they believe.

‘People cannot help their beliefs. We are forced to what we believe by evidence. If we are honest we say what we believe. I believed that all these millions could have escaped Hell by saying they believed in the same beliefs as I did. No, what I now believe is that if we are rewarded or punished in another world, it will not be for what we believe but for how we have acted.’

Such reasoning, combined with his loathing for farm work, set him at total variance with his father, and he therefore planned his escape. To emigrate to Canada or America, as did so many other Irishmen, seemed the best solution, and in the autumn of 1902 he decided to go.

His plans were made and the ticket virtually bought, when one Sunday afternoon his brother Joe walked into the kitchen of Lake House. He found his brother standing moodily in front of the open fire, obviously reflecting on his forthcoming departure. But Joe had come to forestall that departure, for he needed someone to drive cars for him occasionally, and he therefore offered Harry an apprenticeship with him at the Shankhill Road workshop. The younger brother, who was also passionately interested in cars and engines, at once dropped any idea of going to Canada. That very evening they set out from Lake House in the gathering dusk and walked over the fields to the nearby village of Hillsborough, from where they took the train to Belfast.

How often it seems that a man’s life is moving down a certain path and then a chance occurrence deflects it, leading to great achievements and to benefits for humanity. That hasty decision not to go to Canada was such a point for Ferguson. In Belfast he set about learning his trade of mechanic with boundless enthusiasm, and he discovered a particular aptitude for tuning engines. His first success was on a gas engine that was used for driving the lathes and other machinery in the workshop. The wheezy engine produced little power and overheated so severely that Joe Ferguson set his brother the task of carrying buckets of water to cool it. Thoroughly irritated by the heat, the steam, and the smell, and the poor performance of the engine, the apprentice waited until there was no one else in the workshop and then checked the timing of the exhaust valve. He found that it was opening too late, and when Joe Ferguson and one of the mechanics returned, he showed them his discovery with all the delight of a younger brother outshining the elder for the first time. ‘I still remember how “gunked” you looked’, he wrote to Joe Ferguson over fifty years later.

This incident, more than anything, led him to concentrate on engine tuning, and with uncompromising perfectionism he built up his talent for making engines go better than ever before. Even today a talent for engine tuning is much valued, but in the first years of the century when internal combustion engines were still cantankerous, really gifted engine tuners were about as rare as white flies. Not surprisingly, therefore, J. B. Ferguson and Co.’s business soon began to develop a ...