Pulled by camels, powered by grandfathers and the bane of Peter Capaldi: The curious history of the lawnmower

The former Poet Laureate Sir Andrew Motion pictured his late father ‘in threadbare cords, catching the sunny intervals/between showers, trundling the Ransome out/from its corner in the woodshed’. To many of us, the lawnmower will conjure similarly fond memories of male relatives now long past. My grandfather patrolled the family lawns with a sergeant-majorish fervour, giving the grass a short back-and-sides once a week, whether it needed it or not.

I can see him now, sleeves rolled up, face reddened by sun and effort, pushing his beloved Hayter Hayterette (advertised with the slogan ‘Sooner or later you will buy a Hayter’). Purchased a decade before I was born, his mower was handled with the solicitude a nursing mother shows her baby, cleaned and towelled and put away dry on a bed of sacking. Grandfather would tell me that the blades on his rotary mower ‘revolved 3,000 times per minute and cut the grass at 200mph’. This was the sort of technical data that had captivated generations.

It had taken more than a century for lawn mowers to reach the proficiency of the Hayterette. The first was built by Edwin Beard Budding in 1830. Born in Gloucestershire, Budding was a restlessly inventive fellow, who patented everything from an adjustable spanner to a pepperbox pistol. When working as an engineer at Brinscombe Mill in Stroud, Gloucestershire, he spotted bladed cylinders trimming the stiff woollen cloth used for guardsmen’s uniforms. If the cylinder could cut material, he reasoned, then couldn’t it also cut grass? Some kind of machine was clearly needed. The maintenance of lawns and sports fields was laborious. Grass was either cropped by sheep (as Lord’s Cricket Ground was until the 1840s) or cut by skilled workers armed with scythes. At Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, no fewer than 50 labourers were once devoted to the task — the cost of lawn upkeep was prodigious. As a result, ownership of a pristine bowling green was to the Regency gallant a status symbol on a par with a Rolls-Royce.

Budding teamed up with John Ferrabee of the Phoenix Ironworks in Thrupp, Oxfordshire, to produce his lawnmower. He experimented with his new device at night, more because he worried people would laugh at him than because he feared them stealing his idea. Launching the new 19in, hand-powered lawnmower, Budding proclaimed hopefully: ‘Gentlemen will find in using my machine an amusing and healthy exercise.’ Production was soon licensed to companies around England and Wales. The most successful of them was a firm of agricultural engineers in Suffolk — the name of Ransome would go on to become synonymous with lawnmowers.

Nonetheless, the Budding lawn mower was a limited success, with only 1,000 sold by the time its inventor died in 1846. The simple fact was that, for those with large expanses of grass — whether estate or sports field — the Budding mower was simply not big enough. This issue was eventually resolved by Alexander Shanks of Arbroath, Angus, who — taking advantage of the fact that Budding’s English patent did not apply in Scotland — produced a 27in mower. The machine was pulled by a horse, generally shod in leather ‘lawn shoes’ to prevent its hoofs making imprints on the ground (experts contended that the best beast to pull a mower was actually a camel, the wide soft hooves of which made no impression on the turf. Camel-powered mowers were used in Regent’s Park, which had a convenient zoo). One of the Shanks mowers was sold to the head gardener at Clumber House in Nottinghamshire, who reported that: ‘It is drawn by one horse requiring a boy to lead it and a man to guide the machine. The saving in labour amounts to seventy per cent.’

The lapsing of Budding’s patents in the 1850s opened the way to a burgeoning lawnmower industry, with firms such as Thomas Green and Son (which perfected a small, quiet and powerful machine designed to trim the grass between headstones) and Follows & Bate (whose light and popular side-wheel model was named — somewhat alarmingly — the Climax) joining Budding, Shanks and Ransome (which had begun to make its own designs including the Ideal, which, an advertisement in Country Life in 1908 modestly asserted, ‘has been used on numerous golf courses with great success’).

Competition soon led to modification and development. Although the hefty and cumbersome steam-powered lawnmower didn’t catch fire (the engineer who manufactured it, John Sumner, founded the company that became British Leyland) and the bicycle mower failed to get out of first gear, Ransome enjoyed more success in 1902 when it launched the world’s first commercial petrol mowers. The company would make Britain’s first electric machines in 1926, thus opening the way to a million cries of ‘your blooming cable has flattened my tulips!’

At about the same time that Qualcast, ATCO and Suffolk Ironworks came on the scene, the first petrol-powered sit-on mower— the Easimow — appeared in 1953. Makers E. F. Ranger (Ferring) hired actress Diana Dors to advertise the machine, although Britain’s ‘blonde bombshell’ looked as out of place perched on it as a pony on a space hopper. By the 1930s, the lawnmower was an established cornerstone of British life. H. C. Webb & Co even launched a child’s model with the slogan ‘just like Dad’s…’ and Prince Edward was photographed pushing one across the grass at Buckingham Palace in celebration of his second birthday.

It might surprise you to know that Philip Larkin was something of a lawnmower fan, although it was a dark episode with his trusted Qualcast Commodore in 1979 that inspired his celebrated poem The Mower, when, cutting his lawn in June that year, he ran over and killed a hedgehog. The incident provoked a sombre meditation on loss and death concluding with the memorable lines: ‘We should be kind/While there is still time.’ One of Larkin’s lawnmowers is now owned by the University of Hull.

Those seeking a wider selection of notable mowers will find them in the British Lawn Mower Museum in Southport, Merseyside, which also sports models formerly belonging to The King, Eric Morecambe and Britain’s last hangman, Albert Pierrepoint. Lawn mowers also feature in the poetry of Louis MacNeice (‘The lawn-mower sings moving up and down./Spirting its little fountain of green). As did Sir Andrew, the Irish poet saw the mower as an emblem of a calm, happy and orderly life.

Not everyone feels the same way, however. To some, the lawnmower is symbolic of the straitjacket of domestic existence. ‘The Ransome mower’s locked into the shed/‘I have a splitting headache from the sun,’ opined Sir John Betjeman in his poem Sunday Afternoon Service in St Enodoc, Cornwall. Many will empathise with the feeling that the mower is a tyrant whose incessant summer demands can only be dodged by faking illness. The actor Peter Capaldi is another non-believer: ‘When I hear mowers starting, it makes me want to kill myself. It’s the sound of death approaching.’

It is true that a lawnmower lacks a certain pizzazz. Whereas models such as the Suffolk Colt and the ATCO are icons of British design, I cannot imagine James Bond pushing one, even if Q had fitted it with a missile launcher. The lawnmower was the stuff of mirth rather than romance, the central element in episodes of classic British sitcoms Terry and June, Only Fools and Horses, Last of the Summer Wine, One Foot in the Grave and Open All Hours. According to novelist Penelope Lively, the difference between male and female gardeners is ‘that men are intent on cutting grass and women are not’. Not that the lawnmower-makers didn’t try to interest women in their machines. When the first Flymo appeared in the 1960s, it was marketed with the slogan ‘Now lawn mowing’s as easy as using a vacuum cleaner!’, which may not have thrilled its target audience quite so much as the advertising executives thought.

These days, of course, nobody needs to push or even ride on a mower any more. The first robot lawn mower was demonstrated by H. C. Webb & Co at RHS Chelsea in 1959. Radio-controlled, it bore an uncanny resemblance to Doctor Who’s mechanical dog, K9. Today, top-of-the-range lawn robots use cameras and come fitted with night vision. Some can even be operated via the owner’s smartphone as he or she sips Prosecco on a Sardinian beach. My grandfather, I feel certain, would not have approved of such idleness.