This old iron hobby of ours attracts many more men than women; I suppose this is because more men work, or have worked, with tractors and machinery, and they pass this interest onto their sons.
So, as a woman who goes to vintage vehicle shows, who has her own tractor, and who writes articles about old machinery, I’m often seen as a bit of an oddity. I don’t mind this at all, because in many ways I’ve always been rather a square peg in a round hole. I have, for instance, always been more attracted to the idea of welding than I have been to the idea of cake baking, and I’ve always been better at using a cement mixer than I have been at using an iron. This is probably because I had five older brothers and I spent a lot of time outdoors with my father. Plus, my mother was a very practical sort of person, too. She was always happier in the garden than she was in the kitchen.
However, I’m still obviously a woman, and when I get talking to other vintage tractor and machinery enthusiasts, they almost always ask me how on earth I became involved in this hobby. They ask this because old tractors don’t seem like a normal thing for a woman to be interested in and people are curious as to how it all began.
When I give my answer, I always say that my interest in old farm machinery came from my ancestors, from my father, and from my grandfather William Roberts, who died when I was just an infant. The stories of him have continued to exist in our family to the present day. William Roberts is a hero of mine because he was a kind, brave, hardworking man, a man who understood horses, and who had a close affinity with the land, which he farmed in a simple, low-impact way.
William Roberts grew up in a tiny hovel in the Snowdonia mountains, where he learned farming from his grandfather. As he grew up, he became a farm labourer, which was hard work for low pay, but a harder life was yet to come. When he was barely an adult, Wil, as everyone knew him, was called up to fight in World War I. This young man, who had never been away from the hills where he was born, was sent to France to fight a war that probably seemed to have very little to do with him.
Wil must have witnessed some dreadful scenes in that horrible war; he worked with horses, hauling artillery, and my family says that he never really talked about what he had experienced. However, in many ways, Wil was one of the lucky ones, because one day, among the mud and the blood, a piece of shrapnel hit him in the shoulder, knocking him to the ground badly injured. Lucky to be rescued and lucky to survive in the makeshift hospitals on the front line, Wil was deemed too injured to be properly treated in France. He was sent to England to a military hospital to recover. His recovery was slow, and he never did get back to France. Instead, he was sent by the government to work with horses on a large farm in England, ploughing and harvesting grain to help to keep Britain fed during some of her hardest, leanest years.
When he was finally released from military service, Wil came back to the hills of North Wales and resumed life as a ploughman. Eventually, he was able to buy his own farm in the hills, a place just up the lane from where I live today. Life was peaceful in this rural backwater, a far cry from the horrors of WWI, but, in a time before mechanisation, farming involved heavy labour and plenty of elbow grease. My father, Arthur, was born on the farm in 1930, and he learned the same simple but hard-working farming methods from his father Wil. I think my interest in old farming tools probably stems from the knowledge that my grandfather and father would have used such items. Simple, well-made tools, tools that were made in Britain. Whereas now, many of our tools are made in far-flung countries and are nowhere near as durable as those that hail from the golden era when our country made almost everything that we needed.
Reluctantly moving forward
My father was, as was to be expected, a little more modern than my grandfather, and he decided that the farm was in need of a tractor. This was the 1950s after all, and most other farmers were already using tractors. Being cash-strapped, hill-based farmers, money was scarce, so all that the family could afford to buy was a secondhand Fordson Model N tractor. These Model N tractors were produced in the UK from the late 1920s to 1945, so by the 1950s, they were old, outdated machines, but to my father, it must have seemed like a huge step forward at the time. However, my grandfather Wil never particularly liked the tractor, and a family story persists to this day of how on the day it arrived, my father tried to show my grandfather how to use the tractor. It seems that Wil took the controls, and as the tractor lurched off across the field he shouted “Whoa.” He panicked when it didn’t stop, and unsure of what to do, he stepped off the back and left the tractor chugging away across the field. My father had to jump on the tractor to stop it, and Wil, well, he just walked off back to the farmyard.
It might seem like a funny story of an old man unwilling to learn about the modern ways, but to me it seems quite poignant, because I can imagine just how Wil felt at this moment. I imagine a man who was excellent at what he did–which was farming with horses. I can picture that it must have felt as if this new-fangled concept of a tractor had brought with it a world that Wil knew nothing about. It must have seemed both daunting and disempowering, especially to face this “new technology” so late in life. Wil never did learn to drive; he never drove a car either, and by then my parents owned an old Willis Jeep, and my mother would drive my grandfather whenever he would need to go anywhere, which was never farther than the local market town in any case.
My father, on the other hand, loved anything with an engine, and he dabbled with tractors, motorbikes, cars and even trucks from time to time. He was able to fix just about anything, and he passed these skills onto my older brothers. When I was growing up, the yard at home was full of vehicles–some working, some being used for parts, and some that were used by me as places to hide and play in. I literally grew up surrounded by old vehicles.
Early tractor memories
The first tractor I recall driving was a Nuffield Universal 3 that belonged to my older brother who, like my grandfather, was also called Wil. Nuffield tractors were exported to the USA by a company called “Long,” and they were rebadged with the name “Long” replacing the name “Nuffield,” but the poppy orange paintwork remained the same.
The Nuffield Universal 3 that my brother Wil owned was built in Oxford, England, in the late 1950s. It was an outdated tractor by the time I was a teenager in the 1980s, but my family wasn’t wealthy, and they farmed in rather an old-fashioned way, so it was always the norm for us to have tractors that were decades old. I had a love-hate relationship with that Nuffield tractor, but the reason for my dislike of the tractor probably has more to do with my older brother than the actual tractor. I was always wanting to do things that my brothers did, so when my brother, Wil, asked me to roll a newly ploughed field up the lane, I jumped at the chance. The problem was that the starter motor didn’t work on the tractor (there was always a catch with anything involving my brother, Wil), so, given I had barely driven a tractor, Wil bump started the tractor and got it ready for me to commence rolling. I was told under no circumstances was I to stop the tractor and to just keep going round and round rolling until my brother came back. The other issue was the gears. The tractor didn’t like changing gear, so I was also told not to attempt to change gear, but to just keep going in the one gear that my brother had managed to find. … This was how things always were with Wil. There was always some danger, some malfunction, some spanner in the works that could’ve, in retrospect, been easily avoided.
It was springtime in Wales, and there was a lovely golden light glowing through the still leafless trees as the day was coming to a close. My brother had driven off in his van to attend to some other jobs while I rolled the field, and I felt like quite the farmer as I went around on the Nuffield, marvelling at what a good job the roller was doing at flattening out the lumpy soil. After about an hour, the light began to fade, and it became quite chilly, as it was still early in the year. By this time, I had well and truly rolled every part of the field, and I was beginning to hope my brother would soon return so I could stop. Not only was I cold, but I also desperately needed the toilet. Soon the sun left me, and all I could see was the charcoal outlines of the hedges and the trees. All I could do was to keep going round and round that field in the dark, with no lights, cursing my
unreliable brother.
At one point, I tried stopping the tractor and putting it into neutral, so I could leave it running and go home, but the gear stick just wouldn’t shift and it made such a terrible grinding sound that I was terrified I’d break something. So, I just had to keep going around and around that field in the darkness, hoping either that the tractor would run out of diesel so I could stop, or that my brother would return. I even contemplated jumping off the tractor while it was moving, but I decided that course of action was sure to end badly. With everything, the need to go to the toilet, and the cold, I was almost in tears when I saw the lights of my brother’s van as it pulled up at the gateway. I drove over and pressed the clutch and brake as my brother walked over.
“Oh, you’re still going round,” he said, stating the obvious as he walked over. With a great grinding noise, he took the tractor out of gear, looked at me, and said “Okay?” I don’t think I answered, but I recall that I stomped home across the fields in the dark, marching angrily as only an affronted child can.
There were more adventures on that Nuffield that almost served to put me off tractors altogether, but more about all that another time. Suffice to say, I continued to think that tractors were both wonderful and dangerous. They were annoyingly temperamental and yet wholly exciting. … By the time I was 28, I knew I had to have my own, and I was determined it would be better maintained than that wretched Nuffield of Wil’s. FC
Josephine Roberts lives on an old-fashioned smallholding in Snowdonia, North Wales, and has a passion for all things vintage. Email her at josiewales2021@aol.com
