WHITTLESFORD - Maynards

The Whittlesford agricultural engineering factory and foundry was started around 1829 by Robert Maynard I. He took over as tenant of Charity Farm, West End, Whittlesford, from his father David. After two bad harvests in the late 1820s RMI saw making machines in partnership with his brother-in-law Edward Smith a better prospect than running a 50 acre tenant farm.

In 1841 Robert and Jane Maynard lived in the Town House (the present Charity Farmhouse) with their four children and Robert’s mother, Rebecca - the lessee of the Town Lands Estate. Robert farmed the charity lands on Stone Hill field. He is listed in the census as an inventor and worked with his blacksmith on a number of innovative implements. Edward Smith also lived here in a separate tenement with his wife, Frances, and their four children.

The 1851 Census describes RMI as a farmer and an ‘Agricultural machinist employing 3 or 5 men.’ His wife was born in Wadesmill, Hertfordshire. His son Walter is in his business. Edward Smith is a ‘machinist - agricultural’ and his son Edward Smith works as a carpenter for RMI.

By 1881 Maynard’s Agricultural Engineering Works was the main employer in the village. The new foundry cast its first iron in August 1880; a small brass furnace was added later. Iron had become much cheaper. Fast developing railways transported Maynard’s raw materials and finished products, many of which are very heavy, cheaply and quickly. The two storey workshop is dated 1893 and other workshops were built around 1917.

Marking changes in the main activities the factory is variously called: Factory, Iron Works, Foundry, Agricultural Engineering Works. At its peak it had six forges and anvils for blacksmiths.

RMI’s first machine was a seed drill. Such drills replaced broadcast sowing from a basket slung over a man’s shoulders. His seed barrow looks like a long, narrow box placed crossways on a wheelbarrow. His drills soon became more elaborate. In 1840 Samuel Jonas said of RMI’s combined manure and seed drop drill: ‘It was invented by that intelligent and clever agricultural implement-maker, R Maynard, of Whittlesford.’

The manure may well have been produced in the ‘two very extensive and most excellent bone mills, situated at Duxford and Whittlesford, belonging to Mr Charles Thurnall.’ Charles took over Whittlesford Mill in 1854 after the death of his father William (1780-1842) who had bought it in 1828. Then the Whittlesford Mill employed about 20 men, producing linseed oil, oil cake and artificial manure.

The Cambridge Chronicle in 1842 referred to Mr Maynard of Whittlesford ‘appearing to have the greatest variety of agricultural implements.’ In 1840 he made a Cumberland horse hoe and in 1849 a new barley chopper designed by Gooch.

In 1846 20 guineas [£1.05p], offered by the President of the Saffron Walden Agricultural Society (SWAS), Lord Braybrooke, was awarded to ‘a piece of Swedes dropped with Maynard’s drop drill.’ RMI ‘contended against seven of the best turnip-farmers of the district.’ The prize was to be spent on agricultural machinery. In a later catalogue RMI could justifiably claim that he had: ‘Long practical experience of lever drills.’

A 'Catalogue of Agricultural machines Manufactured by Robert Maynard', in the 1851 Great Exhibition bound set of manufacturer's calalogues is ‘A revised catalogue.’ It includes: a four-horse thrashing machine, a clover and trefoil seed [dressing] machine, tile making machines, bolting machines, steaming apparatus and Gardner’s patent turnip cutters – ‘absolutely unchanged since their introduction by Gardner of Banbury before 1842’. RMI offers to ‘supply machinery from most other makers in the kingdom.’ The ‘clover and trefoil seed engine is the invention of Mr Constable.’

Maynard made horse-works, gear or gins. In 1856 a large portable chaff cutter was patented. RM note paper dated ‘187.’ lists: ‘Patentee of steam power portable sifting chaff engine; self-acting horse rake. Drills, thrashing machines, dressing machines, oil cake crushers, weighing machines.’

The machinery sections of the short-lived SWAS and the Essex Agricultural Association (EAA) shows were dominated by Maynard. The EAA show in 1870 was at Saffron Walden where the agricultural implements stands included Stand # 10: Robert Maynard: #7 sifting chaff engine £49; patent elevating apparatus to put chaff into bags with a newly patented part dealing with cavings £56; horse rake drills; seed barrow; #18 corn weighing machine £3 5s and #21 for coals £2 6s [it had smaller weights]; a portable stem engine. In 1884 the Robert Maynard stand included an eight horsepower Eddington steam engine £210. W & S Eddington & Co., made steam engines and boilers at New Street Iron Works, Chelmsford, Essex.

S Jonas’s son, F M Jonas of Chrishall Grange, also praised RM I for his ingenuity and willingness to develop machinery, including an elevator. The Jonas’s were leaders in the development of the use of chaff in feeding animals to the extent that Jonas ‘had nine barns filled with feed, trodden down by gangs of boys’. The barns were so full that their walls required iron tie rods to hold them together. Jonas and others harvested cereal and other crops at appropriate states of ripeness, chaffed them and mixed in various ingredients to produce large quantities of excellent quality feed.

Maynard offered ‘A description, as furnished by some of the largest stockmasters, … of storing cut straw so as to render it equal in value to ordinary hay.’

Horse numbers increased dramatically during the 1800s, especially in the rapidly growing towns. Similarly many more cattle and sheep were required to feed the increasing population, not least those who moved from rural to industrial areas.

Chaff cutters were critical in the success of Maynards. ‘Chaff’ in this context refers to pieces about an inch long of cereal straw and other crops to provide bulk in animal feeds. The Maynard’s 1911 model produced chaff and litter straw of lengths 3/16, 3/8 and 5/8 of an inch and could be adjusted for other lengths, up to six inches.

The first chaff cutters were troughs or boxes into which straw was laid and cut by a knife, which was later attached to the box at one end. The cost of chaff produced by the old fashioned up and down knife was seven times that of using a machine, i.e. one man could do the work of seven. Knives were arranged radially on a hand-turned wheel, cutting straw from the centre outwards. RMI made such machines.

RMI’s chaff cutters numbered 1, 2 and 3 were driven by 1 or 2, 2 or 3 or 4 horses. The horses walked in a circle around the gin, if necessary stepping over the drive shaft. The brittle iron castings of the knife wheels were tyred by a metal band around them.

Maynard cutters numbered 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 – ‘The Mammoth’ with six knives - were power driven, firstly by steam engines - stationary at first, then mobile. Steam power developed slowly, then rapidly, to be briefly the major source of power, only to be replaced by internal combustion engines, using gas, oil, paraffin and diesel.

The Royal Agricultural Society of England (RASE) was founded in 1839 with the motto ‘Progress in Science’. It conducted tests of machines. Although Maynards won many prizes and medals awarded by the RASE and other farming organisations, they did not win any RASE trials. RMI did not take part in their first annual show Oxford in 1839.

The second RASE show was in Cambridge in 1840, with ‘trials of agricultural implements in a field belonging to Mr Peter Grain, about a quarter of a mile beyond the turnpike gate, on the Hills Road. Near to this, on the premises of Mr Emson and Mr Grain, thrashing and dressing machines, and other implements, will be at work. A ploughing match will take place nearby.’

Ransome’s won the gold medal for implements with six tons of machinery which commanded universal approbation. Their chaff cutter ‘is the largest and most powerful of its kind hitherto constructed’.

In 1843 J Allen Ransome in ‘The implements of agriculture 1843’ explored patents for agricultural machinery, finding chaff cutters but none for Maynard. He writes of RMI: ‘an ingenious mechanist to whom all agriculturists are indebted for several improvements in drills and other machinery, has, by the simple contrivance of placing a roller in advance of each coulter remedied this defect as these rollers not only prepare the surface of the soil for the most favourable operation of the coulters but at the same time secures their penetrating the ground to a uniform depth.’

In 1871 RMI was the first President of ‘The Whittlesford Ploughing Association’ and organized a ploughing contest. Ploughs were brought by Hornsby, Howard and Ransome, Sims and Head. Ransome commented sarcastically that Headly (of Cambridge) ‘polished his plough shares’. It was noted that subsequently Ramsome’s shares were always well polished. The Champion’s prize was 35 shillings (£1.75p), equivalent to several weeks’ wages.

RMI’s older brother Nathan was the local agent for Ransome. Nathan ran the village shop and eventually, the post office, in the same premises as the present village shop and post office, thankfully restored after the collapse of the western end of the building in 2003. He built ‘Orient House’ opposite his shop.

The Ransome’s Orwell Works at Ipswich covered 9 acres and employed 900 men, compared with Maynard’s two acres and 60 men (30 in 1861). R Hornsby, Spittlegate, Grantham, Lincolnshire and John Howard & Sons, Britannia Iron Foundry, Bedford were other large manufacturers of agricultural implements and machines.

These factories made chaff cutters, generally as one of many machines. The scale of arable farming grew and machines replaced human muscle power. Successful and well capitalised companies grew very large and came to dominate the market.

In 1839 the number of implements exhibited at the RASE show was 54 and 115 the next year in Cambridge; in 1894 there were 6,031 – not the highest figure as the Kilburn show, in London in 1879, saw 11,878. The 1839 implements ‘were, in great part, “crude, cumbrous, and ill-executed machines, the work of village ploughwrights and hedgeside carpenters”’. Three years later the makers were ‘possessed of great intelligence, skill, and capital’. Soon many machines were exported to countries which, having copied them, sought only new ideas.

An 1892 RASE article states that ‘it was rare in 1800 to see cattle-food preparing machines but since the dependence of English agriculture upon livestock has been fully demonstrated such machines have become the largest class of implements at all agricultural shows and the prosperity of the farmer may be estimated by the use he makes of them. It is because chaff-cutting facilitates the admixture of more nutritious matter with straw or hay that its use has become universal.’

Chaff cutters could be linked to threshing machines and RMI inventions enabled the chaffing to keep up with the threshing. His 1867 cutter was improved: ‘others do not cut fine and riddle as fast.’ With at least 5 knives and a ‘greater width of mouth, 15 inches or wider, it will cut as fast as an ordinary portable thrashing machine can deliver straw.’ The riddle is made of thin strips of metal bent in a zigzag form, a RMI 1867 patent riddle had hexagonal holes to maximize the use of the surface.

There were many injuries to men and boys working with chaff cutters and threshing machines - always spelt and pronounced ‘thrashing’ locally and referred to as a drum. An Act of Parliament regarding the safety of threshing machines of 1878 was followed in 1897, by an Act dealing with chaff cutters. The Act came into force in 1898.

Long before 1898 RMI had developed many safety features. ‘The Safeguard’ cutter was awarded an RASE silver medal in 1870. In 1894 William Jonas of Heydon Bury wrote of Maynard inventions for this ‘most dangerous machine’: ‘All danger is absolutely done away with as the attendant cannot possibly reach the Feed Rollers, however careless he may be.’ Maynard patented a safety drum [feeder], then the ‘Crocodile’ feeder designed to not be a crocodile, i.e. to not swallow your fingers, hand or arm.

The Harry Douglas (a Maynards foreman) papers include an undated story of RM stopping a London bound express train. RM asked the station master Mr Sharman to stop the express. He said that he dare not do so. So RM walked up the line and stopped the train, so he was at the Patent Office before it closed. His offer to pay £20 to Addenbrookes Hospital if the railway company would refrain from taking police court proceedings was accepted.

Following the success of his factory RMI became a major farmer and landowner in Whittlesford. In 1871 Charles Thurnall sold Parsonage Farm of 286 acres to two people. RMI took the old house and 139 acres. On his death the farms went to his youngest son Albert, who bought out his surviving siblings. RMII inherited the works which his son Robert III continued.

RMII took over in 1883. ‘Patents of many kinds flowed from his fertile brain.’ He won 30-40 gold and silver medals. The Royal Scottish Agricultural Society rated his chaff cutter the best in the world. ‘Considerably over 2,000 of these Machines are now in work, giving entire satisfaction!’

The New ‘Automaton’ of 1885 was portable, i.e. on three or four wheels. It was a combined cutting, sifting & bagging chaff engine. ‘Rough Hay, Bean or Pea Straw, Clover or Sanfoin Straws, are with this Machine passed to the knives, without the least difficulty, while such stuffs often baffle the most practiced men who attend Chaff Cutters, and it is at such times they sometimes meet with accidents in getting their hands caught in the roller; all such accidents are avoided with this Machine.’

The ‘Original’ of 1891 has a Bagging apparatus and a new safety guard roller; it ‘takes straw from the thrasher as fast as it is thrashed.’

A Maynard cutter was judged ‘best in the world’ at The Royal Scottish Agricultural Society show in Glasgow in 1888. This may account for RMII’s claim in 1894: ‘My standing, as a prize-winner, with Chaff Cutting Apparatus, is absolutely unique, having fought and conquered at all leading trials throughout the world.’ He produced an ‘Illustrated Catalogue of Robert Maynard’s world-renowned Safety Chaff Cutters.’ The two storey building, the most substantial on the site then and now, is dated 1893, presumably the peak of Maynard success.

Maynard had 17 items at the 1894 RASE Cambridge Show on stand number 399, including: 9 chaff cutters, 2 Ransome machines, 2 ring rolls, a stacking machine, a patented self-acting horse rake and a steerage horse hoe.

Other chaff cutter patents were: a compensator for the riddle to reduce vibration; a cleaner for the top feed roller; a cavings elevator (cavings are unwanted bits and pieces, e.g. leaves) which carried up the cavings, then deposited them at the elbow of the feeder, thus they went back through the mouth with a fresh supply of straw and were chaffed; a jointed chaff bagger; a carriage locking lever; a disc feeder (1893); a knife sharpening tool; a dust separator.

Maynard’s Catalogue of 1903 states: ‘With these machines accidents are impossible! With these machines victory is certain! Leading features of excellence have kept Maynard’s machines to the front, and have made them stand out as clear as a Lighthouse above all others of recent introduction. Brass bearings: nothing but best Gun Metal used.’ It includes ‘The “New Drum” Safety Feeder’. ‘The Scientific method of using cut straw by which its nutritive and palatable properties are so much improved as to render it nearly equal to ordinary hay’ will be sent post free on application.

The ‘Monarch’ of 1897 with its safety patent feeder lived up to its name as it was the model ‘installed in Buckingham Palace by order of HM the King’ who bought it at the Smithfield Show of 1913. By then there were 4,500 Maynard cutters in work, with wheels with up to five knives spinning at 80 to 280 revolutions a minute.

During the 1939 – 1945 War, after an initial boost for chaff cutters, labour saving combined harvesters reaped and threshed, baled or cut the chaff. At first they were pulled by tractors. Now self-propelled monsters with air-conditioned cabs, close circuit TV with electronic controls, use satellite navigation. Separate cutters are now known as straw choppers.

In 1883 a Special Silver RASE prize went to a patent for ‘a complete novelty in the form of a straw yealming or straightening machine. (A yealm is a compact bundle of straw.) It worked ‘fast enough to supply one of his most powerful “MAMMOTH” Machines’ and ‘saves the labour of three men, for £22.’

A 1905 cut hay chaff apparatus ‘extracts 4 to 6 ounces of dust from a single truss of what appears to the eye and nose, clean sweet hay. Second-class hay cut to chaff is made clean and bright.’

The ‘Grasshopper’ patent straw elevator was cranked to enable the circling horse to walk underneath it to work the integral horse gear. Another patent was for an elevator which was convertible between being up- or down-cast.

The Maynard patented ‘Cambridge roll’ has ‘a double length boss which slips into the boss of the next ring giving extra strength to the axle, preventing the rings from falling and dirt from getting onto the axle, trebling the life of the roll and taking far less horse-power in work.’

‘Cambridge’ refers not to the place but to William Colbourne Cambridge, the Wiltshire inventor of rolls which have rings rather than solid one, two or three cylinder rollers. His rings, especially when ridged and of alternate large and small diameters, were more effective in breaking up clods in preparing a tilth for sowing. They were also more easily turned.

Other Maynard patents were: an expanding tractor roll – the central 8 foot roll had 4 foot rolls on either side to make it 16 foot wide; a hoe for which scuffler points could be supplied; a combined chaff cutter and grist mill; a steering harrow.

His patented a self-acting horse rake which ‘deposits the load by the power of the horse’ ‘so that a boy of 12 is not fatigued by working the Rake the whole day long.’

A 21 gun salute was fired on the Lawn Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897; the small cannons were drilled at Maynards. 22.6.1911 the King George V coronation programme includes a royal salute of cannons.

It appears that the last Maynard agricultural machinery patent was for the open wheels of a sugar beet lifter around 1925. It was first demonstrated at College farm, Duxford about 1923-4 by the Agricultural adviser for Cambridgeshire. The RASE said it required field testing and asked for it to be shown in 1926; it was not shown.

FW McConnell-Silk produced ‘a beet harvester with Maynard wheels of 33 inches’, adjustable for ‘rake, height [depth]’ which squeezes the beet out of ground.

‘Robert Maynard [RMII], the well-known Whittlesford engineer, died on December 20, 1930 at the age of 85. His life was spent in patenting or perfecting agricultural machinery & to the last he visited the office of works daily. His chaff cutter took the world’s champion prize for efficiency at Glasgow in 1887 (sic) and His Majesty the King has one of these machines in the Buckingham Palace Mews. At the time of his death RMIII was away at Smithfield.’

The last identified patented item is labelled ‘The Maynard Liner Patent: Robert Maynard Whittlesford Works near Cambridge England’. It made white lines, e.g. on a tennis court. RMIII continued to work at his inventions: a bedside lamp with a dimmer switch demonstrated in Robert Sayle’s store in Cambridge; a device for stripping feathers; a propulsion unit for a boat - sucking water in at the bow, ejecting it from the stern.

The last catalogue known is dated 1920s and is for ‘breaking and wearing parts’. Chaff cutters, beet lifters, spares and other pieces of equipment were manufactured and equipment was repaired through the 1940s and into the 1950s, the work gradually petered out by the close in 1960 when RMIII died.

From the late 1930s Walter Pamphlin’s Steam Rollers Ltd stored and maintained road rollers in the open shed. A steam engine was used to get up steam for ‘hush-hush’ work in 1940. A very loud explosion resulted in two men being badly scalded. Although they were promptly attended by a nurse who lived nearby they died. The men were said to be from the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge and Whittlesfordians proudly talked of the atom having first been split in their village – it was actually split elsewhere in 1932.

Tanks were based in the village during the war and an army motor repair unit took over the two storey block to maintain vehicles. Other buildings were used as War Emergency stores.

RM III’s death in 1960 saw the final closure of the works and the destruction of most of the company’s records. The R Maynard sale catalogue dated 16.3.1961 states that: ‘The moulds, patterns and goodwill of the “Maynards chaff cutter” will be offered at noon.’

The only machine in the sale of the factory in 1961 was, appropriately, a ‘Farmers Friend’ - a portable motive power unit, with a Petter engine, for use with various items of farm equipment.

Today only the works office, in a private garden, and the 1893 building, boldly named Maynards, converted into 4 flats, ‘remain to remind us of the glory that was once Maynards.’

Robert Maynard farms in the village. He is the grandson of Albert’s son Robert John, known as Jack - who wrote a short history of the Whittlesford Guildhall. He has a chaff cutter, beet lifter and a white liner. Another farmer has Maynard cast iron ‘staddle stones’, used to support ricks or granaries, designed to prevent animals climbing them.

Maynard’s machines, virtually all chaff cutters of varying dates, have been located around Whittlesford and further afield. At Ashdon in Essex a collection includes a G M Innes (of Hitchin, Hertfordshire) chaff cutter alongside a Maynards machine.

Working chaff cutters, operated by their proud owners using steam engines, have featured at the Bedford Steam Engine Preservation Society show at Old Warden, the Eye Show in Suffolk and the Royal Cornwall Show at Wadebridge - originally supplied to Blackwell, a steam thrashing contractor in Northleach, Gloucestershire, at a price of £59.

The farm at the Norfolk Museum of Rural Life at Gressenhall has a Maynards chaff cutter, ‘Type 6K’, which was used 1900-70. It has Maynard’s patent cavings elevator and crocodile feeder, it is portable with a tractor pull. The Farmland Museum at Denny Abbey has a Sugar Beet Lifter, currently on display in the Cambridgeshire Farming area.