Welcome to the British Lawnmower Museum. It's situated in Southport the sunny victoria seaside
town on the northwest coast. The museum started in the 80s with a lot of machines that sadly were
going to be discarded and it seemed such a shame. Machines made by Royal Enfield who was famous with
motorbikes, Vincent Motorbikes, Fraser Nash cars, Jeremy Pierce from precision engineering that made
all the cast aluminium for Rolls-Royce cars and so instead of throwing them away we started restoring
them and we've ended up with a thousand machines and in the museum we show 200 restored models.
This particular one here is one of the first Atco machines and Atco was a company that never made
lawn mowers the machine came about because they had a donkey that pulled the lawnmower
around the factory grounds and sadly the donkey died and the managers got together and said is
there not another way to cut the grass without getting another poor horse or a pony and the
managers got together and they designed this new chassis which was an open frame cast iron chassis
and it came out at 18 guineas. Atco also went on to make a car in 1939.It was going to be
for the road safety traffic act. Sadly they made it just before world war two and the production
had to stop and went on to the war effort. They also made the carriage for the bouncing bomb.
This is the first lawnmower it's a replica and it was originally made in 1830 by a gentleman called
Edwin Beard Budding he never set out to make a lawnmower he worked in a woollen mill in Stroud
in Gloucester and the mill owner got an order for guardsman's uniforms and he went to Edwin who was
a problem solver and said make me a machine for cutting all the toughs and the bobbly bits off the
cloth i want it to be perfect and what he designed was a spinning blade over a fixed blade and he
also found that it cut the grass very efficiently but it wasn't plain sailing for him because
everybody thought he was just a complete lunatic and a madman for making such a strange contraption
so he had to test his machine at night time so nobody would see him and eventually he brought
it out onto the market and said gentlemen will find my machine amusing and healthy exercise and
his principles never changed to this day and sadly he died penniless never knowing how popular his
lawnmower was going to be. This is the original patent that we have in the museum archive.
One of the museum exhibits is this special machine made by Allett around the 1970s; really well
made it's got heavy duty bearings it has a unique rubber rear roller and all the adjustments are by
hand no spanners needed adjustable handle and ball bearing front roller and it wheels really nicely,
one of the quietest machines on the market especially with the rubberised roller.
This machine was made by Vincent Motorbikes, really well made all-aluminium chassis and
they always had a unique thing on their motorbikes and on their lawnmower the handle is the fuel tank
and they've bolted it directly onto the cylinder head; quite unique.
This machine belonged to Brian May from the rock band queen and he wanted it to
have a happy retirement and wished the same for himself when he retired. He said it had
done sterling work and was the Gilbert Harding of lawn mowers. This is Suffolk colt from the
late 50s very popular in the 60s and even into the 70s and we gave this machine to James May
in 350 bits and he put it together on a tv program called the reassembler. here's a Qualcast
Electric Super Panther from Eric Morecambe and it was collected on a sunny afternoon
when Eric Morecambe was celebrating the birth of his first baby and he was on the lawn writing it's
a boy in the lawn with weed killer and Bart Simpson years later copied him writing bart
in the grass on his birthday with weedkiller and it's now one of Lancashire's 70 special objects.
Nicholas Parsons rang up one day and said would I like his old lawnmower and we went down to
collect it and said here's my lawnmower would you like my spade, my fork, my hoe,
would you like my pressure washer? He's a really nice guy.
This machine went on the latest film Downton Abbey everything was set in the late 1920s. This is the
world's largest hand mower it's originally made in 1935 from a Lloyd's 36-inch gang mower. This
unique machine was made in the 60s and it's the only hand-powered rotary i've seen on the market.
We've recently received one of the original machines from Lords cricket
ground it looks very similar to this one this was the first one
made in 1904 by Ransoms and it was for Cadbury's chocolates employees for their sports field.
In the mid-1830s the huge agricultural company Ransom bought the license off Edwin Budding to
make his machines and this was their first machine it was called the new automaton.
A nice machine made in Guildford by Drummond Brothers in the early 1900s
it was called the willing worker and you needed to be because it weighs 100 weight.
All the original machines were painted in green because of the machine was so heavy
they painted them silver to look lighter. This machine was made by the Enfield Cycle
Company that went on to be Royal Enfield it has the kickstart a really well made machine.
In here we have a few rich and famous people that have donated their items one of them
is from Lee Mack if you go to YouTube and put Lee Mack and 'dibber' you may find it entertaining.
There's also Vanessa Feltz's dibber, Alan Titchmarsh's weeder, Roger McGough's
trowel and quite a few others. This is an early machine from Greens of Leeds and London
one of their hand machines again made before the chain was invented.
They all had latin names and this one was called the 'Multum in Parvo'
the translation is with a little you get a lot out of it and next to it is the new super duper model
called the Green Silence Messer and that was the first machine to have a chain fitted to it
and it's in the Guinness book of records for never changing the model for 70 years. A nice
machine from the 1960s made by Wilkinson Sword and they had a unique cutting design.
This machine belonged to Albert Pierpoint, Britain's most famous hangman. He hung 400 people
and got paid 15 pound per hanging coincidentally his lawnmower cost him 15 pound and we always
wondered who paid for his lawnmower and the term money for old rope comes from this gentleman.
Here's the first electric lawnmower made in 1926 by Ransom.
Before the internal combustion engine was invented they used horses and ponies to pull the lawnmowers
around but they didn't want to have hoof prints in the freshly cut grass so they had donkey boots,
pony boots, horse boots and these are shire horse boots and we went to a lady in the lake district
who had a lawnmower when we got there she was 96 years old all chatting away and she said ''I
remember when i was six and our coachman used to take me round with the horse and carriage and he
used the same horse to pull the lawnmower around the grounds and he didn't want the horse to wee
all over the freshly cut grass so he used to take the horse along with the lawnmower into the bushes
where he'd do a whistle and when he whistled the horse would relieve itself and fertilize
the plants then he could go back out again''. Here's a machine part of our lawnmowers of the
rich and famous it belonged to Prince Charles and Princess Diana and it was one of their wedding
presents. Prince Charles was quite a keen gardener and this is Prince Andrew and Prince Edward with
a Webb toy lawn mower the idea was to encourage a child to cut the grass just like dad would do.
The Atco car was designed to train a young person to learn to drive, maintain and repair
a car before they ventured onto the road. It was made for the government's road safety act
and it was the spark for young enthusiasts to become grand prix drivers and Le Man winners.
Sadly they were manufactured in 1939 and world war two broke out and Atco had to turn their efforts
to the war. This is a Qualcast Panther from Gene Alexander alias Hilda Ogden from Coronation Street
along with Paul O'Grady's alias Lily Savage and that was for his birthday present. The
first robot lawnmower was invented in 1995 by Husqvarna it cost a million pounds to develop
and it just used daylight the solar panels are the same as fitted on the space shuttle.
Lawnmower racing's a great sport it's one of the cheapest forms of motor racing it doesn't
cost you an arm and a leg unless you run over yourself and this was a machine that we converted;
really good fun Sterling Moss is a keen lawnmower racer along with Noel Edmunds, Chris Tarrant and
loads of other people. So this is a reciprocating knife machine where it's driven by a big wheel
this particular model went on scrap heap challenge.
A gentleman called Carl Dalman went to a Brussels inventors fair
with Sir Christopher Cockerell's hovercraft design with an engine on the top of a dustbin lid
and said he'd invented the hovercraft lawnmower but it wasn't plain sailing for for Carl
because people looked at it and it was the first time a lawnmower had been made out of plastic
and it didn't look like a lawnmower and they had the same problem that Edwin Budding had
in 1830. So in the mid 60s he went and got 50 representatives gave them a fly mow each and say
go knocking door to door see the lady of the house and have a go with this it's nice and light
and they also surveyed two thousand housewives and said if you had a choice of colour for your
lawnmower what colour would you like and the overwhelming colour was orange and
that's why they're still orange today. One of the problems that they had was in the mid 60s
plastic was deemed very flimsy the fact that it was stronger than the police riot shield
didn't seem to make much difference. The museums open every day except Sundays and bank holidays.
I'm sure you'll find it a cut above the rest and something to remember forever mower!