By Hugh de Lacy (snr)

January 26, 2021

Two great names of the pioneering motor industry, Herbert Austin and Frederick York Wolseley, moved sheep shearing into a new era when they invented a machine shearing system in the late 1800s.

In the earliest days of the wool industry wool was plucked rather than shorn, using a wooden comb which had a handle and teeth for pulling. Nowadays called “rooing,” the practice of plucking still continues in some remote parts of the world. The wool was initially spun by rolling clusters of fibre into each other, typically on the spinner’s thigh. Later the spindle and distaff took the place of hand-rolling, and in the High Middle Ages the spinning wheel was developed.

Implements to cut the wool rather than pluck it appeared with the Iron Age, around 1000BC, and by 300BC the Romans had developed hand-shears that are recognisable forerunners of those still used today. Just like modern blade-shears, they comprised two iron blades joined at one end by a metal spring originally created from a copper-tin mix.

As the wool industry increasingly underwrote the British Empire’s global expansion during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, shearing blades became more efficient. In the 1860s a Sheffield, England, company called Burgon and Ball began manufacturing what are today the standard blade shears used world-wide. It features two semi-round flat springs riveted together to form an inverted “W” that connects the handles which themselves are extensions of the two blades. Previously a single rounded spring did this job, but Burgon and Ball’s adaptation applied a more precise and consistent pressure between the blades at the cutting point, and a more vigorous re-opening of the blades after each cut or “blow”.

Though they can be made to do the job, and have done for the past 150 years, these shears have major limitations, having to be extensively modified before they will cut wool at all. First the shafts of the cast blades have to be twisted so that just the right amount of pressure is created between the two edges at the cutting point all along their respective edges. This takes considerable skill because the blades come out of the manufacturing process slightly bent, and have to be straightened. Then they  have to be sharpened on a hand-turned grinding stone – again something that takes great skill – and a strap has to be fitted to go round the shearer’s hand so he can push the blades into the wool without having his hand slide forward onto the blades.

Other problems with the Burgon and Ball shears are that the untempered steel in the blades means they have to be buffed up after every sheep, and sharpened after every three or four. This cuts down the time the shearer spends actually shearing, and the resultant lower tallies, relative to machine shearing, have been the major factor in the decline in blade-shearing over the past century. Also, a pair of Burgon and Ball shears, costing around $65, lasts for only about 900 sheep before the blades are beyond further sharpening and have to be replaced.

The massive expansion in flock sizes and wool production in the antipodean colonies, combined with the Victorian industrialists’ conviction that anything that could be done by hand could be done better and faster by machine, drove the development of machines to shear sheep in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

There had been many attempts to develop a steam-powered machine that could shear wool faster than it could be done with blades, but it took a wealthy Irish-born aristocrat to make the vital breakthrough. Frederick York Wolseley (1837–1899) went to Australia as a teenager in 1854 to work on a New South Wales sheep-station, and a decade later took up the machine-shearing challenge. By 1872 he had a crude working model which he continued to develop with Melbourne’s Richard (R.G.) Park and Company. Wolseley and another agricultural machinery inventor, Robert Savage (1818-1888), took out a couple of preliminary patents in 1877 that laid the groundwork for a handpiece that used a static comb to concentrate wool in the path of a cutter sweeping back and forth across it in an arc. A steam-powered overhead spinning shaft conveyed power to the handpiece by way of a steel downtube. This was the essence of the modern shearing machine, but even after an “Improved Shearing Apparatus” was patented in 1884, it still couldn’t shear more sheep in a day than a blade shearer could.

But Wolseley persisted, buying the rights to a horse clipper he thought might help, and hiring its owner, John Howard, as a mechanic. The big breakthrough came when R.G. Park and Co appointed a smart young mechanic named Herbert Austin (1866-1941) to give Wolseley a hand. It was almost certainly Austin who developed the cutting-edge breakthrough of hollow-grinding the shearing comb one degree back from the flat, so that the cutter severed the wool fibres at the outer edges of the comb as efficiently as it did those in the middle. By 1877 Wolseley and Austin had cracked it, and the following year saw the first shearing of a complete flock – 184,000 animals – by machines in Sir Samuel McCaughey’s woolshed at Dunlop Station, Louth, New South Wales. By the end of the following year, 18 more big Australian sheep-stations were using the equipment and it was being exported to New Zealand.

Part of the attraction of the machines was that because they cut the wool right on the skin, the initial yield was about a kilogram greater per sheep than with blades. That first-time advantage of course evaporated with successive machine shearings, but it made a great promotional attention-grabber. The implication was that the extra wool harvested in the first season would pay for the machines, and in some cases it did.

There is some uncertainty as to when the first full mob of sheep was machine-shorn in New Zealand. Wolseley and Austin heavily promoted their machines here, and uptake was as quick as in Australia. Flaxbourne Station in Marlborough is often cited as the first to use machines on a complete flock, though Galloway Station in Otago is a contender for the same honour.

The Wolseley Shearing Machine Company, incorporated in Sydney in 1887, made Austin its chief engineer. The Australian company was wound up two years later and re-incorporated under the same name in London. Other companies, including Burgon and Ball and several American manufacturers, quickly jumped into the shearing machine market, and the Wolseley company was nearly destroyed in the early 1890s when a lot of the product it sold was found to be defective. Austin was sent back to England in 1893 to sort out the production mess and to manage the business set up by then in Birmingham.

It’s a quirk of history that the names of both Wolseley and Austin became much more closely associated with the British automobile industry than the wool industry they revolutionised. Austin went on to become Britain’s equivalent to Henry Ford, mass-producing cars. He had begun building cars in the mid-1890s while still working for the Wolseley Shearing Machine Company, in the hope that demand for horseless carriages would counterbalance the highly seasonal demand for shearing machines. None of Austin’s early motorcars was successful, however, and the company directors were by no means convinced they had a future anyway. After Wolseley’s death in 1899, the company was sold to Vickers, Sons and Maxim, and Austin left to start up his own motorcar company at Longridge, Birmingham. But Austin never forgot Wolseley and eventually named one of his luxury models after him. Cars bearing the Wolseley name continued to be produced into the 1980s.

Wolseley’s invention of the mechanical sheep-shearing machine certainly did crank up the pace at which a sheep could be shorn, though because the shearer was tied to the machine by the umbilical cord of the downtube, the old blade shearing techniques had to be modified to suit: where blade-shearers had moved around the more-or-less stationary sheep, machine shearers had to move the sheep into a succession of positions that brought it within the range of the handpiece and downtube. For example, where blade-shearers had started by shearing horizontally across the sheep’s belly, machine-shearers soon developed the “spear-belly” technique of starting at the top of the brisket and shearing downwards into the crutch. Another innovation that came with machines was to drop the sheep onto its back after the underside was shorn, and then shear the flanks and back from the tail to head – the “long blow”, as it came to be called.

The overhead drive-shafts that could serve a dozen or more shearing stands were initially powered by stationary steam engines, but these soon gave way to traction engines and then to stationary diesel engines. The rollout of electricity from the 1920s saw many of the overhead plants replaced by individual electrically-powered machines, though some of the old multi-stand overheads are still in use today, albeit driven by electricity.

Today several companies round the world manufacture shearing machinery, and over the years they’ve made minor modifications to Wolseley and Austin’s breakthrough concept, but the shearing handpiece used today is easily recognisable as the descendant of their original.