1939 Lister D With Sheep Shearer

I recently saw a Lister D complete with sheep shearer for sale (even though I don't have any sheep!) but had to buy it!




Doreen Edgington advised that the equipment was supplied to a Mr H.J Webb of Bicester in 1939. I purchased the machine from Bicester and was told by the seller that he had obtained it from a farm in Ardley (nearby).
So, as the machine hadn't travelled very far in its life, I decided to try to find out a little more about H.J Webb. A little bit of searching came up with a Bicester General Chat group on Facebook and I posted on there explaining what I was hoping to discover. Within 24 hours, I had the following:

Harry James Webb married Ida Beatrice Newport at Kidlington in 1911, and they appear to have moved to Bicester sometime between then and 1939.
Harry was born in Kidlington in 1890 (son of Frederick and Eliza). He died in 1969.



I know that the actual details of H.J Webb are unlikely to be of any interest to anyone apart from myself but I thought I would share with you what I found (and the method used) as I for one just love knowing as much as I can about the history of my engines.

By no means uninteresting Craig. It's not all about the engines - a bit of history is always worth posting.

I did similar research when I got my Lister D, it was supplied to JC Baker of Foregate Street, Worcester in 1939, a bit of searching found an ex-employees group which I contacted and found out most records had been lost in a fire, one of the service guys was a bit old to do this new fangled interweb stuff so got his daughter to send me a nice email telling me about the company and his role as a field service engineer which i thought was nice.

That's a good result Stuart.
My other engines were all supplied to large institutions - foundry, agriculture etc. so whilst I know where they were (to some extent), I'm never really going to know exactly "who" the individuals were.