Bouncing bombs, gold mining ladders and steaming machines: a history of Wantage Engineering Ltd by Trevor Hancock

THE Wantage Engineering Company Limited was the name adopted in 1900 for a firm that traced its origins to 1826, when John Austin opened an iron founding business in the town of Wantage, Berkshire.

Austin's small business mainly made ploughs, haymaking implements and threshing machines.

He also undertook general foundry and blacksmithing work for local customers, but in 1833 both Austin and his young son died, leaving no successor in the family.

Chief foreman of the works Charles Hart took on the management of the business.

In the 1840s, Hart's trade suddenly increased following his successes in exhibiting implements at the shows of the recently-established Royal Agricultural Society.

He also introduced Hart's Improved Berkshire Plough, which was favourably received.

The increasing business meant that Hart had to move to larger premises, and the new Vale of White Horse Foundry opened in 1847.

By the 1850s, Hart was making more and larger threshing machines. In particular he was developing designs of machine for steam power.

At this time he sold, as agent, steam engines produced by other firms such as Clayton and Shuttleworth, to work with his machines.

Hart took on new partners in 1857 – brothers John and Henry Gibbons.

From my research, it appears that John had been an apprentice at Wantage and Henry had been an apprentice to a firm of paper manufacturers and engineers elsewhere.

John left after a very short while, to be replaced by a third brother Philip.

The new partnership traded as Hart, Gibbons and Gibbons. After Hart retired in 1858 through ill health the brothers carried on and changed the name in about 1860 to P. and H. P. Gibbons.

Gibbons decided it was time to enter the steam engine market and make their own engines for their threshing machines.

The development of the firm, therefore, lay in the manufacture of steam engines, threshing machines and associated equipment.

In 1881 Henry Gibbons died, and Philip took on a new partner – Arthur Robinson.

Robinson was an engineer who developed the designs of the firm's steam engines, so that the firm (Gibbons and Robinson 1881-91, Robinson and Auden 1891-1900) became specialists in traction engines, portable engines and threshing machines, with most of the output going for export.

After Philip Gibbons retired in 1891, the firm was incorporated as Robinson and Auden Ltd in 1894. Then in 1900 both Robinson and Auden sold their shareholdings to Lord Wantage, who reconstructed the firm as the Wantage Engineering Company.

In the years before the First World War the business was transformed from agricultural steam engineers to a firm specialising in engineering for haulage, railway, mining and conveying and other small items for local use.

During the First World War the company received substantial Government orders totalling over £100,000 producing munitions for the Woolwich Arsenal.

More than 100 men, women and children were employed by the firm and the wagon shop was heavily employed on wagon production throughout the war.

Mr Alfred Booker, who was employed for 54 years at Wantage Engineering, starting aged 13½ in 1915, recalled truck loads of equipment regularly being dispatched to Woolwich Arsenal for shipment onto France and elsewhere.

After the war, under the Thurstons (father and son George and Henry), the firm produced gold and tin mining equipment, steel chutes, stairways and bucket ladders for dredging equipment.

In WW2 Wantage Engineeering Ltd was used again for munitions and other important war equipment. Some components produced were incorporated in the bouncing bombs used by 617 Squadron during the Dambuster raid of 1943.

After 1945, Wantage Engineering Ltd continued to be involved in the production of mining and dredging machinery for export and other small engineering projects.

Other owners also followed but the firm is still operating today at the trading estate at Challow, in a different form and far removed from its heyday when it produced steam traction engines and other agricultural equipment.