What's This ?

[V8RX7]

What is this called ?





And ideally what's it from (other than a Wolseley !) ie rough year / model

Edited by V8RX7 on Monday 30th September 15:10

[Doofus]

It's a battery box for an electric fence

[2xChevrons]

Doofus said:

It's a battery box for an electric fence

Yeah.

It's a totally different Wolseley company (and logo) from the car company, although it's named for the same person:

Frederick Wolseley invented the revolutionary mechanical sheep-shearing machine in the 1880s and founded the Wolseley Sheep Shearing Machine Company to build and sell it, employing one Herbert Austin as engineer and later works manager when the factory was moved from Australia to Birmingham in the 1890s.

Austin pitched the idea of building motor cars to the Wolseley board and built a small run of half a dozen or so cars (the first British 'production' cars) before Wolseley lost interest and sold Austin, his designs and the rights to the Wolseley name on cars to Vickers. Vickers formed the Wolseley Tool & Motor Car Company. Austin left in 1905 to start his own firm and Vickers renamed the company Wolseley Motors in 1914.

Wolseley Motors then went bankrupt in 1927 and was purchased by William Morris (out of his own personal fortune, not the Morris company coffers). Incidentally he did so to out-bid an offer from General Motors which was looking to purchase an ailing British firm to enter the UK/Empire market. Out-done, they went and bought up the equally destitute Vauxhall company instead. Had history gone a little different then the Wolseley Astra may now be one of Britain's best-selling cars...

Wolseley Motors was sold by William Morris to Morris Motors in 1937 and then became part of BMC, then British Leyland etc. until the last Wolseley car was made in the 1970s.

The original Wolseley Sheep Shearing Machine Company carried on making shearing equipment and branched out into other agricultural machinery such as stationary engines, pumps, generators, milking equipment, barbed wire and electric fences. They made the Wolseley Merry Tiller rotovator, of which several examples are probably still sitting in sheds on your nearest allotment. With the downturn in demand for wool post-WW2 Wolseley diversified and entered the building supplies and heating/ventilation business. Those Plumb Center/Drain Center/Parts Center/Build Center/Pipe Center etc. outlets were, despite the spelling, Wolseley brands.

A google tells me that the company is still around but has renamed itself Ferguson, which was the name of a big building supplies firm in the US which Wolseley bought in the 1980s, but it still trades as Wolseley in the UK.

So your battery box is for an electric fence that has nothing to do with the Wolseley cars other than being made by the firm founded by the man who the car firm was named after!

[V8RX7]

I assumed the first reply was a joke !

Thanks for the full reply - very interesting

The PO of my house was a pre war, car dealer, hence my assumption.

[Doofus]

V8RX7 said:

I assumed the first reply was a joke !

Charming!

[V8RX7]

Doofus said:

Charming!

Your username didn't inspire confidence

[2xChevrons]

V8RX7 said:

I assumed the first reply was a joke !

Thanks for the full reply - very interesting

The PO of my house was a pre war, car dealer, hence my assumption.

The logic is understandable - I only dived into the history of the different Wolseleys when I spent a summer school holiday weekend clearing a neighbour's vegetable plot with a Wolseley rotovator and I also assumed that it was the same Wolseley as the cars and it was an obscure BMC sideline that I was previously unaware of. So I looked it up and found that I'd made the same mistake as you - the rotovator had 'Wolseley' on it in exactly the same script as your battery box.

Strange device - it looked like this:



The one I used had several styles of rotary tine and some really medieval-looking attachements that were for rooting up potatos. You could take the tines off and fit little wheels with tractor-tread tyres and it had a cultivator and a potato ridger to go on the back. There was also a little dropside tipper trailer which you slotted the entire machine into the front of and it turned it into a little three-wheel truck. All powered by a rather worn Briggs & Stratton 3.5 with knackered piston rings and there was a 50/50 chance that when you started it the starter cord would jam and make ear-splitting Psycho-style 'screee-screee-screee' noises.