Tractor heritage, news and features

Older, wiser and positively vintage

Like antiques, to us our old tractors are fascinating and hugely sought after. Yet in our throwaway society many people take the view that anything that’s old is somehow useless. Of course those who make new things are always going to try to convince people that they need to buy the latest ‘new thing’, which is frequently not the case at all. It’s almost as if we are being brainwashed into thinking that everything new = good, and everything old = no good. We sometimes even apply this belief to people, whereas some other societies see age as something to be respected, and that older people have the wisdom and experience that the young can never have.

Some of the best engineers and most knowledgeable people in the vintage tractor world are ‘of a certain age’, and some. Far from seeing these people as ‘over the hill’ most of the younger generation of tractor enthusiasts view the older folks as a mine of information and experience. If you really want to learn your stuff you need to hang out with the old guys I think. Not only do they remember a time when these machines were current, but they have also been reared in the era of ‘make do and mend’, where you usually had to fix things yourself, and if you didn’t know how to do it you had no choice but to give it a go.

While a 40-year-old may be familiar with using say a Standard Fordson, through having taken it to shows or ploughing matches, he or she isn’t going to know what it’s like to work on one of these tractors for a living, day in day out, like an older bloke might. I bet some of the older tractor enthusiasts often shake their heads at the younger generation, especially over the staggering amounts of money that people are prepared to pay for old tractors, just so that they can say they own this and that rarity. It must seem odd when you remember a certain tractor as being outdated, to see it now being hailed an antique, and costing many times what it would have done when new. If I were an 80-year-old today, I think one of my big regrets would be that I hadn’t hung onto all the old wrecks that I had in my youth!

Many of the older tractor enthusiasts are involved in the vintage tractor scene because of nostalgia - it’s pleasant to be around the things that you had in your youth, it is what you know, and it takes you right back there I suppose. For people of a younger generation it is more like nostalgia for an age that they never even witnessed. There’s a certain romance about the notion of horses and early tractors tilling the land, and perhaps the notion of it is more romantic than the reality actually was. People of middle age and younger often speak of a time when life was simpler, but was it really any simpler? After all people still had to work, often harder than they do today. It was certainly simpler in so far as we had fewer belongings, but if you ask any older person about their childhood I think they will recall harder times than what we have now.

It is probably those hard times that give the older folks the wisdom and experience that they have today. They grew up learning to look after things, to make them last, and no doubt the reason we still have a lot of the old tractors we have today is because in the past those old guys, who were then youngsters, knew how to look after their belongings and make them last.