Lord Nuffield, or Wiliam Morris, First Viscount Nuffield, to give him his full title, is often regarded as Britain’s answer to Henry Ford, creating a reliable car, the Bullnose Morris, that brought motoring to the working classes.
He was by no means born into riches and splendour; his father was either a clerk or farm worker, depending on sources, while his mother was the daughter of a farmer and he spent the greater part of his childhood at Headington, just to the east of Oxford.
This childhood ended when he was apprenticed to a bicycle maker in Oxford at the age of 15 from where he went on to eventually produce his own bicycles, motor cycles and eventually cars at Cowley, now the home of BMW’s Mini production.
Wartime contingencies
The two world wars had brought home to the British government the need for improved agricultural productivity and mechanisation was obviously going to play a big part in that, thus it approached Morris Motors Ltd., with a view to manufacturing a homemade tractor for the looming peace.
So it was that in the early 1940s the company started work on the design of a new tractor, relying to a great extent on the expertise of one Herbert Merritt who had been trained in engineering at the renowned gear manufacturing company, David Brown.
It wasn’t until the Smithfield show of 1948 that the result of all this work was unveiled in the form of the Nuffield Universal which was available in both conventional four-wheel format, the M4, or a tricycle row crop version known as the M3.
This latter had been produced as an export model in a bid to persuade the post-war government to release sufficient steel to get production under way, however its popularity in the UK was limited.
This first model was powered by a 3.8L Morris commercial engine that had been adapted to run on TVO. It produced 38hp and remained in production up until 1961.
A four-cylinder Perkins diesel became available in 1950 as an alternative power source, this was slightly more powerful with 43hp on tap and it stayed as an option until a 45hp BMC unit became available in the mid 1950s, following the merger of Austin and Morris to form the British Motor Corporation (BMC).
In those early years the sales were not great as the company entered a market dominated by the highly competitive duo of Ford and Massey Ferguson.
Yet the early tractors made at the Wolsey factory in Birmingham gained a reputation for being solid and reliable,
Counting cylinders, not wheels
The original M4 stayed in production up until 1956 when two new modes were introduced, the Universal Four and the Universal Three.
Looking back, these may be easily be confused with the M4 and M3, but in these later tractors the number referred to the engine’s cylinders rather than the number of wheels.
The four-cylinder Universal Four had the 45hp BMC diesel while the three-cylinder Universal Three had, as its name suggests, a three-cylinder BMC unit of 37hp, enabling it to compete at the lower end of the power market.
By this time the tractor market was beginning to mature and it was no longer the case that one size was suitable for all farmers; differentiation was setting in as agriculture adapted to a horseless world and the pace of development was accelerating.
It might be said that Nuffield was a little late coming to this realisation; in 1961 it introduced just two new models, the 342 and 460, with 42hp and 60hp apiece as replacements for the old.
This was the year after Deere had launched its new generation range and even David Brown was offering five models at the time, while Ford was planning its ground-breaking 6X series.
The larger 460 was quite a power jump from its predecessor and the rather limited range now offered a big tractor and a little tractor, with nothing in between.
Bathgate woes for Nuffield
Yet a bigger problem still was lurking in the wings and that was the move of production from the midlands up to Bathgate in Scotland in 1962, a development urged upon BMC by the government keen to be seen investing in an area of high unemployment.
A brand new factory was built in this West Lothian town which badly needed the jobs, but didn’t have the skills base, and so it was that quality control suffered with tractors reputedly leaving the line unfinished or with major components missing.
Rectification of this situation came eventually, but meanwhile the company’s reputation of being the gold standard of tractors had taken an unfortunate knock.
A major step forward was taken in 1964 with the 10/42 and the 10/60 being introduced. The major selling point was a new 10-speed gearbox, as indicated in the name, although the power ratings remained much the same.
1967 saw the last hurrah of the big two Nuffields as a as an extensive makeover gifted them new lines, including a bonnet that opened upwards and plastic headline surrounds, yet they suffered reliability problems often blamed on the move to Scotland.
A third model was to join the range the following year and this was a clean sheet design although heavily influenced by the Ferguson TE20, and it was intended to fill a perceived gap in the market for small tractors ,
It was, however, a little too successful in being small for it could only muster 15hp from its four-cylinder BMC engine, a diesel version of the long lived A series petrol engine as found in the road going Mini up until 2000.
Due to poor sales it was revamped in 1968, given an extra 10hp and relaunched as the Nuffield 4/25.
