Vintage Horticultural and Garden Machinery Club

It’s 1936 and we are looking through the latest catalogues for a new sprayer, the choice is wide with sprayers to suit every budget and every spraying need. A new sprayer may be needed because there’s a new job such as whitewashing to be done as in the image on the right, or perhaps the old sprayer has started to fail and corrode from sulphur or lime, or even there’s been some dubious chemical through the old sprayer such as Corry’s ‘Weed Death‘ which was advertised as ‘Better than Arsenic‘ for killing weeds and plants, their adverts were a bit grim and macabre, we’ll thoroughly wash our hands and move on.

Whatever the reason for a shiny new sprayer, they start at a low-price point, or as we say in Yorkshire ‘For the more economically-minded man’. An all-purpose hand sprayer for spraying fruit and roses, bushes, crops, limewashing, creosoting and disinfecting was available for 23/- as in the image below. This was probably a good entry point sprayer but a pneumatic sprayer would be even better…..

For the greenhouse a small handheld pneumatic sprayer would be ideal as in image A below. This sprayer ‘being made with tubular handle is most useful for spraying grapes, rose trees, and tall plants out of reach of the ordinary sprayer by fixing same on pole or ordinary bamboo lance‘ – so now we know why some sprayers have hollow handles!

The knapsack sprayers in images B and C were able to hold a greater volume of liquid with B being able to spray corrosive liquids too. Knapsack sprayer C had to be specified with a tinned copper container in order to spray corrosives such as lime and sulphur. This knapsack sprayer was quoted as being ‘The strongest and best finished Knapsack Sprayer on the market‘ with the best leather shoulder straps and a 39 inch lance. 

The pneumatic sprayer in image F below was particularly suitable for disinfectants and insecticides and could either be carried on the back or sat on the ground during use. The bucket sprayer D and Non-splash sprayer E were also ground-dwelling sprayers. The bucket sprayer is a very common item often seen at sales, complete with a four gallon bucket and a double-action brass spray pump it also came with an all-metal strainer to keep lumps out of the mixture when filling and cost 35/- complete in 1936. 

The Non-splash sprayer in image E was ‘an entirely new departure in spraying machine construction…built on the lines of a milk churn..with a zinc gauze strainer thereby obviating all danger of the liquid splashing when being transported‘. It was fully guaranteed to give many years excellent service and was also 35/- or 39/- with lever handle.

The lever spraying machine, image below left, was suited to large areas of limewashing, the lever action enabling a high pressure to be gained and a finer spray too. The hose connection could be swapped over so the machine could be used either left or right-handed. The barrow sprayer, right image, is another lever-pump sprayer suitable for all classes of spraying with the pump being detachable so the barrow could be used for carrying water, rubbish or many other goods and as a multipurpose item was painted green rather than being unpainted, was this so it blended into the garden better or just a selling point?

But in the world of sprayers bigger with more gadgets could be better. The single-wheeled water barrow sprayer in the right image below has a galvanized tank measuring 16″ x 18″ x 12″ (10 gallons) which is painted inside and out, with an anti-spill rim and sprayers for plants, a jet for windows and also for car washing too. The first car power washer documented?

We have included here the swing water barrow on the left because it’s so advanced for loading water into itself with a hand-powered 1 & 3/4 inch semi-rotary pump with air vessel. Ideal for carrying water about for cleaning up after white washing the buildings. Price? A 40 gallon barrow with rotary pump and wheels for 96/- . 

Note: Although the sprayers are unmarked there’s a reference to Westhill sprayers, more than likely the sprayers were mainly from that one supplier.