Victorian bookbinders’ plough

For many years now I have referred to this style as a “Snail’s-Horn” plough, from the shape of the decorations. I have one that is effectively identical to yours, right down to the asymmetric casting of the brass wing nut. Hill/Hampson Bettridge snails-horn ploughs are comparatively common in America, and show little if any variation. Images first appear around the 1880s, in Crane, the second edition of Zaehnsdorff, and in an 1892 Harrild catalogue. Unfortunately there seem to be no images of English ploughs for about thirty years before Crane. The Hill/HB catalogues showed exactly the same image up until the eve of World War 2, and although this may have been due to re-use of old zinco blocks, I believe that there was absolutely no change in that period.

The Hill-Hampson Bettridge plant was bombed during WW2, and after the war they did a bit of cosmetic change to their plough design: the snail’s-horn cutouts were replaced by rounded-over quarter-circles, and the old presumably shellac finish (which normally darkens and reddens with age) was replaced with a presumably nitrocellulose laquer which preserves the wood’s original pale tan. The sturdy and manipulatable blade-holding mechanism was retained; in my opinion this is one of the main advantages of a good English plough over the over-engineered and under-thought French and American varieties My teacher, Anne Henning Kahle, bought this style of plough and lying press new from H/HB around 1960, and they are still going strong despite half a century of use in an active binding school where every student was taught to use them on every book (to master the technique, not because all books should be trimmed). The press had an eighth-inch deep rut worn in it by the 1970s, when it was planed down and reduced in height by that much; it now needs to be resurfaced again, or better to have a beech patch glued in and leveled. I resoled the all-wood cheek of the plough twice beginning in the 1980s, and it too now needs re-treatment; interestingly, the sole of the blade-holding cheek has not worn down at all, even at the ends. I watched the progress of wear on this plough and press for well over thirty years, going in to help with teaching after I had ceased to pay for lessons.

Another local binder, an English amateur, has an almost identical post-WW2 H/HB plough, except that it was made with a classic bolt knife, not a sliding knife! I have a similar coelocanth, a late-made Hickok American plough that is absolutely typical of their smaller model except that it has a classic forged bolt knife; though perhaps my plough was retrofitted. Neither Hill/Hampson Bettridge nor Hickok offered bolt knives as options in their twentieth-century catalogs. It is interesting that some demand for the blade style seems to have persisted.

With my experience of how rapidly ploughs wear, not just the soles but in the accumulation of “slop” and general wear, I would be inclined to regard any English plough still in usable condition as being twentieth century, and probably no older than the 1920s. And probably not1930s: who would have been buying ploughs in the depths of the Greqt Depression?. So: an age more like like 90 years+ than 130+, at least for mine. Whatever the age, my Hill/Hampson Bettridge plough is the gem of my plough collection.

Made by my great grand father or great great grand father, both Names Nathaniel J Hill. My grandfather married into the family in 1919 when he was on furlough after WW!. Thank you so much for allowing me to see his work