Film Night

摘要

The Western Branch has found an ideal winter evening's entertainment for its annual schedule, with a film night courtesy of Jim Wilkie. Jim is a renowned source of archive material having pioneered the Old Sodbury Sort out where parts of many vehicles which were long thought to be extinct could be sourced. Its Jim's passion for agricultural merchandising material produced on reel that grabs our attention. We started off with a film produced by the Fiat Corporation, circa 1987. It featured the familiar terracotta branded equipment covering the mid-range 110-90 tractors, a fleet of Laverda combines and the possibly unfamiliar part of the Italian stable, Braud, which included grape harvesting machines. The reference to a multimillion lira investment by Fiat into their manufacturing plants reminded us of the era before European domination took hold. This was a great film for us all to watch as even Jim hadn't seen it before. We then moved onto a reel picked by Chris Brown which was the Massey Ferguson circa 1950's. Chris has recently returned to the UK after working on overseas irrigation and drainage projects, and we look forward to Chris becoming a regular attendee at Western Branch meetings. The film was taken at the time when Ferguson and Massey Harris merged, circa 1952. All the tractor drivers were wearing tweed jackets with the familiar farmer's caps. We then had a couple of further films, the most relevant was a John Deere film pre the Second World War which previewed the tractor range of the 1930's in the US, with the Model A, B & G. What was interesting to note was the focus on row crop weeding.