R. A. Lister & Co.

Robert Ashton Lister (1845-1929) set up as an agricultural machinery maker at Howards' Lower Mill, Dursley, in 1867, his father George having come to the town from Yorkshire in 1817. Between 1889 and 1892 the firm took a licence for the Danish Alexandra cream separator, was incorporated as a private company in 1893, took control of the Lister Electrical Machinery Company in 1903, and in 1909 added a petrol engine, on a design bought from F. C. Southwell of London, to drive electricity generators and its new sheep-shearing machinery; the founder was knighted in 1911. The 1920s and 1930s brought the Auto-Truck of 1926, narrow-gauge locomotives built until 1968, the slow-running CS diesel of 1929 and the D-type petrol engine of 1931, of which more than 250,000 were made by 1964. A mechanised foundry opened at Dursley in 1938, when the firm — 'one of the few surviving family concerns in the country' — employed 3,000 at Dursley and 1,000 at Stamford.

Lister's shearing business dates from 1909, when the company used its four decades of agricultural experience to develop its first mechanical shearing machine, a two-operator machine that far outpaced hand shearing at about fifty sheep a day. For Land Rover owners it offered the 'Lister sheep shears', on a leaflet (L.A.S./5M/958, received by the Automobile Association's technical library on 5 December 1958) 'as approved by the Rover Co. Ltd for use with the Land-Rover'. The Lister mounted sheep-shear set comprised a gearbox with pulley and vee-belt for the Land Rover power take-off, on a bracket at the rear of the vehicle, and two Lister 'Ace' handpieces — 'the handpiece of champions', craftsman-built with six combs to choose from — on 4 ft 6 in flexible drives (6 ft drives were available), designed to run at the Land Rover's standard idling speed. It cost £54 6s 6d with standard comb and cutter or £55 7s 6d with wide, with a flexible exhaust extension at 11s 6d a foot; the Land Rover needed the rear power take-off, and a hand throttle was recommended on petrol models. The leaflet gave R. A. Lister & Co. Ltd, Dursley, Gloucestershire, telephone Dursley 2371, by appointment to the Queen as manufacturers of agricultural machinery and dairy equipment, with branches at London, Stamford, Glasgow and Dublin.

After Charles Ashton Lister's death the Hawker Siddeley Group bought the company in 1965, and in 1986 merged it with its other engine maker, Petters, as Lister Petter Ltd. Lister Petter passed to Schroders Venture Capital in 1996, to its management in 2000 and to the EGL Group in 2013-17; after administration in 2013 it left Dursley, where it had been for 147 years, moving assembly to Hardwicke near Stroud in April 2014 and later to Aston Down, and is now owned by Sleeman & Hawken. The shearing side continues as Lister Shearing Equipment Ltd (registered in England no. 3496830), which records its manufacturing periods as 1909-47, 1950-98 and 2002 to the present, trades from Brunel Way, Stroudwater Business Park, Stonehouse, Gloucestershire, and launched its Nexus sensor shearing machine in 2020.