TOMMY ROBINSON SAW.

[Stanley]

TOMMY ROBINSON SAW. 
Thirty years ago, whilst I was doing Ellenroad I was approached by an architect who wanted some heritage items to enhance the Wheatsheaf Centre.  One of the things I found him was a Tommy Robinson saw made in Rochdale.  These three pics are of the saw in its original location in 1988 at what is now a gas engine museum at Poynton.  I've forgotten the name of the bloke who ran it and the name of the old colliery where it was based.[Anson colliery]  The bloke's trade had been woodman and he bought this saw from the joiners in Stockport who had bought it new in about 1914.  It spent the first four years of its life sawing boards for duckboards in the trenches and after that was used almost exclusively for sawing oak coffin boards.  The beauty of these saws was that they never deviated from the thickness setting.  If you set it to saw an inch board it was still an inch thick when it finished the cut.  When I saw it in this location it was erected out in the woods with a roof over it.  If you want to see it today, it is still in the Wheatsheaf Centre at Rochdale.  Tommy Robinsons of Rochdale were a famous firm and exported woodworking machinery all over the world.  It was always a mystery to me how such a wonderful firm could go out of business.