Sheep-shearing, toasters and secrets

My kind of Christmas shopping - in a woollen mill that is at least 50% museum. A very odd dyptich, in which the link is a certain amount of mystery, and sheep-shears. We had a set similar to the ones on the left at home. Not that we ever sheared sheep - they were used for pimping dairy cows for the show-ring

There is a very long history of the Chicago Flexible Shaft Co. that I have only had time to skim-read in part. A son of Irish immigrants in New Hampshire, born 1869, worked at a sheep-shearer manufacturing plant, argued with his boss, dropped out, renounced his family, and ran away to Boston, where he worked clipping not sheep but horses. Eventually, he and a childhood friend moved to Chicago, took new names, started a business together and began manufacturing animal clipping equipment, succeeding in keeping their past and new lives completely separate, as he became a multi-millionare before he died in 1921

Interesting, but obscure - except that the Chicago Flexible Shaft Co. became, in the early 20th century, the Sunbeam Corporation, manufacturing coffee makers, ('Mixmaster') electric mixers and, most famously, toasters - still available on eBay at surprisingly high prices! The company remained successful until disabled by a fraudulent chief executive in the 1990s

Alvan Blanch is also, to me, a familiar name from childhood, as the premier manufacturer of grain driers. The company is named after a real person, the founder, born in 1916. Alvan worked as a demonstrator of sheep-shearing equipment (sadly, not the Chicago company) until his employers (mysteriously, to me) backed him to become a farmer in Wiltshire, UK. He used that as a base to begin, in the 1950s, manufacturing farm machinery. Driers, and other crop processing and weighing equipment, became their speciality, and the company has been a spectacular international success. Alvan died in 1991, but the business is now headed by one of his sons. No doubt the half-hundredweight and two-stone weights were originally for sack weighing

The internet is surprisingly coy about any further details of Alvan's life - to the extent that I suspect it might have been professionally laundered. Is there something about sheep-shearing that engenders a craving for both commercial success and extreme secrecy?