Ahhhh, reel mowers, I get it. This entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography explains it pretty well:
In 1941 the family moved to a house in Bray Street, Concord, that Richardson had designed. When Garry started (1948) a lawn-mowing business during university vacations, his father made two complex reel-type mowers to help him. Driven by the desire to succeed again, Mervyn continued to build lawnmowers in his backyard workshop and registered the name Victa Mowers (a corruption of his middle name) in mid-1950. Over the next two years he built and sold sixty reel-type mowers, powered by imported Villiers two-stroke engines.
In 1948 Richardson had watched a public demonstration of the 'Mowhall' rotary-blade lawnmower, which required two people to push and pull it over long grass and was never a commercial success. In August 1952 he hit upon the idea of putting a Villiers engine on its side to drive a set of rotating blades. Within a few hours he had assembled the prototype of the Victa rotary lawnmower from scrap metal, billy-cart wheels, and a jam tin used as a petrol tank.
Would love to see one of those reel mowers! Has one ever been seen?
