PART TWO - The John Mason Account
A primary source of information must be John Mason's 2003 self-published
book The Victa Story: Turning Grass into Lawn.

That book's Forward said this:

John Mason commenced with Victa in 1955 as their General Sales Manager.
Over the coming years he held a variety of titles including Group Marketing
Manager as well as serving as one of a team of three on the General
Management Committee. When he retired in 1969 he held the position of
Associate Director of Marketing.

It should be pointed out that Mason wrote his book at 84 years
of age - some considerable time after these events. The second point is
that Mason was never a first-hand witness to the Peach Tin. Nonetheless,
he was a senior Victa employee in the company's infancy, joining the
firm just a couple of years after Merv weaved his backyard magic.

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The extract from Mason's book is telling ...

THE PEACH TIN MOWER

So - on this momentous Saturday afternoon he made a 'skeleton' frame of
flat wrought iron bar material to which he assembled two mild steel round
rods as axles, front and rear, and to which he attached four cast iron
billy-cart wheels. A piece of flat steel bar was bent like an inverted 'U' and
attached to the skeleton frame to serve as a handle.

On the skeleton frame he mounted one of his Villiers mower engines in a
vertical position - the crankshaft was vertical with the flywheel magneto
and pulley (for the starting cord) uppermost. But it was the lower end of
the crankshaft which was to be the 'business' end of the experimental machine.
Here he attached a flat steel bar sharpened on the leading edges and fixed by
a heavy nut and washer to the lower end of the crankshaft.

To provide the engine with a fuel supply of the petrol/oil 2-stroke
mixture he mounted a peach tin to which he fitted a small tap and a piece
of plastic tubing which connected to the carburettor. It was this peach
tin which gave the experimental model its name.

Having filled the peach tin with fuel he wound the cord onto the pulley
and gave it a pull and the engine burst into life under control from the
throttle lever mounted on the handle.

Merv pushed the mower into some long grass and it disappeared - the grass
not the mower, and after a few minutes doing the same thing he saw that
with some modifications here was the basis of a new style mower/grass cutter.

He was ecstatic and called his wife to watch his demonstration - the first
demonstration of countless thousands by a Victa Rotary Mower.

Amongst other things which Merv Richardson saw was that, in its present
skeletal form, the mower was potentially dangerous; because stones and
other objects could be thrown out at speed and likely to injure the
operator or bystanders. So it was back to the drawing board, though I
suspect the plans for the Peach Tin mower were just a few rough sketches.

TO BE CONTINUED ...