Don Pallot

Don Pallot

Lyndon Charles Pallot, a well loved character known as ‘Don', founded a transport museum

Bicycles

Don Pallot was born in Trinity and educated at the parish school. He developed an interest in mechanics from an early age and, after leaving school at the age of 14, started remaking bicycles until he became a trainee engineer at Jersey Railways, where his enthusiasm for steam was born.

In the early 1930s he opened Central Motor Works at Sion, Trinity, the agricultural works which was to become well known throughout the Island. He was a brilliant engineer who loved solving mechanical problems and his ingenuity led him to invent several implements which were to make the life of Jersey farmers easier.

The Pallot Elevator Digger, Last Furrow Reversible Plough, Single Furrow Reversible Plough, Tractor Mounted Cotil Winch and Tractor Mounted 2 Point Linkage Transport Box can be seen in the Museum today. His ability to improvise proved invaluable during the difficult years of the Occupation of Jersey by the Germans.

Family

It was at his home at Sion that Don raised his large family of six sons and five daughters with his devoted wife of 62 years, Dolly. It was in Dolly's honour that the Ransomes, Simms and Jefferies traction engine was named Dolly May.

A man of great vision, Don started collecting what he could of our mechanical heritage, with his ambition being realised in 1990 with the opening of the Pallot Steam Motor and General Museum . There is no doubt that but for his steady interest, maintained over many years, much that is on view today would have been lost forever. Locomotives were brought in from the UK, Belgium and Alderney and lovingly restored to form part of his vast and varied collection. He died at the age of 85 in 1996, but his memory lives on in his museum which his family continue to operate.

Biography

Steam was a life-long fascination for Lyndon ‘Don’ Pallot, who could with some degree of confidence be called Jersey’s Fred Dibnah. Fred was the famous TV personality who delighted audiences with his great knowledge of mechanical engineering and steam power. It was when Don joined the Jersey Western Railway as an apprentice steam engineer, some time before 1930, that there awakened in him a passion for steam power; a passion that stayed with him, undiminished, throughout his long life.

Steam could never be his bread and butter, having been superseded by internal combustion as the source of modern engine power, but whatever the motive force, Don was the man.

Schoolboy activities

Born at Vert Pignon on Rue du Tas de Geon, he started repairing and servicing pedal cycles while still at Trinity School. What made him so popular was his skill at fitting 3-gear Strurmey Archer hubs to old cycles. He went on to service and ‘soup-up’ motor cycles, especially for enthusiasts who competed in the Bouley Bay hill climbs. This he did at Temple View, a property now long gone and replaced by a magnificent ‘conker’ tree on the corner of the Howard Davis Farm opposite Trinity Church.

Close by, on the site where the present Trinity Arms stands, was a blacksmith’s shop, where Don used to spend time watching and taking in other skills. One of his innovations was to replace the flat rectangular fuel tank with a more aerodynamically-streamlined custom-built one. He not only tuned the machines but took part in the races as well, although there is no evidence that he was ever a winner.

His father was a cobbler and had tried farming which, during the depression years, was hazardous and resulted in bankruptcy. But Don retained strong ties to the agricultural community and it soon became clear that he carried an ‘inventing gene’ first exhibited by Moses Alexander Pallot, a great uncle at Mont Pellier Farm, who, in 1915, had patented a device for lifting the shafts of horse-drawn vehicles.

It’s easy to imagine, Don, as a child, watching his uncle work and listening to him explain what he was doing and all the time firing up a keen inquisitive and practical nature. Having completed his apprenticeship, Don decided to set up on his own in 1931 and worked from premises at Les P’tits Canons on St John’s Road, where he started servicing and repairing motor vehicles. At that time he lived at Sion on the site of what used to be Mauger’s Garage and when the opportunity arose to take on bigger premises, he was not afraid to borrow £500 and purchase the site where the JFTU shop is now.

Central Motor Works

This became Central Motor Works, which thrived under his keen business sense and sound mechanical knowledge. Soon he was an employer and his business grew to include the selling of road vehicles and farm machinery. The Occupation years brought business growth to a halt, but there was plenty for Don to do during that time. With the loss of export markets the population and farming economy became self-sufficient, but impoverished. He refused to work for the occupying forces on the grounds that he was too busy looking after farmers.

With a growing family, he was more than willing to exchange his services to the farmers for whatever produce they could spare and the reputation gained during those difficult years was to stand him in good stead after the Liberation. One of the areas into which he had expanded was contract work; ploughing and cultivating but also reaping and threshing cereal crops.

His penchant for innovation and design had flourished during the Occupation years when the ‘mend and make do’ approach was the only one available. He modified a Citroen car, purchased for £10, by adding a second gearbox and a power-take-off attachment. This attachment then drove a blade fitted to the side of the vehicle, which mowed hay and cereals. A benefit of the design was that the machine could be transported from farm to farm under its own power. His knowledge of steam power also came to the fore when he converted an imported French threshing machine, one of only two in the island, to work from a portable steam engine.

After the Liberation, farm vehicles, especially lorries, were imported, but many were too big to negotiate the narrow lanes and field entrances. With customary practicality and economy of thought, Don found the perfect solution. He stripped off the body, disconnected the brake pipes and drive shaft and simply cut 3 feet out of the chassis. He then turned the whole thing on its side (to get a better weld) and welded the pieces back together again then re-fitted the parts and, hey presto, down the lane and into the field without getting jammed between the granite pillars. This was possibly the single most characteristic innovation of his life.

Agriculture blossomed in the 40s and 50s when most farms converted from biological horse-power to petroleum horse-power, meaning that Don’s skills were in ever greater demand. At this time he developed a number of implements which bridged the gap between imported machines from grander landscapes with the requirements of the, by comparison, tiny Jersey fields, where every square yard of soil was in production. Where human resources had dug the field edges, where the plough could not reach, he invented the ‘travelling last furrow attachment’ working from the Ferguson 3-point linkage system.

Digging machine

Where human resources had harvested the Jersey Royal crops with a hand-fork, a good three-man team of French labourers digging up to a vergée a day, he developed the elevator digging machine, which was essential as few younger workers were prepared or able to carry on the onerous traditions of the war generation. Where cotils had been breezed and dug by hand, for the same reasons as above it was necessary to modernise, and Don developed the winch, again working off a Ferguson 3-point linkage that would haul the plough up the steep slopes.

All of these machines were built at Sion using a massive steam-driven steel press to form the parts. More than 15 people would be employed there during these years. Don was leaving more and more of the daily business management to his children and decided that his particular philosophy and approach to life should be employed for the benefit of the whole island when he stood for election to the States as Senator in 1978. Having narrowly failed to come in the top six, he then offered his services to the Parish as Deputy but again was unsuccessful. Though a disappointment, this did have the consolation of allowing him to divert his energy and intellect into the creation of his Steam Museum, which now stands as a wonderful reminder of the islands rich agricultural past and, not least, as a tribute to the man himself.

Don Pallot may not have been a snappy dresser and he may not have been able to beguile the electorate with sophisticated rhetoric but one can’t help wondering how different the island might be today if we’d had the courage to elect a man like him whose only qualifications were sound, practical, down-to-earth common sense, imagination, and a keen understanding of where the money comes from and to what best use it could be put.