The Sunbeam Little Wonder Junior by Quentin Cockburn

We had this shearing machine, it was portable, allegedly, one of the best. It had an Austral Villiers engine, painted green enamel.  Like all ‘British-built” engines, simple.  (Unless of course you were really foolish and purchased a Triumph Dolomite.)   A single arm, and attachment for a comb, all worm drive and oil lubricated. It looked like a tentacle from ‘Captain Nemo’, with a bit of fifties sci-fi thrown in.

To work properly we needed to keep the thing at the correct engine speed.  ‘Too fast’, and the hand piece would tear strips of the sheep, ‘too slow’, and the bloody thing would get jammed and stall.  The trick was to know when the hand-piece was labouring round a particularly area, the belly, the flanks or in the dags.  (For our extensive overseas readership, ‘dag’ is a colloquial term used to describe the turd encrusted bits of wool around the arse and the flanks. Adopted as a pejorative adjective to describe absence of sartorial refinement… Parl: “ Jeez, aint Brian a real Dag in them corduroy flairs! )  

The governor, the device that kept the engine from over-revving was the key to the operation.  It consisted of a bit of wire on the carby, connected to the throttle, if it revved too high the wire would trip the throttle and it’d calm down a bit.

Our shearer, (after many had come and gone) was a great bloke called “ Dave’.  We’d stand by the machine as it ‘putt putt whirred putt putt whirred’, and he’d give a signal and we’d ‘go easy’ on the governor.  It required nerves of steel, and an engineers ear for “listening” to the ‘note’.  Of course we only used it for one season.  After that Dave brought his own electric one and lashed it to the rafters.  Problem Solved!  We returned to pretending to herd, draft, and push.
We were hopeless!

We need a Sunbeam Little Wonder Junior, (favoured device for sheep duffers the world over) in Parliament.. We lack a “Governor”.

Now I’m being serious here.  I was educated by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Both as the genial and astute ‘Pete and Dud’, and the crass and profane ‘Derek and Clive’.  In between I learnt, with (the ‘governors’) acute ear, to distinguish between amusing and crass, and somewhere lower down the scale ‘unspeakably vulgar’.

There are cadences in humour, and nothing worse for the “educated” than vulgarity without wit, polished inference, lucidity and the (for want of any other description) the governing principles of effect, resonance, and obliqueness.  You see the best humour attacks you from all sides, it packs a punch on myriad levels, and it’s depth is in the telling, and the ‘wonder’ is in being unaware of where the “Schwerpunkt” may strike.  (Dear readers I am a novice in matters military, but I believe this was the term used by Guderian and others to describe the meeting point of ‘pincers’ in Blitzkrieg. Something about surprise and overwhelming strength. I have neither,.)

The governor is embedded as a shared cultural inheritance wrapped delicately in an established social convention, colourful, mannered, and universally understood.  To share a light on something we acknowledge and make it different, transformed.  Isn’t that what humour is.?

Mal Brough’s’ Menu is a tipping point, these conventions have been devalued, and the governor despatched.  No small wonder, and not a lot of Sunbeam either. Is it manners, or education?