Historical information

Robert Ashton Lister was born in England in 1845 into an industrial family. After attending the Paris Exhibition in 1867, Robert argued with his father and formed the R.A. Lister Company to produce agricultural machinery at his factory in Dursley, England. In 1889 he linked his machine with Pederson’s cream separator which now ran at a consistent speed due to a spinning centrifugal separator thus producing consistency of cream. It was marketed through the Commonwealth and Robert himself drove right across Alberta in Canada with horse and buggy to promote the machine. He also expanded the use of his machine to sheep shearing. In 1909 the Company acquired the rights to manufacture petrol driven engines. When World War 1 began in 1914 the Company focused on producing petrol engines, lighting plants and munitions for the War Department, the workforce was mainly female as the men enlisted and left for the Front.

After the War, Robert Lister retired, and the Company was taken over by his grandsons Robert, Frank, George and Percy with A.E.Mellerup. Their father Charles represented the Company in North America and Europe. Foreign competition and over supply of second-hand ex-military engines and lighting sets saw profits drop but the Company managed to recover under the leadership of Managing Director Percy.

In 1929 the Company designed the CS (cold start) diesel engine producing 6-7kW which became known as the Lister 9-1. The engines were all painted the same shade of Brunswick green. By 1936 Lister was producing a wide range of petrol and diesel engines most of which were small at 1.5 to 3 horsepower. These could be bought ‘stand-alone’ or powering a complementary range of pumps, churns, cream separators, auto-trucks, generating plant and sheep shearing equipment.

The most successful was the D Type Lister introduced in 1937 most of which were rated at 1.5hp at 700rpm. More than 250,000 were sold up to 1964 and although RA Lister ceased production many years ago, hundreds of these engines are still in use today.

Physical description

Green Lister Stationary Petrol Engine Serial No. 16268. It is the smaller of two Lister engines in collection. It was made in 1924, Dursley, UK. The two engines in the collection are petrol engines from the 1920s predating the more numerous diesel engines manufactured from 1920 on.