This is an (attempted) ‘enhanced’ (by Apple ‘Photos - Edit’ facility) version of the page above called “Our one and only view of a horse-drawn furniture wagon in action", and is perhaps the earliest view of James Archer’s business as it actually took place. Effectively, this photo shows the road-going part of a removal. This faded print apparently shows one of James Archer’s furniture boxes mounted on road-going wheels, for the purpose of local (within a town) or country (where there may be no suitable railway line) removals. Or indeed, presumably this would equally have been the beginning or end portions of a removal involving putting the furniture box or container onto a railway wagon for long (or indeed not so very long) distance transport purposes.
Four horses and two men to lead them, and no doubt an experienced (relating to horses) eye could spot much more than I have mentioned. And no doubt it goes almost without saying that the removals job involved, in those days, a considerable amount of ‘horse know-how’on the part of the two removals men seen here.
(See also my notes on the un-enhanced version of this shot on the preceding page of thsi site).
(20.9.2016): So this is the state of ‘technology’ in 1893: horse-drawn road-transport. Steam on the railways. Not yet steam on the roads, but this came to Archer Cowley with the turn of the century. And they progressed to steam traction-engines drawing two or three (horse-type) wagons in the 1900s (first decade), and on to petrol and diesel in the 1920s/30s/40s, including Foden and E.R.F pantechnicons with those wonderful (more or less everlasting, I gather) Gardner diesel engines.
(26.9.16): Perhaps James Archer’s stroke of business-genius was to foresee the opportunity represented by the railway/road integration of transport, and to capitalise on that by providing the necessary facilities that made such co-operation between road and rail a very practical proposition. That made the business very satifactorily profitable. But that phase of technological development came to an end in the latter-decades of the 20th century and perhaps the firm (then under the control of Cantays) did not move forward in the way James Archer had done in the 19th century to capitalise and re-invest in the new technology of transport in the way that firms like ‘Eddy Stobart’ did. And so the AC&Co business came to be sold into new hands and to disappear under the name of Robinson Removals, along witht the inherited good-will from so many well-handled removals operations. We (Ruth and I) remember discovering a good many year ago some of that good will existing even in our own (then) village of Lyddington, when we mentioned our connection with the firm.
(Added 6.2.18): Regarding: "Bowler, Captain, Drummer, Jolly, Pilot and other horses owned by AC & Co and sold on 6th June 1912” (the title of another page in this album), the horses shown here in 1893 would have been 19 years older in 1912, so, it seems most unlikely that any of those horses (sold) are shown in this ‘about 1893’ shot of the firm at its work. Well, well. And so it was. Horses were the staple product of transport in those days, and now things are entirely different.