Seventy-seven years ago, the first shovel manufactured by the African Shovel Company appared on the South African market and today, the company - now well-known as Lasher Tools - is still making shovels of all shapes and sizes, as well as a host of similar tools. It was a firm of mining engineers, Blane & Co. Ltd., which founded African Shovel in 1928 with a factory in Barlow Street, Germiston. Shovels were followed by picks, spades forks and other garden and mining tools and the workforce, in those days, had a core of men from Sheffield, England. Sixty-four people were on the payroll by the early 1930's. Today the Lasher team consists of over six hundred able bodies all working together to produce tough, reliable tools, guaranteed.
Steel was imported from England until Iscor material became available in 1939 and ash handles were also imported until experiments with local timber proved successful. Even stinkwood was tried! The Second World War produced supply problems of course and local materials had to be used almost exclusively, although it had been company policy to use local material wherever possible from the beginning.
Not only did the firm survive those trying times, but in 1950, built a second factory in what was then Aerodrome Road (now Sigma Road, Industries West, Germiston). Spear & Jackson of England (which held a minority shareholding in the firm) opened a saw factory in Vanderbijlpark in 1948, which was taken over by African Shovel in 1962 and, at the same time, Blane & Co. - which was already handling sales and marketing of the shovel division - took on Spear & Jackson saws as well. In 1971, the Norton Group took a controlling interest in African Shovel Co. and the name was changed to Lasher Tools. The task of removing rock and rubble with shovels was known as lashing and the Scottish miners who came to South Africa at the turn of the last century, were known as Lashers. Lasher Tools finally became a wholly owned subsidiary of Norton in 1973. Growth from this period demanded new factory premises, which were built in Ladysmith. Here, saws, blades and cane knives are made. Current manufacturing facilities can supply the whole South African market as well as providing sufficient volume for export. With home markets firmly established in mining, building and construction, agriculture and forestry and the DIY market, exports have been an important part of growing the business for the past twenty-five years. Today, some fifteen percent of production goes overseas; UK, Europe, the Americas, the Pacific Islands, New Zealand, Australia, Africa and Indian Ocean Islands.