1890’s
Bunce (Ashbury) Ltd are the oldest British manufacturers of snow clearing equipment and we have been at the vanguard of developments in this field. Our company was originally founded in 1896 as a blacksmiths by the current Directors' great, grandfather, William John Bunce, just a few hundred metres from our current location which we moved to in 1900 and have been on this site in Ashbury ever since, expanding from time to time, as need arose.
1920’s
William John Bunce was the first person in this country to put a steel snowplough in front of a lorry and it wasn’t many years after this innovation that the horse draw snowploughs we previously manufactured were a thing of the past. We have manufactured snowploughs continuously ever since. The 1920’s also saw the commencement of our own Bunce grit/cinder spreading units.
1940’s
The 1940’s saw us commence production of snow blower and snow cutter attachments and we are still the only UK manufacturer of this type of product.
1960’s
When David Bunce, the current Directors' father, spotted the Danish built Epoke range of salt spreaders, the nail was in the coffin for our own grit spreading unit. The quality of production combined with new innovate designs such as the ‘Epoke Metering System’ made Epoke leaders in the ‘field’ and Bunce (Ashbury) Ltd took on the Epoke agency in the UK in 1964, without a backward glance. The range now includes units capable of spreading dry salt, pre-wetted salt, pure brine or a combination of all three. Epoke A/S, founded in the 1930’s by Ole Christian Thomsen, are also still a family run business, now in its 3rd generation. When Epoke was originally formed its main business was manufacturing drain grabs which we sold very successfully in this country.
This decade also saw the death of Albert Bunce (William John Bunce's son) and the retirement of Misses Irene and Doris Bunce (William John Bunce's Daughters) who had been equal partners in the Business with Albert Bunce.
In 1968 we decided to close the agricultural engineering arm of the business to concentrate on the Municipal sales of our snow clearing products. At the time the agricultural side represented about half of our total turnover but in the first full year after closing this our total turnover increased so we had more than doubled our municipal sales
1970’s
In 1971 we became a Private Limited Company. We bought the manufacturing rights of the Croker Snowcutters which we have gone on to develope into our SnoBlo range. (Ted Croker, the designer of the snowcutters, was a fully qualified engineer but he was perhaps more famous for being the secretary of the Football Association.)
1980's
In the early 1980's we were one of the first companies in the UK to develope a plastic snowplough. These have a high density polymer sheet attached to a steel skeleton, thus producing a strong, lightweight snowplough which required less traction to be pushed than conventional all steel snow blades.
In 1988 David Bunce retired and handed over the reigns to his three sons Philip, Stephen and Andrew Bunce who are currently the Joint Managing Directors. This is an unusual Company structure but has worked well for the last 20 plus years
1990's to the present day
In the early 1990's we bought the manufacturing rights to the Bunce Mikro Snowplough Sweeper Combination which we had been importing from Denmark for about ten years
As Epoke's main customer for drain grabs (we were buying more than half of their production),we took over production of thproduct in 2000 when Epoke decided to cease production so they could just concentrate on their Salt Spreaders and De-icing sprayers
Times have changed, products have been adapted through the years to incorporate developments in technology and to meet the continually changing requirements of ‘Winter Maintenance Management’, but some things have remained the same. Quality, reliability and service.
