Daisy Vacuum Cleaners were designed in France and built in England in the 1910s. In 1909 the Daisy works were beside the canal at Leamington Road, Birmingham. Daisy continued to make vacuum cleaners into the 1920s but was removed from the register of companies in 1929. According to Carroll Gantz in ‘The Vacuum Cleaner: A History’:
‘In 1890 the wooden Baby Daisy was made in England, which was the first working utilization of a bellows to create suction. The Baby Daisy was pumped using a long upright handle and included a floor nozzle, as well as an upholstery nozzle with a six-foot lengthening tube.’
The two Baby models shown were manually powered devices which needed two people, one to work the bellows to create suction and one to use the cleaning hose. Many households at this time had domestic servants to do the cleaning.
The first picture on the left, is of the Daisy No 2 Sweeper which required only one person to operate it, but had very limited power to just pick up crumbs.
Electric cleaners had been invented but many houses did not have electricity and there was a real fear of electrocution.
The card was found under the floorboards at Martin and Silvers clothing and shoe shop at 1, Buttermarket, Thame, during renovation work in 1980.
Notice that the prices are in pounds, shillings and pence, known as lsd. There was 12 pence in a shilling and 20 shillings in a pound. The lsd system dated back to Roman times when a pound of silver was divided into 240 pence or denarius with lsd standing for librum, solidus, denarius. On 15th February 1971 the United Kingdom changed to the current, much easier to understand, decimal currency with 100 pence in the pound.
