R A Lister and Company
| Private | |
| Industry | Manufacturing |
| Fate | Taken over / Merged |
| Successor | Hawker Siddley, Lister Petter |
| Founded | 1867 |
| Defunct | 1986 |
| Headquarters | Dursley, Gloucestershire, England |
| Products | Engines |
| Parent | Hawker Siddeley (1965-1999) |
| Subsidiaries | Blackstone & Co |
R A Lister & Company was founded in Dursley, Gloucestershire, England, in 1867 by Sir Robert Ashton Lister (1845–1929), to produce agricultural machinery.
The founder of R A Lister and Company was Robert Ashton Lister, who was born in 1845. He led the exhibit of the family's products to the Paris Exhibition of 1867, but on return fell out with his father, and in the same year founded R.A.Lister and Company in the former Howard's Lower Mill, Water Street in Dursley to manufacture agricultural machinery.
In 1889 Robert acquired the UK rights to manufacture and sell Danish engineer Mikael Pedersen's new cream separator, which through a spinning centrifugal separator allowed the machine to run at a constant speed and hence create a regular consistency of cream. Marketed in the UK and British Empire as "The Alexandra Cream Separator", its success resulted in Pedersen moving to Dursley. In 1899, he founded the Dursley Pedersen Cycle Company with Ashton Lister. Robert was a pioneer of business in Western Canada, and took the first cream separator in that region over the plains of Alberta in a journey made by horse buggy.
By the early 1900s, R.A. Listers had redesigned Pedersen's cream separator, expanded its lines of sheep shearing machinery, was producing milk churns and wooden barrels for butter, and from the off-cuts developed a successful line of wood-based garden furniture.
In 1909 the company acquired manufacturing rights from the London-based firm of F.C. Southwell & Co. for their design of petrol-driven engines (derived from the design of a range of imported engines made by the U.S. based Stover Manufacturing and Engine Company).
During World War I, the factory was focused solely on War Department production, producing petrol engines, lighting sets and munitions. Many of the men left for the front, meaning that a large portion of the workforce was female. After the war, Sir Robert Lister retired and turned management at Dursley over to his grandsons (sons of Charles Ashton Lister CBE) Robert, Frank, Percy and George together with A. E. Mellerup. Charles Ashton Lister managed the company's business in North America and was based in Canada. George managed home sales and Frank was in charge of buying, while Cecil did not have a clearly defined role at all, and, although Robert was the eldest, it was Percy (later Sir Percy) who had by far the most significant impact.
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