Believed to have been made or commissioned by P.C.Payne & Son of Back Lane, High Street, Keynsham in Bristol, the tiny "Alton" hand-operated planer was seldom advertised and must have sold in tiny numbers. Astonishingly, it was still being listed as late as the early 1950s in a plain form with no automatic indexing on the cross feed and appears to have been made in both early and late versions - the former very Victorian in appearance but the latter (which may have been copied from the former by another maker) having the bed casting altered to give a more contemporary look. However, the rest of the machine appears to have been much the same, as a study of the pictures below will reveal.
Taking up little room despite their considerable machining capacity, the planer (in any size from bench-top to it's-so-big-we'll-have-to-cycle-round-it) is a most useful machine; economical of tooling they can be pressed into service for numerous tasks although this example - with a table 4.5 inches wide, a stroke of 14 inches and 3.5 inches of elevation on the tool slide - was intended for smaller jobs only.
Weighing 45 lbs the Alton was priced, in 1951, at £25, at the time just a little less than one of the cheaper backgeared and screwcutting lathes from the likes of Zyto or Corbett's