"Denford Small Tools" was founded in Brighouse by (so far as is known) Horace Denford in the years before World War Two and is still trading today. Original products included a range of engineering inspection and measuring equipment and tool holders together with, no doubt, sub-contract work for the many local machine-tool companies. It is believed that Denford moved at least part of their operation to Box Tree Mills in Wheatley, Halifax, in the closing years of the war - the building having being occupied between 1942 and 1944 by a ship-telephone equipment manufacturer, Arthur Graham & Son, who had been bombed out of their Woolwich premises. Having set up in the Box Mill plant a new company "Denford Machine Tools" was created and manufacture started of two small precision bench lathes branded "Box-Ford". These machine, for which there must have been a limited market at a suggested price of £175 (when a backgeared and screwcutting ML7 was around £60) nevertheless had a production run hinted by the factory at in excess of 400 units. This early effort was quickly followed by an improved copy of the American South Bend "9-inch", a design that was to make the company so well known. In 1952 Denford sold out to Harrison and moved his operation (commonly known by the initials D.S.T.) to the Brighouse site the company occupies today.  Having given up control to Harrison Denford must have set out to sell in the same (and growing) market segment - education. With an accelerating program of building during the late 1940s and 1950s England's secondary and further education service was being re-housed in purpose-built premises, with fully-equipped workshops, and the "Viceroy" was obviously aimed at this market segment. The lathe was carefully designed to address the shortcomings that limited the appeal of a Boxford as a training lathe: not only was it more robustly built but, more importantly, concentrated on safety and incorporated features that ensured there was as little chance as possible of young fingers getting involved with drive belts, changewheels or the inside of screwcutting gearboxes. Boxford of course were forced to follow suite and, to meet the challenge, introduced the Underdrive (UD)  lathes and, later, the Mk. 2 underdrive with its single-lever-operated backgear.
"Viceroy" was a marketing name used widely by the Denford's Small Tools Department and, by the end of the 1950s, was being attached to a number of different metal and wood turning lathes, edge-tool sharpening equipment, double-ended grinders and polishers, disc and belt-sanding machines, bench and pillar drills, drill sharpening machines, a metal shaper (originally the "Royal"), as well as two milling machines made for them by the A.E.W. Company in Norfolk. Wood lathes were offered in both between-centres and bowl-turning types and, in some cases, were adaptations of lower-specification metal lathes - the TDS-1LS lathe being an example when, fitted with wood-turning equipment (including a  very heavily-built out-board bowl-turning attachment) it became the Model TDS 3MW and was advertised as a combined metal and wood lathe.
All the metal lathes were of 5-inch or (later) 5.5-inch  centre height and, without exception, carried on neat underdrive stands. Only two between-centres capacities appear to have been offered: 24-inches and 40-inches with the latter carrying the letter "L" as a suffix to its model number.  Although hardly things of beauty  (and with some strange constructional details including being held together with a mixture of BSW, BSF, UNC and BA fasteners) they were very strongly-built, compact lathes designed, with great success, to appeal to the educational market as it existed in the 1950s and 1960. Although modelled closely on the general layout of a Boxford (with which it is sometimes confused) the Viceroy featured several significant improvements: a compact and safe underdrive stand, a more massive bed with larger way Vees and integral feet; a separate power-shaft for sliding and surfacing speeds with the leadscrew left for screwcutting only; a totally enclosed oil-bath screwcutting gearbox (which could be operated with the lathe running); single-lever engagement of backgear and a useful spindle lock for removing chucks (both features eventually to be fitted on the Mk. 2 Boxford); a rigid, doubled-walled apron (with an oil sump on the power cross-feed model) and, as a useful finishing touch, a tailstock barrel carrying a No. 3 Morse taper. The headstock spindle, like that on the Boxford, ran in taper roller bearings and had the same 1.5" x 8 t.p.i threaded nose but with a fractionally larger bore of 13/16". The headstock was unusual in that (on backgeared versions) the final drive was not direct by belt but geared down slightly by passing through a supplementary gear arrangement in the headstock, making the lathe rather noisier than it should have been - and providing yet one more thing to wear out or go wrong.
From thoroughly well-specified metal lathes to both simple wood-turning and combination wood-turning and inexpensive plain-turning metal lathes the company generally used the same basic casting for bed, tailstock and elements of both headstock and carriage - thus saving both a great deal of money and simplifying the provision of spares. Although the lathes altered in detail over the years from any one era the aim was always  to make the design as modular and interchangeable as possible. The "TDS-4" and "TDS-5BG" were both entry-level models with the No. 4 having just belt drive and the No. 5BG the addition of  backgear. The "TDS-1" had screwcutting by changewheels and hand-powered cross feed whist the top-of-the-range TDS-1/1-G.B. was fitted with a screwcutting gearbox and a separate power shaft to provide sliding and surfacing feeds. An important part of the gearbox screwcutting arrangements, and vital to extend the threading range, was a set of extra 14DP changewheels, mounted on a stud behind the gear-train quadrant, and stamped: A = 16t, B = 18t, C = 22t, D = 24t, E = 26t, F = 27t and G = 35t.
All models were mounted on cabinet stands that took up a minimum amount of room, just 17" deep front to back, and held a motor and countershaft unit that provided (in the case of TDS-1/1-G.B) and in conjunction with its single-lever-engaged backgear, eight spindle speeds from of: 75, 110, 175, 250, 400, 570, 900 and 1300 rpm to 1400 r.p.m. A  0.75 h.p. 3-phase motor was standard, with the option of 1.5 h.p. when used industrially rather than educationally. On the later MK. 2  the 8 spindle speeds were modified to become: 60, 85, 135, 200, 410, 570, 930 and 1350 rpm. Surprisingly for a lathe intended to teach the basic of turning the bottom speeds of  60 rpm was still too fast for screwcutting and, if this had been reduced to below 40 rpm it would have made the machine much more suitable for its intended customers.
In conjunction with an 8 t.p.i. leadscrew the screwcutting gearbox provided 48 threads from 4 to 224 tpi and 26 power feeds, the longitudinal rate varying from 0.0014" to 0.0118" and the cross from 0.0005" to 0.0046". On the Mk. 2 these rates were changed to become: sliding feeds 0.0014" to 0.08" and surfacing 0.0005" to 0.3".
The tailstock was robustly constructed with the usual set-over facility for turning shallow tapers, a No. 3 Morse taper and, unusually for a lathe of this size, a hollow spindle that passed through the casting and handwheel.
The original style of the Viceroy was interesting with the carriage and tailstock reflecting the "round" lines common in the 1930s and 1940s but the headstock and screwcutting gearbox ahead of their time with a distinctly angular look. However, by the 1960s, the range had distinctly old-fashioned air about it and, to keep it looking fresh, Denford introduced a Mk. 2 version with very square styling. Although some mechanical changes were made (and the speed ranges altered)  it seems that the real extent of the re-design was to dust off the original blueprints, replace every curved line with a straight one and make new patterns. An improved oil-bath power-feed apron incorporating an adjustable automatic knock-off was introduced - though the widespread use of plastic-coated metal handles secured by just spring-dowel pins was not so praiseworthy. In later years various models of these newer machines became available, from plain-turning to more highly-developed and generously-specified 280 and "Synchro" models fitted with manual or electrically-operated variable-speed drive.
Viceroy machine tools were rarely advertised other than in the educational press and are still little known, even in their country of origin; consequently, the market under-values them and, if you want a neat, strong, very compact lathe with a generous capacity at a bargain price a Viceroy may be the machine to look for..