Herbert Austin, 1st Baron Austin (8 November 186623 May 1941) was an English automobile designer and builder who founded the Austin Motor Company. For the majority of his career he was known as Sir Herbert Austin, and the Northfield bypass is called "Sir Herbert Austin Way" after him. Background and early life The son of a farmer, he was born in Little Missenden, Buckinghamshire in South East England, but the family moved to Wentworth Woodhouse, near Rotherham, Yorkshire in 1870 when his father was appointed farm bailiff. Herbert Austin first went to the village school, later continuing his education at Rotherham Grammar School. In 1884, he emigrated to Australia, travelling with a maternal uncle, who lived in Melbourne but had recently returned to England on a family visit. They travelled to Australia by ship, via the Cape. Life in Melbourne He started work with his uncle who was the works manager at a general engineering firm, Mephan Ferguson, in North Melbourne. Two years later he joined Alex. Cowan & Sons, a Scottish paper business which had an agency for printing equipment and Crossley gas engines. Later he worked for the Langlands Foundry Company Limited in Yarra Bank, Melbourne, which made locomotive boilers, wheels and gold mining equipment. To develop his drawing skills, Austin attended Hotham School of Art in North Melbourne, outside working hours. During this time, he submitted a design for a swing bridge over the Yarra River at Spencer Street, Melbourne, for a competition organised by the Government of Victoria, but did not win. In December 1887, Austin took up his new appointment as manager of an engineering workshop owned by Richard Pickup Park, who was developing a new sheep-shearing machine for Frederick York Wolseley. On the strength of this new managership, he married Helen Dron in Melbourne on 26 December 1887. Born in Melbourne on 23 October 1866, she was the seventh daughter of Scottish parents. They were to have two daughters, Irene (born in 1891, later Mrs. Waite) and Zeta (later to become Mrs Lambert). Their only son, Vernon James Austin, was killed in action in France during the First World War on 26 January 1915. After Austin spent three months improving the sheep-shearing machine, he was asked to join The Wolseley Sheep Shearing Machine Company, in Sydney. Shortly after joining, he was sent to a sheep station at Avoca, Victoria to study the machines in