The head of Ford Motor, Edsel Ford, Henry’s son, died unexpectedly in 1943, whereupon Henry Ford came back to take over the company. Upon Henry Ford’s death from the effects of a stroke in 1946, his grandson Henry Ford II took over control of the company. He immediately started to dismantle a number of the things that his grandfather put into place. One of those things was the “handshake agreement” between Ferguson and Ford. Ford II disliked the lack of Ford’s marketing of the tractor business, and wanted to cut out the middleman. In late 1946, he advised Ferguson that the agreement would be ending on June 30, 1947.

Harry Ferguson won $9.25 million compensation in 1952 from Ford. In 1953 he merged with the Canadian Massey-Harris manufacturers to form Massey-Harris-Ferguson, which, in 1958, became Massey-Ferguson Co. He retired from Massey-Ferguson in 1954, selling out his portion of the company. After his departure, he continued to work on and develop advancements in automobiles. He came up with a number of them through his Harry Ferguson Research enterprise. He retired to Stow-on-the-Wold, in Gloucestershire, England, where he continued to work on four-wheel drive and anti-locking braking systems. His designs were adopted in the mid-1960’s by a number of Formula One racers. However, as he found in his early tractor and implement designs, another commercial breakthrough was to be elusive. Harry Ferguson suffered from insomnia and depression and, when he died from a drug overdose on October 25, 1960, a coroner’s jury returned an open verdict on whether he had committed suicide. ♦