City's Monument To Flour Power (19 August 1978)

I liked the recent Gazette item about the old windmill at Bradwell and how a young man was attempting to make it operational again on a do-it-himself basis.  All power to his elbow.

When I first came to this district and travelled on the old “Nobby Newport” train from Wolverton to Newport Pagnell I used to cast a speculative eye on that old mill on the hill.  It seemed to share the same general look of disrepair as most things just after the second world war, so I was glad when the county council decided to make a grant towards its preservation – a job carried out externally in 1950.

Some years ago the mill was surveyed by Mr. Kenneth Major, B. Arch, ARIBA, and his 1720 words report was published in the 1973 Milton Keynes Journal of Archaeology and History.  Though couched in technical terms, which are difficult for a layman to follow, the report is a good example of what a specialist can deduce from an array of odds and ends, some still in situ and a good many of them not.

Some essential parts were missing and another item was there which had never “belonged” to that mill at all.  Yet he was able to say how the mill had worked originally and how it had been adapted to work later by using some of the oldest parts plus new fittings.  Here are some of the points as I interpret them:

The mill appeared to stand on a mound, but in fact was sunk into it.  The original sails were 52 feet in diameter and the mound was added to ease the work of the miller in setting the sailcloths on the sails and in starting the mill.  The sails were reduced in length whey they were renewed by the millwrights, Thompsons of Alford in 1950.

The rear of the traditional boat-shaped cap (which still hangs out from the tower’s top or “curb”) originally housed the gear by which the cap and sails were turned into the wind.  Later the method of turning the cap was changed and the chain wheel was fixed outside the rear of the cap.

The mill was a “two pair” one, in that it had two pairs of millstones.  One pair was of Peak stone and the other was of French stone for the finer flours.  The Peak stones were 4ft wide and the French stones 4ft 6in.

The report concludes that although this was only a two-pair mill, it was used as a trading mill, buying grain and selling flour and meal, rather than for grinding a customer’s own grain for a miller’s due.

It was an excellent example of the small tower mill which was built at the end of the 18^th century and the millwork was typical of that period of change.  The wooden gearing was quite unrefined and heavy, for it was only a step away from the “cog and rung” gearing which came before gearing was designed mathematically.  The later work was not so crude or empirical in its design.  The machining was more accurate and the adjustments were finer.

“Bradwell Mill is an important monument of the period just prior to the Industrial Revolution,” the report concluded.

The Journal also carries two photographs of the mill, one taken about 65 years ago and the other taken in 1945.  In the first the cap and sails appear to be pretty well intact, but much less so in the second.

Curiously, this report makes no mention of the fireplace and flue referred to in the Gazette as an almost unique feature, there being only one other example in the country.  Is it a fireplace?  If so, was neither the fireplace nor the flue visible when the survey was undertaken?  Or were they thought to be of little moment?

If it is a fireplace – and there should not be much doubt about that – then I imagine it would be used to help dry-out wet grain or some other crop in some way thought to be safe, provided there was someone in attendance.

Wet crops have always been a problem for British farmers.  In the fourth century BC – long before the Romans came – Greek geographer, Pytheas, noted that the British farmer often gathered corn green and threshed under cover.  This demanded parching the grain to make it keep.  After the corn was dried it was kept in basic lined pits.

This practice seems to have continued through the Roman occupation, this district quite a number of so-called Romano-British villas (farmsteads) have been excavated.  In some of the smaller cases it would be hard to say how much were Roman and how much native British, for the substantial remains were shaped stone channels in the ground.  There were signs of fires at the xxx and when these structures were first brought to xxx up and down the country was thought they were hypocausts – the means by which the Romans provided under-floor hearing for their homes.  It soon became apparent, however, that there were corn-drying oven fire at one end sent hot air along the channels and gently heated a floor which corn was laid which was never itself in contact with the flame.

Incidentally, there is apparently no evidence that there ever was a fantail at the Bradwell mill, as there were and still are on new mills.  Their purpose is to redress torque and keep sails orientated in the quarter.  Clever chaps, forefathers, considering what means at their disposal.