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Ewell - the Hogsmill River and its mills
This page is part of the Bourne Hall Outreach Programme,
an informal partnership between the Bourne
Hall Museum and Epsom and Ewell on the Internet.
The Bourne Hall Museum mounts exhibitions each year on aspects of
our local history. These exhibitions are fascinating - and much appreciated
by those who see them. They take considerable care and trouble to
assemble, and it is a great pity that, until now, the material in
these exhibitions has been inaccessible to the general public after
the exhibitions have closed. The Bourne Hall Outreach Programme will
put the text from all the exhibitions back to 1992 on the Internet,
thus giving you a mine of information about local history. We hope
you will find it useful.
The Museum has a permanent collection and also mounts exhibitions
on specific aspects of life in the past. They welcome enquiries about
places in the Borough, which should be addressed to the Curator, Bourne
Hall Museum, Ewell, KT17 1UF.
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The Hogsmill River and its Mills
When corn arrives at an old-fashioned mill, it is hauled up from waggons
into the loft through an overhanging projection called the luccombe. The
grain is poured out of the sacks, down a chute into a hopper on the floor
below, and this feeds the millstones. They are made out of stone from the
Peak District (for animal feed) or out of blocks of French burr stone bound
together (for wholemeal flour). The lower millstone stays still while the
upper one revolves, catching the grains between grooves which have been
cut across the stone, and so cracking and grinding it. These grooves slowly
wear down, and the millstone has to be pulled over for them to be cut again.
The flour spills out round the edge of the stones, and is then shaken in
a bolter, which is a mechanical sieve separating out flour from bran. The
top millstone, called the runner, rests on a shaft which runs down through
the floor: every pair of stones has a shaft, and they are all turned by
cogs driven from the main vertical shaft of the building, the crown post.
At the base of this is another cog called the wallower, which engages at
right angles with one which is attached to the millwheel, and in this way
the wheel drives the machinery. The millwheel turns slowly, but because
it connects to big cogs which then engage with little ones, the millstones
go much faster. The wheel is spun by the force of the stream, either because
the water flows fast underneath, or because it is directed along a wooden
trough to drop on top of the wheel or to strike it halfway. When the water
is to be diverted away from the wheel, a sluice gate is lowered across the
channel that leads to it, and at the same time another is raised to let
the flow from the millpond go round the back of the building.
The Hogsmill was a powerful stream in the early Middle Ages, and it turned
several mills at the head of its course. By 1408 there were only two, the
Upper and Lower Mills, although Ewell Court and Ruxley also had mills of
their own. The Upper Mill was the better site - when it was rebuilt in 1810,
it had six pairs of stones, and was grinding five waggon loads of wheat
every day. The mill had been enlarged across the bed of the stream, so that
the river now flowed through the middle, turning a central wheel. The miller
lived in style, with an ornamental garden, a fish pond and a pheasantry.
In 1832, after the Lower Mill had given up making paper, the milling firm
of Hall & Davidson bought it and installed new cast-iron machinery. Profits
from the mill was carried to their headquarters on the London coach - on
one occasion this was held up by highwaymen, and the money would have been
lost if the miller’s little son had not created a distraction by bursting
into tears and refusing to be moved from his seat (with the cashbox under
it). The Lower Mill was rebuilt in brick, instead of timber, in 1896, and
the millstones were replaced by roller plant, which produces white flour
rather than wholemeal. The tenant miller, Jesse Ayling, found that this
was an inferior product and he resigned in protest. Ironically the Upper
Mill, which Hall & Davidson had also taken over, kept its millstones and
was later to advertise the traditional quality of its flour, said to have
been supplied to Queen Victoria. By 1925 water levels had dropped, due to
extraction to supply the new suburbs, and the mills could only work in the
daytime. The Lower Mill burnt down in 1938, while the Upper Mill continued
on a small scale until 1953.
Paper is traditionally made from strips of linen and cotton, reduced in
water to a pulp called stuff, and spread out on a mould to form sheets.
The market for paper in London was met by mills in Surrey, where the clear
streams provided water which would wash the rags clean, as well as a source
of power for the mechanical hammers which mashed them. Children cut the
rags into strips and fed them into a long trough, where hard and soft hammers
were arranged to rise and fall on them until the linen and cotton fibres
were pounded free. The stuff made in this way was run off into a paper-making
vat, where a worker called the vatman would dip his mould into it. These
moulds were made out of a wooden frame covered with copper wires: there
was a pattern stitched over these in a finer wire, which appeared in the
finished paper as a watermark. The mould was dipped sideways into the stuff,
and then lifted up flat, so that it carried a film of paper with it. This
was passed to a second worker called the coucher, who laid the sheet onto
a piece of felt to drain. This was repeated again and again until six quires
of paper, each containing 144 sheets, had been stacked up. Then they were
taken to the screw press, and all the workforce helped twist the handle
on this, so that the water would be squeezed out of the paper. Then another
worker called the layman separated the sheets from the felts, and they were
hung up in the drying loft. This had vertical ventilation holes, so that
the wind played on the front of each sheet. When dry they were given a thin
coating of gelatine, called size, so that they would not absorb ink, then
they were briefly returned under a trip-hammer to be polished.
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