Hello everyone! I have just finished my third week at The Mills Archive, and it is amazing how much more I keep learning.
This week carried a big personal achievement, as I managed to reach my goal of uploading 200 cuttings on to the catalogue by the middle of the week! Needless to say, this figure barely scratches the surface of our Press Cuttings Collection, and now that I have finished scanning in most of the items, I am ready to increase the number of cuttings available to you all online.
Of course, besides the numbers game I have for myself, updating the catalogue also carries the joy of discovering new fascinating stories about mills. Last week I talked about the restoration efforts at Nyetimber Mill, Burton Mill, and the mill at Bateman’s, Rudyard Kipling’s last home.
This week, I found even more links between mills and celebrities. The most glamorous was the purchase of Tickerage Mill in Sussex by Vivien Leigh in 1961. Unsurprisingly, the articles provided much more information about Ms. Leigh’s personal life, including her separation from Laurence Olivier at the time, than about the mill itself. Even now, the mill carries that fame with it, as evidenced by this article in The Telegraph about its sale. Another celebrity who lived in a mill was playwright John Osborne, and one of the articles regarding his stay there made me reflect on the attitude we have towards celebrity culture. After buying the mill in 1961, Mr. Osborne built a boarded fence six feet high around his property, shielding it from public view. In our modern world with technology allowing anyone to capture information and instantly share it with an audience of millions, I thought the obsession with celebrity lifestyles was a relatively new one. But these articles prove that the issue goes back more than fifty years, and that even with the technological limitations they had at the time, people still craved as much information as they could about the lives of the rich and famous.
As I continued to look through the cuttings, I also came across many more stories about restoration and mill conversion, and these are some of my favourite ones: Woods Mill was donated to the Sussex Nationalists’ Trust in 1966 and by 1968 it was converted into an educational centre, for which it won an award in 1970. Bembridge Mill was handed over to the National Trust in the late 50s, and was converted into a museum by 1973. Barnham Mill used to produce flour, and then it was converted for the production of animal feed. In the 90s, it was bought in an auction by butcher Vic May, who planned to convert it into a museum. All of this work just goes to prove the versatility mills have, whether they are restored to carry out their original purpose, or whether the building is converted into something else entirely.
In addition to revealing fascinating stories about mills, the press cuttings are also important in the formation of timelines regarding a mill’s history. However, when cataloguing, I found that some of the articles I come across were given to the Archive without any indication of the date or source of the article.
I found it particularly frustrating this week because I found a series of articles about Rowner Mill. There are some dated articles from the mid-60s talking about plans to lease the mill to an angling club and convert it into a clubhouse, but there are other submissions with no date on them that lament the plans for the mill’s destruction. Because there was no date on the demolition articles, I did not know where those plans fit in chronologically, and whether the angling club saved the mill after plans for demolition had been made, or whether the mill was demolished despite efforts to try and save it. Although a quick search on Google revealed that the mill had indeed been demolished in the late 60s, it made me appreciate the convenience of having such easy access to well-recorded information, as well as sympathise with the researchers of the past, who would have had to spend a lot more time and energy than I did to uncover the same information.
Thank you all for following the progress of my internship. If you have any of your own special stories and memories to share, please feel free to do so in the comments below. Until next week!
