Flour has played a crucial role in society for thousands of years. As a staple part of our diets it has an important role in public health. Contents 1: Contents2: What is in a grain?3: Fortification4: Gluten5: Miller's lung See some of the items relating to health on our new Gems pages here
Author: Chris Viney
Homeland health
Purity, Quality and Merit. This Gem is a Certificate of Excellence, issued by the Royal Instituation of Public Health and Hygiene to certify that the Homeland Flour produced by Witherington and Over fulfilled their required quality standards. Witherington & Over was a milling company in Reading, not far from where the Archive is now at…
Letting the cat out of the bag
Meet Biddy who worked for Bemis Bags for 79 years. Introduced as a company trademark in the 1880s for Bemis Bags, images of similar cats in bags were used in company products and advertising up until the 1960s. This is the original cat: her name is Biddy and she was a common sight at the…
Nice rice
Mill don’t just grind flour. This is a donkey-powered rice mill in China. It makes use of an Edge Runner Stone rather than using a pair of flat millstones. To work it, the rice would be placed on the stationary lower stone. The donkey then drags the top vertical stone around the edge of this lower stone,…
The life-giving camel
Mills come in all shapes and sizes: sometimes they even come with a camel. This postcard shows a camel-driven Saqiya or Sakia. They were once a common sight across the Middle East and Asia, and in some areas are still in use today. They were animal-driven machines, with which water could be raised from one…
Small scale
This curious contraption is a chondrometer and is used for measuring the quality of grain. This unusual Gem is a chondrometer: a measuring instrument designed to determine the bulk density of grain. It is essentially a specialised set of scales, with a small pot for the grain on one side, and a counterweight that slides…
Theatre of machines
One of the oldest books in our collection, a guide for centuries of millwrights. This fascinating Gem is an enormous folio-sized book called the Theatrum Machinarum Universale of Groot Algemeen Moolen Boek, which translates as the Universal Theatre of Machines or Large General Mills Book. It was produced by Johannis van Zyl and Jan Schenk as a reference…
Gems of the Archive: The Universal Theatre of Machines
Hello, it’s me again. Unbelievably I am now halfway through my internship at the Mills Archive (insert obligatory Bon Jovi reference here), and the gem page is really starting to fill up. This week Mildred had a treat in store for me in the form of The Universal Theatre of Machines, an original 17th-century millwright’s…
Measure for measure
‘Safe as a thief in a mill.’ Millers have historically had a terrible reputation. Old sayings such as ‘honest millers have hairy palms’ and ‘safe as a thief in a mill’, show how unpopular they were in their local communities. They were accused of stealing more than was due to them, as well as having…
A lonely fight for survival
“Newport’s cattle market had not seen anything like it before. There, talking business among the weather-beaten faces of Isle of Wight farmers, was a woman.” This Gem is a newspaper cutting from The Southern Echo, a regional tabloid newspaper covering Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. The article, which was published on 14th March 1978,…