We recently found a copy of the “Engineers’ Pocket-Book for the year 1840”. As well as accounts and notes on his work the owner had written the following poem expressing his hopes about life O that I could obtain my wishI’d have each day a dainty dishOf plain meat fowl or fishWith a bottle of…
Author: Nathanael Hodge
Printing Blocks
The latest addition to our archive is a box of printing blocks used to create the images in articles by mill expert Rex Wailes. We’ve got several boxes of these already, and I’ve never been quite sure what to do with them. Are they worth keeping? Can we generate a usable image from them? Or…
A Celebration of the Life of James Venn
A Service of Celebration will be held for James Venn on Wednesday 21st January 2015, 10:45 at the Milton Chapel Chilterns Crematorium, Amersham, HP7 0ND The Chilterns Crematorium is situated just outside Amersham on the main A404 Amersham / High Wycombe Road. There are white gates at the entrance, which is clearly signposted, and a…
A photograph on iron
One of the oldest photos in the archive is this c.1880 image of Mr Holman and his employees, printed on iron. Tintypes or Ferrotypes were an early form of photograph. A sheet of thin, varnished iron (not tin, despite the name) was coated with photographic emulsion and exposed to light. This picture from the Geoff Holman…
Detective work at the Archive
To work in an archive you sometimes need to be a detective. This is especially true for the tangled web of the mill world, where everybody knew everybody and things were constantly passing from one person to another. A little digging can reveal unexpected connections between material that came to the archive by completely different…
New at the archive: John Munnings Collection
A collection of detailed watermill sketches by artist John Munnings, together with his notes and the typescript for a book, is the latest addition to the archive. John Munnings (1916-1987) was the son of a miller and nephew of the artist Sir Alfred Munnings. He was born at Mendham Mill, Suffolk, and his planned book is full…
More collections on the Hub
Fourteen Mills Archive collections are now on the Archives Hub. These include two full catalogues, the Reid Windmills Albums and E Lancaster Burne Correspondence, and twelve described at collection level only. The Archives Hub has also made the Mills Archive the subject of its monthly feature, which can be read here (follow the link at the end to see a list…
Mills Archive on the Archives Hub
The first Mills Archive collection can now be viewed on the Archives Hub. The Archives Hub is a website where archive repositories from across the UK upload their catalogues so that the country’s archival material can be searched in one place. My project over the last two months (funded by the Vodafone World of Difference scheme) has…
Harry Meyer (1900-1982)
Harry Meyer at Blackthorn, 12 June 1931. Photograph by Doris Meyer. Harry Meyer was a mill enthusiast who from the 1920s to the 1940s carried out cycle trips taking photographs of windmills throughout England. Harry was the son of Heinrich Freidrich Ludwig Meyer, a music teacher born in Hanover, Germany. Heinrich married Lillian Harriet Smith,…
Rex Wailes (1901-1986)
Rex Wailes at his home in Beaconsfield studying the Groot Volkomen Molenboek, 1939.Photograph by Hallam Ashley. This temporary page provides biographical detail about Rex Wailes, the pioneer of the UK’s windmill repair movement. Now his collection has moved to the Mills Archive we will be able to offer limited access to interested individuals. To speed…