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Women and needle-making

Susan Ing One of our regular volunteers, Susan Ing, has been sorting through the many books that were donated to our library from the collection of the late Alan Stoyel. In this newsletter she shares some insights in the role of women in needle-making from an article in the book Women in Industry and Technology from…

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English paper mills and forged French currency

A version of this article originally appeared as two posts on the Mills Archive blog in 2019.Mills have often played surprising and unexpected roles in world history. One example is the story of the part several English paper mills played in forging currency with the intent of undermining the French revolution. Assignats Assignats were a…

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Tolkien’s Mill

This article was first published on our blog on 10/05/2019 J R R Tolkien It is a widely known fact that J. R. R. Tolkien took a lot of inspiration for his novels from real places.  Interestingly for us, this includes mills: Sarehole Mill in Birmingham, to be precise.Although he was born in South Africa…

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Volunteer Spotlight: Forged French Assignats Part II: Britain’s and Charles X’s Roles

You may remember from a previous blog post the story of Albury Park Paper Mill, Guildford, Surrey and forged French assignats (a form of paper currency issued by the French Republic from 1789-1797). A recent discovery of an article in The Quarterly (the Journal of British paper historians, 106, April 2018) has provided us with an update…

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Volunteer Spotlight: Albury Park Paper Mill and its Forged Assignats

When I’m looking through articles in the Archive, I’m always fascinated in discovering how mills played a part in a wider, often unrelated area of history and their potential political impacts worldwide. One example can be seen in the records of Albury Park Paper Mill, in Surrey. In 1790, Charles Ball, a papermaker from Guildford…

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Volunteer Spotlight: Menier and the Chocolate Factory

February hosts a very popular and tasty-sounding celebration: National Chocolate Lover’s Month! In honour of this, our volunteer Susan has written a blog to get your taste buds tingling… A recent interesting read from my research at the Archive led me to the discovery of the Menier Chocolate Factory, the largest chocolate factory in France,…

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