Champion of change
Full details
| Authors & editors | |
| Publisher | SPAB |
| Year of publication | 2025 Spring pp52-59 |
| Languages | |
| Medium | Digital |
| Edition | 1 |
| Topics | Arts, culture and heritage > Collections of importance |
| Tags | |
| Scope & content | Determined, dedicated and far-sighted: From national suffrage to saving the nation’s watermills, the staff and volunteers of the Mills Archive Trust celebrate the campaigning zeal of Emilie Montgomery Gardner. Emilie Montgomery Gardner, known to the milling world as E M Gardner, remains an enigmatic character and one who deserves to be lauded as a great conservation pioneer. She made a substantial and significant record of historic buildings and campaigned for and critically drew the SPAB’s attention to the vital contribution of watermills to our built heritage. She (had) turned to the SPAB, which had already established a dedicated Windmill Section with the expectation that they would embrace her idea. It seems surprising and even unthinkable now, but she met with resistance and a decided lack of enthusiasm to extend the remit of the Windmill Section. Not one to be easily dissuaded though, she mounted a concerted campaign and eventually persuaded the SPAB to create the combined Mills Section – covering both wind and watermills. Gardner left her comprehensive collection to the SPAB where it proved to be a vital in-house resource for many years. Since 2004, her work has been held by The Mills Archive Trust, which has catalogued the E M Gardner Collection and made it available to a wide audience of milling practitioners, enthusiasts, researchers and others. It comprises hundreds of photographs and negatives of watermills and windmills, and images of watermills from throughout England and Wales; 85 lantern slides which include cross sectional diagrams, hand drawn and watercolour illustrations and photographic images of watermills and mill machinery notably, water wheels, pit wheels, wallowers, spur wheels, flour dresses and sack scales. There are also watercolours, pen and ink drawings and sketches of mills made by Gardner and others. In addition, the Archive includes her handwritten notes on an array of watermills throughout England and Wales made between 1947–55. The cataloguing of her collection is ongoing, but this remarkable resource is accessible at the Mills Archive and, as more research is done, a much more rounded picture of Gardner has emerged. There is no doubt that Gardner was a remarkable woman whose determination, drive and dedication to preserve and record the history of mills was formidable. The milling world owes an enormous debt of gratitude to her foresight and pioneering work. Her campaigning spirit lives on and reverberates through her Collection, which stands as a rich visual and written repository and a fine memorial to a truly inspirational woman. |
