Memories of Mills and Coal

A memoir, written around 1966, describing life in the mills near the Buckingham Arm.

Author, Frank Taylor, miller until 1970’s.

My first connection with the canal began in Aylesbury, when my uncle Harvey, the eldest of my father’s 3 brothers, saw the chance of bettering himself when a canal freight business based at the terminus basin of the Aylesbury arm, of what was then known as the Grand Junction Canal, became available. This must have been quite a risky undertaking for him. Originally may grandfather had five sons, but one died tragically in an accident, aged 16. They were all raised in the corn and milling trade, grandad owning 8 mills, all in Bucks, but Harvey had become the manager of a flour mill, called Colliers Mill, on the Thame Road out of Aylesbury.

Before long, he had expanded the business on the canal, and had 3 or 4 narrow boats and butties loaded and travelling back and forth, largely to the London terminus at Brentford. Indeed, as I recall him Showing me from the books in his office, doing business with the Cunard Line.

Two of my grandfathers mills, at Thornborough and near Twyford, were watermills on the Great Ouse river but the main one, and the biggest, where the family were raised, was at Waddesdon, powered by a steam engine. So far as I can recall, it was Dad who ran this mill most of the time. A couple of months before I became 9 years old a message came to say that the manager of Thornborough Mill had died very suddenly and a hasty decision had to be made about a new tenant. This mill had been put in Dad’s name some time before, so now, on the 9th of June, 1919, with Mother, my 4 year old sister Mabel and me, the family moved to Thornborough. Not, I imagine, without some misgivings by Mother. She had been raised and educated in London’s West End, and Thornborough Mill was 2 miles from the nearest village.

Three fields away from us, less than half a mile, was Leckhampstead Wharf, where a lady named Mrs Canvin lived and ran a coal business, with the help of several sons. There were times when perhaps things over there were not running as smoothly as she could wish and a piercing voice hit our ears. Our usual comment was “Mrs Canvin’s whispering again”. Not many years later, for one reason or another, but probably her age was a contributory factor, this lady decided to retire, left the wharf and went to live with her granddaughter in a cottage at Lower End, Thornborough, now long demolished. Her sons did not carry on the business, but just abandoned it.

One of her main customers must have been a gentleman who was in the habit of buying a boat load of coal at a time. This was Colonel Harris, of Thornton Hall, a rather large person, with a bluff yet kindly manner. I well remember the occasion when Dad answered the phone to hear his voice on the other end. He was a bit perturbed. He said he’d heard Mrs Canvin had gone, his coal stock was getting low, and would Dad consider re-starting the business, because if he would, he would promise to take all his coal requirements from him. Dad didn’t jump at the chance. For one thing, although he employed 5 or 6 men, they were busy enough with milling etc. in winter, and in summer when the corn business slackened off, the farm found them plenty to do. Then again, the experience of carting the heavy supplies of coal needed for the steam engine at Waddesdon, from Quiainton Road Station, was not exactly a great inducement. But after a while he agreed to give it a whirl. So we became W.J.Taylor and Son, Corn & Coal Merchants. At any rate, the Colonel’s coal was no problem. The boat would be moored alongside his wharf at Thornton and his men unloaded it and carted the coal to the Hall.

This still left the local deliveries to several local villages and farms etc. to be attended to, so the wharf house was let to a man whose main job this was. His name was Ernest Mills, a big slow-moving man, married to an always very sorrowful and sad looking wife, somewhat mental. Understandably so, since the household also consisted of a lady with 3 daughters, Mrs Biggs by name. She told me once that she used to work in a piano factory, and showed me her biceps!

Largely our supplies came from just 4 or 5 mines. These were, for house coal: Baddesley, in Warwickshire, for “Cobbles” about tennis or cricket ball size, a goodish hard and fairly clean burning coal; Babbington Main, and Brights. The first came in large pieces of 20-40 lbs. the finest coal imaginable, which would burn very cleanly, giving great heat, leaving hardly any ash. The seam of this lovely coal was worked out, I believe, in the late 1930’s. The Brights were a lower grade, though quite good sort, about football size. Both came from Nottinghamshire. A harder, cheaper grade was Newdigate, and Exhall which provided both house and steam coal, both collieries in Warwickshire. It would seem incredible now, but the price customers paid then for best coal was about 2s 4d per cwt. In the terms we have to use now, that’s around 12p for 51 kilos, and we had plenty of grumbles at the price, yet the profit was almost microscopic.

Moving our supplies from colliery to wharf was done, as you will probably have guessed by now, with the boats belonging to my uncle in Aylesbury, who was happy to co-operate, but there was a big snag: Boats could come as far as Deanshanger fully loaded, but beyond that point the “cut” as it was called, was partly silted. To overcome this, part of a load was transferred to a boat called “The Lighter”. This was a steel construction, rather like an outsize punt, and was towed by the boat. All this was very detrimental from our point of view. Apart from the extra labour involved, any movement of a friable material like coal inevitably means more unsaleable small coal. The end of bringing coal to Leckhampstead Wharf, and the consequent use of the cut, came just before World War 2. My father had a heavy and rather valuable chestnut horse called “Captain”, which towed the boats easily. One day, a boat became grounded, the bank collapsed under the horse, and he fell in. Dad said “That’s enough”, and thereafter coal and coke had to come to Buckingham Goods Station and fetched from there. None of us were sorry when eventually the business was sold, or rather almost given away, to Wilby Bros., when Ted Wilby was “demobbed”.

A small anecdote. Working down at the wharf one day with an employee named Charlie Whitehall, we heard a motor-bike coming from Thornborough way. At that time the canal bridge was still the humpback type, with a longish run up to the crest. The rider evidently intended taking it at speed, quite unaware that once over the top he would find both a sharp drop and a bend to the left. Once over the bridge rider and machine parted company at short notice and went flying. Fortunately not much damage was done to either and seeing us the rider picked himself up and came down to us. He was a young policeman, new to the area. “For God’s sake don’t tell my sergeant” he said. Feeling a bit sorry for him we agreed, but we had many a good laugh about it afterwards. On another occasion when we were there the R100 went immediately overhead on her last trip back to Cardington from Canada.

A note in conclusion. The M1 was almost finished, but not yet in use. I had taken our two boys Richard and David, and daughter Jill, for a short ride to see it. On the way home by the A5O8 towards Stony Stratford, I stopped the car by the canal bridge at Stoke Bruerne. A pair of boats had just left the locks and was approaching. About 50 yards from the bridge the boatman looked up at me and shouted “How’s old Harvey Taylor then?”. This really shook me, since I’d never seen the man before so far as I knew, and how was he to know who I was? There was only time to reply “He’s been dead over 3 years”. He answered “Oh,I didn’t know” and was gone under the bridge. I could only suppose he had a very good memory, and recalled seeing me at my uncle’s wharf many years before. But it seemed more than a bit odd, that we should have stopped there at that precise moment, something out of the blue, no accounting for it at all.

Postscript, provided by Mark Cole:

This article was written by Frank Taylor, who was the miller at Thornborough Mill until the 1970s when Dr Peter Atherton bought the mill and mill house from him, and in 1980 I bought the mill barn, which I restored and lived in for the next 35 years. His son David (mentioned in the piece) lived in Windmill Cottage on the same site until he emigrated to Canada in the 1990s.

It was water-powered until WW2, when the grinding was done by a diesel engine, and people in Thornborough recall the thump-thump of it despite being over the hill from the village. The Taylors also caught eels in the eel trap alongside the weir on the Great Ouse, which went up to Harrods on the London mill train.