Looking back at the origins of wind power

Few matters seem to cause as much controversy in local communities as plans to erect wind turbines. These ‘gentle giants’, producing green electricity, are loved by some but loathed by others. They may seem new and still somewhat alien to us, but wind power has been harnessed by man for over eight hundred years.

Windmill origins

The Romans are believed to have been the first in Britain to harness water power to grind grain into flour, and the Anglo-Saxons continued to use it. The Domesday Book of 1086 lists 5,624 watermills in England. The first record of a windmill is of one in Yorkshire and dates from 1185. It is thought that windmills may have been introduced to England by travellers returning from the Middle East, possibly by Crusaders who had been to the Holy Land.

Post mills

The earliest English windmills, post mills, essentially comprised a square box that rotates around a central post, mounted on a timber trestle. A long pole enables the miller to turn the mill so that its sweeps (or sails) catch the wind. Early mills were small and usually had only one pair of stones. The sweeps would turn a long wooden shaft (the ‘windshaft’), which had a cogwheel to drive the stones. The sails of a windmill are known as ‘sweeps’ in Kent, Surrey and Sussex.

Post mills were still being built well into the 19th century to the same basic medieval design. While no complete medieval windmill survives, pictures in illuminated manuscripts and in stained-glass windows show that they were almost identical to the 17th and 18th-century post mills that still stand.

Tower mills

The tower mill represented a revolutionary change in design. The stones and other machinery were placed in a circular stone or brick tower, with a cap on top that carried the sweeps and could be turned 360° to face the wind. A cogwheel on the windshaft meshed with another on a vertical shaft that drove the millstones. Tower mills could be considerably larger than post mills and had room for extra pairs of stones and additional pieces of machinery.

One of the first records of a tower mill was at Dover Castle in the late 13th century, when Stephen Pencester, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, had one of the bastions in the castle’s outer walls converted into a mill. However, tower mills did not become popular in England until the late 17th or early 18th century.

Smock mills

Where good building stone was scarce but timber plentiful, smock mills became the preferred choice from the 1700s onwards. A smock mill is basically a tower mill with a wooden tower, usually octagonal but occasionally six or 12-sided. Smock mills were very common in South-East England, and several have been preserved. They had the advantage, like post mills, of being portable: if the land was required for another purpose, or if new buildings or growing trees robbed the mill of its wind, they could be dismantled and re-erected on a new site.

Most tower and smock mills were fitted with a fantail – a vane like a propeller at the back of the cap, at right angles to the sweeps. This ensured that the sweeps always stayed in the ideal position for milling, and meant that the miller did not have to keep moving the cap manually. It also provided protection against ‘tail winding’, which might occur when the wind suddenly changed direction: this could result in severe damage to the mill and even in some cases the sweeps and cap being blown off.

Products of mills

Most windmills in England were used to grind flour but could also be put to a variety of other uses. Many mills, especially in East Anglia, were built to drain low-lying farmland and others produced rapeseed oil or cement clinker. In Kent, a tower mill at Copton near Faversham pumped water from an artesian well into a storage tank, and smock mills at Buckland in Surrey and at Bethersden and Great Chart in Kent were used for sawing timber. One Kent smock mill, at St Margaret’s Bay, was even built for the purpose of generating electricity!

Decline of the industry

The heyday of windmills came in the early 19th century, when there were around 1,000 in South-East England and about 400 in Kent alone. However, during the course of the century the need for these delightful structures gradually declined. By the middle of the century ships were arriving at British ports with imported grain from North America, and this was being ground into flour in huge new steam-operated roller mills by the docks, and transported all over the country on freight trains. Millers could not compete with this cheap and abundant new foreign flour.

Windmills can obviously only work when the wind blows, meaning that working hours in a traditional mill could be erratic. Many millers were self-employed and owned their mill: larger mills might have two or three other members of staff, including a ‘stone dresser’ to keep the millstones in good order and a boy or man to deliver flour to the customers. If it was windy, staff would be expected to work for hours on end, but during periods of calm weather they might be laid off without pay for days. With workers expecting better working conditions and holidays, millers found it harder to attract and retain staff, who could be assured of regular hours and days off if they worked at the local factory.

The need for extra power

To improve their work/life balance and make their mills more efficient, many millers started to employ auxiliary power such as a steam engine. A shaft could be driven through the wall of the mill and linked to the internal machinery: a belt drive then enabled a traction engine, parked outside, to rotate the millstones. In many cases, the auxiliary power took over completely, and the sweeps were eventually abandoned and removed. If later the mill became dilapidated, the miller could just move the machinery to an ordinary shed or any kind of building: there was no need for a steam-driven flour mill to look like a windmill. Steam was ultimately replaced as an auxiliary power by oil and electricity.

Interest in mills as heritage

By the time of the first world war, most windmills had ceased making flour for human consumption: they generally produced only animal feed. The war had a serious effect on staffing and, with materials and labour in short supply, numerous mills fell into decay and were demolished during the inter-war years. However, this period also saw the general public start to appreciate these wonderful buildings. The Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings opened a Windmill Section, and the Pictorial Knowledge encyclopaedia encouraged its readers to take photographs of windmills before they all vanished. Increasing ownership of private cars, motorbikes, bicycles and cameras, and increased leisure time, meant that more people were going out to visit and record their local mills.

A Kentish record

An outstanding example was amateur historian William Coles-Finch, whose book Watermills and Windmills, published in 1933, includes a full survey and photographs of all surviving windmills in Kent. Looking at old maps and parish records, Coles-Finch travelled the length and breadth of the county, interviewing elderly residents and talking to millers and their families. His painstaking research produced a book that is of immeasurable value to industrial archaeologists today and acted as a blueprint for many later county surveys.

Coles-Finch recorded 404 windmills in Kent of which 70 were still standing in 1930. More than half of these have since disappeared, and the handful that were then still in use have all ceased operation as commercial enterprises. When Davison, the last miller at Stelling Minnis, passed away in 1970, it seemed as if commercial wind milling in South-East England had come to an end. There was a brief revival in the 1990s when Sarre Mill, between Margate and Canterbury, was restored and started once again to produce wholemeal flour, but sadly, following a change of ownership, this mill is now in need of major repairs before she can work again.

Well-preserved examples

Although Kent and Surrey may no longer have any working windmills, both counties fortunately retain well-preserved examples, some of which are open to the public and can still grind corn for demonstration purposes.

Surrey has one of the oldest post mills in the country, at Outwood. Still in working order, it was built in 1665, and its miller climbed onto the roof the following year to watch the Great Fire of London. Buckland sawmill, the only surviving example of its kind, can also be visited. Other Surrey mills include privately-owned tower mills at Ewhurst and Wray Common, a post mill on Reigate Heath that has been converted into a chapel, and a beautifully restored post mill at Lowfield Heath, which may be seen from planes as they take off from Gatwick airport.

Kent’s most famous windmill is the tall smock mill that dominates the little town of Cranbrook. Built in 1814, it has been maintained in working order throughout its life, and it still produces flour for visitors in the summer.

Other complete smock mills can be seen at Meopham, Stelling Minnis, Sandwich, Margate, Ripple, West Kingsdown, Herne, Woodchurch and Willesborough near Ashford. The county has three surviving post mills – at Rolvenden, Chillenden and Wittersham – although none is in working order. Several tower mills survive but all are privately owned and most have been converted for residential use. One smock mill, at Benenden, has had its machinery removed and now provides B&B accommodation.

Maintaining mills

Mills are vulnerable structures: smock mills at Shiremark in Surrey and at Barham and Chislet in Kent have been burned to the ground by accidental fires in the last few decades, and Winchelsea post mill in Sussex was completely destroyed by the Great Storm in 1987.

Kent County Council owns several of the county’s mills and has provided funds for their upkeep since the 1950s, while Willesborough Mill was purchased and restored by Ashford Borough Council in 1989 after its owner was unable to finance the repairs necessary to prevent its collapse. However, old mills are expensive to maintain, so one must have concerns about their future preservation; Kent County Council has recently contemplated selling eight of their mills. Indeed, maybe we should be using them for their original purpose: as an ecological way to produce stone-ground wholemeal flour.

More of Robert Sissons’ writing on travel topics can be found here. And Windmill World is a great resource for information on all windmills in the UK, and has sections on Kent and Surrey.