PAPER TECHNOLOGY FEBRUARY 2010 BATHFORD MILL BICENTENARY
modern mill had just started when the next
blight occurred: a strike by the China Clay
workers of Cornwall, during which wagons
had to be smuggled into the mill at night to
maintain production.
The next few decades saw the mill making
white and tinted printings, opaques, book
papers, E.S. writings and banks, though dur-
ing WWII they transferred temporarily to
manufacturing recycled papers, including toi-
let papers, while temporary buildings were
erected on the site in which parts for rifles
were made.
By the 1960s there was need to modernise
the mill. First, following a flood at Christmas
1960 where motors and DC generators were
engulfed, there was a change to AC electricity,
and new motors were placed on plinths. At
this time the 400hp steam engine was retained
purely to run the beaters, but it was retired in
1964, and three years later so were the beat-
View of mill from south east, circa 1913. ers, which were replaced by refiners.
Although 1967 saw another flood engulf the
site, this time the precautions put in place in
1960 meant the mill was only shut over a
weekend.
The holding company that operated the
mill, which was established in 1961, was sold
twice in 1971, first to a London-base printing
and publishing group, then at the end of the
year to Portals. Two years later the new own-
ers juggled with production, moving all thin
opaque grades to another mill, leaving Bath-
ford to concentrate upon the growth market of
low-volume security products. At this stage
the most important change to the mill occurred
with arrival of a uniflow vat unit, originally
destined for one of the machines at Overton.
This was supposed to give the single machine
at Bathford a choice of running either as a
Fourdrinier or a vat machine, but it is the vat
that has dominated the last three decades.
Portals was bought by De La Rue in 1995,
Paper machine circa 1913.
who continue to run both Bathford and Over-
ton mills today. However, only two year’s ago,
in 2008, the Portals name was finally removed
as the division running Bathford was renamed
De La Rue Security Papers. Currently the mill
has just over a hundred employees who make
a range of security papers using various water-
marks, chemical sensitisers, holographic strips
and threads, embedded security fibres and
chemical taggants, many of which are propri-
etary trademarks (eg. Cleartext®,
Thermotext® and Securitext®). The mill is a
major supplier of paper for passports, licences,
certificates, and increasingly, authentication
labels – a growing business given the preva-
lence of counterfeit goods, currently estimated
at a cost 5-7% of world trade.
Acknowledgements
This article draws freely upon the work of
Michael Tabb, a former employee and tal-
Aerial shot of mill, circa 1962.
ented local historian.
20
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