of Albion mill as the start of ‘Modern Milling’.
By 1861 there were some 12,000 mills in Britain (twice as many as Domesday) serving 29 million people (twenty times that of Domesday); which is partly explained by better technology, less reliance on bread as part of the diet, and imports of wheat and flour. The imports of wheat and flour from the North American Colonies (USA) had started as early as the 1720s, increasing exponentially so that by the 1860s imports amounted to 1,200 tonne per annum, and 13,000 tonne per annum a decade later to meet the demand of the port mills. Wheat imports from Prussia (Germany/Poland), Russia and India together exceeded that of the USA, all of which contributed to what has been called the ‘Grain invasion of Britain’ in the last part of the nineteenth century. The UK population increased from 27 million in 1851 to 38 million in 1891, but in general UK wheat production remained constant. The British public acquired such a preference for imported Hungarian flour which was fine, white and consistent, that British millers felt that they had to compete. The technology race started. In 1868 Mr Oscar Oexle introduced a Hungarian stone milling plant to the UK (North Shore Mills, Liverpool). Later in 1870 Oexle supplied the first steel roller mill to the UK (John Davidson, Newcastle-on-Tyne), several more installations took place but commercial success eluded all these pioneer companies. By 1879,
Figure 3: Source: Graces Guide to British Industrial History
Henry Simon had invented his own ‘gradual reduction’ system where a machine
held pairs of cast-iron twist-fluted rollers running at different speeds in a single frame. Each pair of rollers fed a sieve allowing the coarser particles to progress to the next set of rollers, allowing for a consistent white and finer flour which was preferred by consumers. Within ten years he had sold 400 roller mills. By the 1880s flour milling literally started to move out of the stone age, but momentum for change was hindered by several factors:
• roller mills were too expensive for the small miller to install • the increasing population led to more water abstraction for domestic and industrial use, which resulted in lower water supply and watermill power
• watermills were costly to maintain (water weeds, silt, water management, etc), so many invested in the installation of gas, electricity and steam engines to increase power • lower industry profitability made it more difficult to justify investment
The 1870s saw the rise of the port flour mills using steam powered roller mills, in new grain warehouses utilising the latest inventions such as hydraulically operated bag hoists and cranes, rubber belt conveyors
and bucket elevators. The ports enabled the importation of wheat grain and flour on a massive scale. The ability to import and scale-up brought economies of scale and hard wheat to the large port-based flour millers, and the smaller inland millers who could only use home-grown soft wheat began to complain; as a result, the National Association of British and Irish Millers (NABIM) was formed in 1878.
The rise of the port-based mills appears to have had several consequences:
• imports of wheat grew to about 50% of UK consumption (1880) • the large port-based flour mills had a surplus of wheat offals for provender
• the larger flour mills avoided competing with each other • the smaller flour mills could not compete on flour sales (quantity and quality)
• the wind and water powered mills retained their local markets or moved into provender milling full-time
• it was cheaper to transport wheat from the US, than from 30 miles inland.
Thus from 1878, some larger flour mills diversified into selling provender for cattle and poultry, and many small mills had no option but to either cease trading or to make provender milling their full-time occupation, moving into niche markets such as producing barley and oats for the horse market. At this time there were about 3.3 million working horses in the UK, of which some 300,000 were based in London, which in 1894 prompted The Times to predict that ‘in 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure’. This became known as the ‘Great horse manure crisis of 1894’.
In 1901, the UK had imported a record 9,339,925 sacks (280lb or 127kg/sack) of flour, compared to the 3,091,835 sacks imported in 1878. In 1901, UK flour production was 28,287,707 sacks compared to 26,912,035 sacks in 1878, despite the UK flour industry having sufficient capacity to supply the requirements of the whole country. The competition from imported flour meant that profitability was so thin that even many modern roller mills had to close. With hindsight, 1878 was seen as the start of the UK agricultural depression, by 1900 it was estimated that 10,000 millstone mills had closed and were decaying, replaced by 1000 roller mills and foreign flour imports. Only some 2000 mills survived to see the twentieth century as this 1921 advertisement indicates, some 50 years after the millstone had technically become obsolete. As late as the 1940s a Government survey of provender companies revealed that a good number
Figure 4: The Agricultural Merchant 1921
of millstone mills were still operating; for example, in Hampshire there were 56 mills.
E&OE Next time: The compound feed Industry from 1650 to 1850. FEED COMPOUNDER JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020 PAGE 29
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