A Miller’s Tale


History of a Northern Irish Compounder: Part One By Richard Scott


Camowen, bringing a sufficient flow of water to drive machinery for the processing of locally-grown oats and wheat, for human consumption. William was evidently a considerable entrepreneur by the


standards of a Victorian Ulster county town. His main business in the nineteenth century was as a builder of courthouses, churches and schools. He also had a foundry and a bond store so the mill was only one member of his portfolio of businesses, and a minor one at that. The basis for his new enterprise was that, plainly, the population


Above: Cranny Mills, taken in June 1949, but looking very much as they did in William Scott’s day, nearly a hundred years previously


English Literature sixth-formers, perusing the fourteenth-century works of Geoffrey Chaucer for “A” level examination, will surely remember The Miller’s Tale. The translation by Neville Coghill into modern speech made the story accessible to today’s readership. In The Canterbury Tales Chaucer gives a satirical edge to all the characters but The Miller’s Tale is downright bawdy, to the delight of teenage students everywhere. The miller is plainly a rogue, and deserves his painful comeuppance.


Over the centuries, millers have often had a bad press, since for


many generations of farmers they were the only customers for the grain harvest, and often were a local monopoly that was richer than its neighbours, it was suspected, by ill-gotten means. Perhaps it was this perception that led to feed producers re-


branding themselves during the twentieth century as compounders, rather than millers, in pursuit of a change of image, leaving the flour millers – “the gentlemen of the trade”, as my father admiringly used to refer to them – to retain what used to be a shared title. Since this article is written for a compounder’s journal, my


treatment will be kinder to the feed millers, as I will continue to call them, not least because I earned my living in the trade during the forty years of my employment.


First generation Ours was a family milling business in the west of Northern Ireland, which started trading in 1850. The company was founded by my


great-great grandfather, William Scott, in Omagh, County Tyrone, on the site of what had previously been a brewery. Linked to the site, there was a leat, or “lade” in local parlance, off the River


PAGE 44 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2020 FEED COMPOUNDER


could no longer be sustained by the humble potato, almost the only source of food in previous generations. Crop failures and potato blight over the centuries had led to several famines, culminating in the disastrous famine of 1845 to 1850. This, known to historians as The Great Famine, or more colloquially the Irish Potato Famine, reduced Ireland’s population by one-third; around one million deaths were caused by starvation and disease, and there was mass emigration of another million people, creating a worldwide Irish diaspora. Given that farmers would in consequence place greater emphasis


on the growing of cereals, William calculated that they would need an outlet for their production. The town population in counties Tyrone and Fermanagh, and further afield, would provide potential customers for flour and oatmeal products. The coming of the railway to Omagh, in 1852, created an opportunity for products to be sold at a greater distance from the mill.


Second Generation This plan remained in place during William’s long lifetime, when in all his activities he acted as a sole trader, with unlimited liability. He handed over the business, which then became a partnership, to his sons William and Charles in 1880, but neither son survived in age beyond his fifties. William (the second) died unmarried and Charles died intestate. This left Charles’s eldest son, William Robert (pictured right), as Charles’s heir- at-law in 1897, with dilemmas as to the future of the business.


Third Generation William Robert’s decision was to form the partnership into a private limited company and to distribute the shares evenly among the five children of Charles and Margaret Scott. His own career was firmly set in an academic context, and he was later to become a renowned economist and economic historian. Accordingly, he had no opportunity for involvement in the day-to-day running of the business, though he remained as its chairman and fount of knowledge for the remainder of


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