As Calbourne Mill pledges to open its cafe and adventure golf over the summer, after an auction of its historic items on May 4 and following its pit wheel breaking, we look back at its historic past.

In 2002, Colin Fairweather and I recorded an interview with Toby Downer, then in his mid-80s. Toby had worked at the mill all his life.                               

“I was 14 when I started work at the mill in 1930. The miller was Wilfred Weeks. There were at least ten mills still working on the Island the day I started.

“There'd be three working in the mill, two adults and me. We used to grind maize to be fed to poultry and grain for the farms.

 

Isle of Wight County Press: The mill in the early 1970s.The mill in the early 1970s. (Image: Harry Matthews/County Press)

“Some of the farmers would grow their own beans and they would bring in sacks of barley or oats to be milled and they would mix their field beans in that they grew themselves or sometimes they'd put a little linseed in.

“Wilf’s brother Reg used to go round and collect all the orders from all the farmers, bran, feedstuff and they all wanted for their cattle, so on a Monday you would be making up the loads to be delivered.

“Each day in the mill book there was all the orders and that was the round for the lorry for that day and then it was just a rotation that re-occurred week after week.

“We asked Toby how long a full mill pond would run the mill for. It just depended on the water flow; sometimes you would have to stop if the pond got too low and give it a break for an hour and let the pond build up again.

“We supplied lots of the Island’s bakers with flour - Wray's, Harvey's, Weeks in Newport, Booth's at Ventnor, Gillings at Freshwater and Totland, Lithgow's, and Rashley's at Cowes. 

“All these various bakers all made, well we called them brown loaves, now you call them wholemeal loaves. Each baker had his own personal little formula of the amount, the proportions of flour, coarse mids and fine mids that went into his brown bread.

“So, each local baker’s brown bread would be different to someone else's. We made them up individually for each baker. What are mids? Well, if you take a grain of wheat there are about three skins - the outside shuck, another one inside, that was mids, and then there would be the fine mids.

Isle of Wight County Press: Toby and his wife outside their cottage at Lynch Lane, Calbourne, one summer’s evening in June 2002, just before the recording.Toby and his wife outside their cottage at Lynch Lane, Calbourne, one summer’s evening in June 2002, just before the recording. (Image: Colin Fairweather/County Press)

“Sometimes the stones would be running, and they go clackety-clack, clackety-clack - nearly sends you to sleep, don't it?

“All of a sudden, there'd be a terrific noise, and if you ran round the back quick and shot your hand in the barley-meal bag, a nail had come through and he'd be red hot because he'd been ground through the stones. There was a nail in the bloomin' mix. 

“At harvest time most of the corn went into corn ricks and stood in the farmer’s yard for several months, and all the time it was drying out.

“When combines come along, they'd combine it quickly and put it into sacks there and then. The corn is threshed on the spot today because the farming machinery's wonderful now. They can do anything with it.

“Eventually the likes of Rank's and Spiller's bought up all the small mills and closed them, because we were just a nuisance.

Isle of Wight County Press: The ‘pit wheel,’ cast in 1881.The ‘pit wheel,’ cast in 1881. (Image: Alan Stroud/County Press)

“We signed an agreement to go out of production and they’d built Solent Flour Mill at Southampton Docks."

In 1955, Calbourne ceased milling ground bread flour.

We asked Toby if he saw many people when the mill was in its heyday in the 1930s or whether it was a quiet village existence.

“On a Sunday, there would be coaches all the way down from the Sun Inn because they were bringing people out to Winkle Street, tourists.

“The mill was part of village life. On the ground floor where the flour and all the bags came down, there was a pair of big scoop scales hung up.

“Well, everyone's got bathroom scales now, haven't they, but in those days, they used to bring the babies in, put them in the scoop scales and weigh them, and in pencil on the whitewashed wall was the dates and the baby and the weight.

“We were lucky just being a country mill. They hadn't thought of the word stress in those days. It wasn't in the vocabulary.”

Finally, we asked Toby what he thought of 21st century supermarket bread.

“I’d prefer not to talk about bread! There was a loaf the other day and the crust was so tough when I was trying to tear it off.

“If I'd still had a dog, the dog would have done it better. Modern bread is terrible in my opinion. Absolutely terrible.”