Flour milling
Flour in Britain is most commonly made from wheat. Flour mills came in a wide range of sizes, from the small 'family' concerns found in areas such as East Anglia to the larger mills in towns and cities. As with most industries the trend has been towards the larger establishment and in the period under consideration the production of flour has generally been a highly mechanised process.
Flour milling was done at mills all over the country, in the early nineteenth century large windmills had been built in the rural areas and continued in use into the middle of the twentieth century. For more on windmills see also 'Appendix One - General Information - Engines and prime movers'.
Fig ___ British Windmills in use in the 1920s
Windmills were not (as far as I am aware) rail connected, the grain came in and the flour went out in sacks, all on horse drawn or motor vehicles. Water mills, although more expensive to build, provided a sensible alternative as they were more reliable. One such mill was still operating into the early 21st century (for more information see 'Appendix One - General Information - Engines and prime movers'). These larger water mills mills were big enough to justify a siding run in from a branch line and several country flour mills had one. Most of the traffic inwards would be sacks of grain, imported bulk grain tended to get dealt with in the big mills at the docks. Outgoing would be sacks of flour.
Fig ___ Working Water mill in 2006
Image courtesy and copyright Leah Willits
The example shown below is based on a photograph of a mill in the south of England which was converted to paper making in the mid 19th century and has all the features common to water mills of the time. This mill has converted to steam, hence the substantial chimney. The mill is built beside a river, not on a canal, the mill required a head of water so they built weirs and to allow barges to pass they had to build locks as well. I have reduced the width of the main building and the extension over the wheel by about a third, and generally compressed the scene, but it retains the character of the prototype.
In the track plan shown below I have retained the main features although the two parts of the main building are shown end-to-end rather than side by side and the access for barges has been moved to an extension as this can be set back to ease access for a model layout. The road bridge at the rear serves to hide the join of the river with the backscene. The pub and general stores is optional.
This layout can be compressed, you need a minimum of 15 inches plus the length of the rake of wagons (uncoupling is best done on the straight siding, not on the curve), so with British four-wheelers if you only ran in four wagons and vans it would fit in a two foot length (60cm).
In the sketch below I have compressed things quite a lot, the barge access tunnels will not only take a narrow barge,and I reduced the height of the left hand end of the building (this saves a lot of windows), however the buildings still have all the necessary attributes. This sketch was prepared for the section on paper making, so I have added a substantial crane mounted on the corner of the bay section of the central building.
Fig ___ Large flour mill (prototype was converted to a paper mill)
Supplies to the towns and cities were often intermittent however and during the wars against the French prior to 1815 working class consumers in larger towns had formed co-operatives to build and run steam powered mills, these were usually called 'Union Mill'.
Associated with the docks would be the great flour mills, dealing with imported grain from Canada and America. With the repeal of the corn laws British farmers lost their protection from imported goods and many suffered great hardship, but the general public saw a steady fall in the cost of basic foods. Large grain elevators or silos were built at a British docks from the 1890's, most followed the American trends using rolled steel and reinforced concrete construction.
Fig ___ Typical large 19th and 20th Century flour mills as seen a dock area
British flour millers had seen this development coming, they were threatened with imported flour arriving from Hungary, Russia and the USA and in the 1870's they responded with a general modernisation of the flour milling business. The mills changed from old stone grinding to steel roller milling (invented in Switzerland in the 1830's but really developed by the Americans), in 1885 the first all-roller flour mill was built by Joseph Rank (the Alexandra Mill in Hull).
This change was quite abrupt and a lot of millstones were en route from the quarries to the mills at the time. These were just dumped by the roadside and even in the 1990's one occasionally sees an overgrown millstone alongside a country road.
Inside the mill shown above were a set of belt-driven machines, the grain was passed through a series of these, each with a more closely spaced set of rollers. The machines were arranged one above the other up the building, the grain moving downwards by gravity as ever finer grades, emerging on the first floor as flour. The illustration below shows the interior of such a mill in the 1930s.
Fig ___ Typical roller (flour) mill machinery
As noted elsewhere grain produced in Britain was usually shipped in sacks, bulk grain was mainly imported and seldom traveled far from the docks. As a result the inland flour mills did not have the giant silo's found in the dock areas and any large 'mill' type building would serve for a model layout. The example shown below is the Nelstrop's Albion mill in Stockport, one of the first built for the steel roller milling system in the 1890s. The mill was built alongside a basin on the Stockport Canal atop Lancashire Hill, the mill and the firm are still in business and still (very) independent. On the right I have shown the building modified for a model railway layout set in the pre-war era. The corner towers and diagonal corner have been eliminated, the building is reduced in height and a covered loading bay has been added to a section of the building extended out toward the siding (representing the enclosed sack hoists for the grain). The boiler room and chimney have been moved to the end of the building, so coal wagons can be parked at the end of the siding.
Fig ___ Typical large flour mill
Other industries served by this basin included the canal company warehouse, a timber wharf, a sand wharf, an engineering company, an 'oil works (?) and two coal wharf's. In model railway terms that translates to (for example) the flour mill siding, a coal merchants siding with fuel oil tanks and an engineering works siding
The bulk shipment of grain to inland mills only became common in the 1960s, at which time the silos were added. Initially concrete was preferred to metal due to problems of condensation, this changed in the later 1970s (possibly earlier) when insulation was added to prevent condensation. The modern grain silos at Nelstrop's Albion mill are shown in the photo below, each can hold in excess of 500 tons of grain.
Fig ___ Flour mill in 2007
There are concrete and metal silos available as kits in several ranges, but with a bit of ingenuity you can make up a fairly convincing model from wooden dowel and strip.
In the country a mill would take in the grain, mainly delivered in large sacks, carried on horse drawn carts from local farms or from grain warehouses (not silos, these buildings stored the grain in sacks), and ship out the flour again in sacks. The standard measure for both grain and flour was originally a bag size, a common size for the grain was the three bushel sack but the four bushel 'railway bag' was also used. For flour (I believe) they again used the standard four bushel bag. The unit for sale changed at some point to weight and the British standard weight for a sack of flour was 280 lbs or 20 stone (from which a bakery would produce about 230 loaves of bread). This was a bit heavy so it was common to put it in 140 lb 'bags', giving 8 'sacks' or 16 'bags' to the ton. The modern standard is the 32Kg multi-walled paper sack, corresponding to about 70lbs, I believe these came in in the 1960s. The picture below is based on a photograph taken in the later 1930s at a British flour mill and shows the most common size of flour bag in use at the time. I believe this weighed in at about a hundredweight.
Fig ___ Typical 1930s flour sack
Cloth sacks continue in use even today to supply small local bakeries, although sacks are now commonly woven from plastic fibres rather than sack-cloth or hessian (which was made from 'jute'). The modern flour mill above supplies flour in small packets for domestic use, 36 pound bags for bakeries and in bulk for larger industrial users. Until relatively recently most flour in this country was shipped in sacks, only after air fluidisation systems appeared in the 1950's did bulk shipment become common. In the 1960s BR built some bulk flour containers for this traffic but by the early 1970s the big bakery firms were mainly using bulk flour delivered by road tanker. The pres-flo air flidisation system, as used on BR Presflow wagons, was used, the tankers resenbling liquids tankers but with a cylindrical tank rather than the more common (for liquids) eliptical type. From the 1980s a tipping version came into use (one of the wagon companies produced a railway version they called 'Tip-Air'), I believe these are used for bulk flour rather than grain.
Fig ___ Typical post 1980s flour tanker
Traffic to a mill would include large quantities of wheat, either locally sourced in sacks or imported grain in bulk. Vacuum unloading was commonly used from the 1920's on for bulk loads of grain at larger mills. Traffic out would include sacks of milled flour and semolina (a coarser grind), bran and wheat feed. These two latter were used mainly as animal feeds before the 'high fibre' diet became popular following research in the 1930's (although Dr Allinson of Allinsons flour fame, had suggested this many years earlier). Animals can digest bran, humans cannot which is why it is used in health foods to 'scour' one's innards.
Flour milling produces something like 25 percent unusable by-product, the remaining 75 percent being the flour. The by-product is sold on to animal feed manufacturers as 'wheatfeed' for inclusion in their products. Many, if not most, of the larger flour milling companies also operated animal feed plants (discussed separately under Farming Related Industries).
For model railway purposes a large mill at a docks might also load imported wheat from its silo into hoppers for delivery to larger inland mills operated by the same firm. A covered loading bay at the foot of the silo with a couple of pipes (thick wire) running down to it from about 'first floor' height would serve and justify hopper wagons as well as vans for the bagged flour and coal wagons or oil tanks for the boilers. If space is really tight you can do what I did and run the siding under the building, behind a series of brick arches or iron columns (these would be perhaps eighteen inches or 45 cm in diameter and spaced at about 12 feet or 4m). The track plan shown below can be accommodated in about five feet (if you limit arriving train lengths to 8 wagons and a brake van). A is a raised platform with small cranes, also serves for the 'workers train' coaches and provides 'end loading' facilities. B is the gantry carrying the vacuum system that unloads the ships and barges. C is the mill and silo, with the associated siding run underneath as described. D are coal hoists, positioned against the centre of the loop so they do not get in the way when uncoupling. E is a possible bulk oil depot at the end of the coal siding (run by the same firm). F is a spur for brake vans, also handy for parking the dock loco when railway company trains arrive on the shunting loop.
Fig ___ Flour mill and silo at a docks
If space is very tight you can carry the silo right up to the quayside, again running the siding underneath an overhang. The example shown below is based on one on the Manchester Ship Canal, the red arm swings out over the water, supported by cables from the upper walkway, the dark grey hose hanging from the arm can be pulled up and laid on the platform out of the way if required.
Fig ___ Quayside grain silo at a docks
In Scotland there were several fleets of small (ten or nine foot wheelbase) grain hopper wagons, two are preserved at the Bo'ness and Kinniel Steam Railway and one of these forms the basis for a Parkside Dundas (formerly Westykits) 'OO' kit. These carried the grain from the ports to the local flour mills, the example shown was operated by a company based in Leith.
Fig ___ Scottish grain hopper
The milled flour is a cream colour but becomes white, and makes better bread, if stored for three or four months. These days chemical chlorine based bleaches are used to whiten the flour.
After the First World War cheap imports became available and a lot of flour millers found they had over expanded. Three major concerns then bought up many of the smaller firms; Ranks Limited, Spillers Limited and the Cooperative Wholesale Society Limited. By the mid 1930s these three firms accounted for 39 per cent of total UK output.
As recently as 1935 there were over 2,600 establishments engaged in grain milling in Great Britain, by 1948 there were just over a thousand, by the early 1960s about 500 and in the early 1970s there were only about 300, operated by 255 firms. This is largely due to one man, an American baker by the name of Mr Garfield Weston who arrived in the UK in 1932 and set up Allied Bakeries in 1935. He initially imported his grain from Canada, and when this resumed after the war Ranks and Spillers decided they better diversify as he had been their main customer. Spillers became involved in bakeries when they bought one in 1937 but they and Ranks began buying into bakeries on a large scale in the mid 1950s. At that time the only other combined milling and baking enterprise was the Co-Op (who supplied about a quarter of the flour and bread in Britain).
In 1961 Allied Bakeries Limited decided to enter the flour milling industry. This was because if Britain entered the Common Market, the forerunner of the EU, then Canadian grain would no longer be available under preferential fiscal arrangements that existed for Commonwealth goods. Hence Allied Bakeries might have to buy flour from Ranks and Spillers who had by now become its principal competitors in baking. By the early 1970s there were three industry giants in the milling and baking trade; Associated British Foods Limited (ABF, which grew out of Allied Bakeries), Ranks Hovis McDougall Limited (RHM) and Spillers Limited (Spillers). By 1977 there were only 39 flour millers in the UK who were independent of the Big Three group millers. Notably Allinsons (set up by a doctor of that name who produced the first wholemeal bread in the 19th century), however I believe Allinsons was taken over by Associated British Foods in about 2007.
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