Diverse subjects are on the menu in this issue, ranging from the SPAB September Tour, the Government’s Ideas on Folic Acid and a recipe for Refrigerator Cookies.

Michael Carden’s very detailed article on Frederick John Keevil has provoked some interest and Michael writes that he has had a call from a Mr Parsons living in Winchester, who knew John Keevil, having worked with him in the big warehouse-like building in the Brooks area known as the Wool Staplers' Hall.  “He tells me it was used as an electrically powered mill after the war - without checking my notes - owned by Smiths and supplied with grain from Southampton daily by a lorries owned by Youngs.”  Does anyone else recall the Wool Staplers’ Hall and it’s milling associations? Apologies are due to Michael as he was not clearly acknowledged as the author of the article.

It seems that every batch of John Silman’s President’s Diary Notes brings to light yet another mill I had been unaware of and want to find out about.  East Mill near Fordingbridge which John has been investigating, is recorded in my trusty Hampshire Mills  “bible”, Water and Wind Mills in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, as located at Criddlestyle .  The entry tells that the mill was originally concerned with making of sailcloth from flax but it was later used as a woollen mill, actually producing finished cloth.  John has explained to me that flax was grown locally to the mill Weaving was continued there for Dartington Hall until 1954.  Was that when Wessex Water took it over, ‘modernised’ the watercourse and built new sluices? We hear so much about flour production in mills but not nearly enough about these other industries. John has explained to me that flax was grown locally near the mill.  Sailmaking must surely have been a huge industry in the south of the county and now raises this question,  amongst many others,  was sufficient flax grown in Hampshire or were supplies imported from other counties or indeed countries, such as Scotland and Ireland?  Has a history of Hampshire’s flax growing and sail making industry been written? Are sails still made in Hampshire? And, what about the origins of the name, Criddlestyle? Who can tell me more?

Nothing seems to have been recorded, however, about the little sawmill beside St. Catherine’s Lock.  A copy of Edwin Course’s book “The Itchen Navigation” was purchased when visiting Hockley Mill on New Year’s Day and in that is a very good photograph which we have been allowed to reproduce (see page 4) with the very kind permission of Winchester College Library Archives.   It is taken from item F3/3/31, the Commoner Word Book, compiled by Herbert Evelyn Campbell (Commoner 1866) and found in the College ‘Notions’ Books.

Next up is Chilland Mill, also on the Itchen Navigation and Tony Yoward has supplied a handsome photograph of it from the HMG Archives.  A detailed history, on the other hand, has been supplied within a recent planning application.