There have been mills in this area for over a thousand years, with four mentioned in the Domesday Book. The most important and largest was Lumley Mill.
In 1327 there were three mills in the area, deemed ‘low value’ because there was often insufficient water to power the water wheels they relied on for their power and to operate. A new type of mill design and water source was required. Built by the MP Lord Lumley in 1760, on Mill Lane between Emsworth and Westbourne, the most northerly of the Emsworth mills was the water powered Lumley Mill (SU 752 064).
Its water wheel was driven by a leat or canal, specially dug for this purpose from the river Ems, which runs south from Westbourne Church.
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The leat through Lumley also fed a watercress bed, that is now long gone.
The tremendous power required for Lumley mill came from a large iron ‘overshot’ waterwheel, which was twelve feet high, but is sadly no longer there.
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After six years’ research civil engineer John Smeaton (1724-1792) proved that overshot water mill wheels, like the one used at Lumley, were twice as efficient as undershot ones. Yet the majority of mills in Emsworth still used the less powerful undershot wheels.
In 1778 Lumley Mill was bought by Richard Barwell who had also purchased the Stansted estate. Then, in 1802, Edward Tollervey bought the mill with grand plans for its expansion. An astute and prosperous baker and businessman from Portsmouth, he was rich but prone to over-indulgence with his intrepid schemes of business development.
Tollervey built a large pseudo-Gothic house, outbuildings and stores, in which he installed ovens to bake bread and biscuits, and also erected a large number of pigsties. He had secured contracts with the Admiralty to supply them with salt pork, bread, biscuits and flour. Local corn was ground by the mill and turned into biscuits and shipped off to Portsmouth dockyard’s Royal Navy fleet, plus up to 14,000 troops in some of the nearby military facilities as well as the growing number of townspeople in Portsmouth.
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The grist or ‘middlings’ and the spoiled or broken biscuits were fed to the pigs which were also processed and sent to the dockyard, thus reducing pig foodstuff costs and further increasing Tollervey’s profits.
Products like malted barley were sold from the maltings at Lumley. Horse drawn wagons, stored in the nearby Mill Cottage, journeyed from there to Portsmouth every week, laden with goods. In the end Tollervey tried to do too much and over-extended his business too rapidly, placing overdue reliance on Napoleonic war contracts. He ultimately went bankrupt.
The mill building we see today was actually an extension to the original mill. The photo above of the mill complex was taken around 1910. It was built during the Napoleonic Wars by French prisoners of war and, if you look closely at the picture below, you can see the two French ‘fleur-de-lis’ emblems they left behind on the side wall.
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Over 100,000 French prisoners were held captive in Britain during the Napoleonic Wars including soldiers, naval seamen, privateers, merchants and even occasionally women and children. 12,000 of them died in places like Portchester castle and offshore floating prison hulks along the coast. 70,000 who returned after Napoleon was defeated at the battle of Waterloo in 1815 also came back to France with serious health issues.
In May 1915 the original mill and the bakehouse, both wooden buildings, were destroyed by fire. At the time the grain store held a large volume of grain owned by Mr. Bartholomew of Chichester, so the fire was intense. Bartholomew’s business still survives to this day.
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To the north of the malt house there used to be a large mill pond which helped power the large waterwheel. It was only the concerted efforts of the Emsworth Fire Brigade in using this pond which prevented all the mill buildings from being destroyed in the fire!
Only the miller’s house and part of the foundations for the three storey malt house survived the catastrophic fire, as well as the ramp to the bakehouse (below).
The Mill Manager’s house is ‘Little Lumley’ (below) and the neighbouring buildings of ‘Lumley Cottage’ were the stables and the grounds which were used to produce vegetables.
- Read about Brook Meadow and Lumley village – click here
- Read about French Napoleonic prisoners of war – click here