Visit to Stott Park Bobbin Mill, near Windermere – September 2006

This bobbin mill, built in about 1835 is the only one left in the country which is still working, albeit as a museum.

 

It is not very big, the main room being perhaps about 40 ft long by 20 ft wide, plus an office, the boiler room and the engine room, and it has two floors.  There is also the drying building for the timber, and the home for the small boys. The office is now the entrance and gift shop.

 

The mill is situated in a long narrow valley with a high wooded embankment on one side.  The trees are coppiced to encourage long growth of about 7 ft to 20 ft long.

 

 When the mill was built in 1835 the steep hillside ensured that there was plenty of water to turn the waterwheel, which was the original power source.  In 1850 a water turbine was installed and in the 1880s a steam engine superseded it, but in 1941 it was converted to electricity. The mill closed for business in 1971.

 

There is an enormous boiler in the mill which was used to generate the steam, (we are not even allowed to go into that room because of Health and Safety), but the steam engine in the next room can be seen working, although it does not now drive the machinery.  There are a lot of drive belts high up near the ceiling which used to be connected to the machinery.

 

Because of the good situation, in Victorian times there were 64 bobbin mills in the valley, which is only about 9 miles long, which means there were 7 of these mills per mile.

 

As the mills employed something like 15 – 20 people each, it meant that there was plenty of local employment.  In its early days Stott mill itself employed 10 men plus 8 boys taken from the workhouse from the age of about 6 years old. The boys were housed in a home on the site.  The last man to work at Stott mill was there for 51 years.  The cause of the demise of the mills was bobbins now being made of plastic.  When the mills closed the villages died as there was no other local work available.

 

In spite of the wood shavings there was no lung disease from working there.

However there was a fire hazard, and the mill caught fire in about 1920 and again in 1964 although it was able to carry on again very quickly as the buildings are of stone.

 

With all the trees around there was a plentiful supply of suitable wood to make the bobbins.  The preferred wood is silver birch, but they also used ash, alder, beech, chestnut, hazel, oak and sycamore.

 

Bobbins were made for sewing thread, from the very tiny ones about half an inch high to ones of about two and a half inches. (The Silko/Dewhurst sewing thread bobbins were made at Stott).  They also made the large bobbins for spinning mills, toggles for duffle coats, round ladder rungs, various types of handles and spout bobbins.  These latter were placed between the wall of a house and a down pipe, but spacers are now made of metal.

 

For the tiny bobbins, strangely enough, the wood had to be about 5 inches across and just over half an inch thick, as they can then cut about seven bobbins from it.

The other processes for the tiny ones are all as for the standard bobbins.

 

The process starts with the timber being cut into lengths of about 4 ft long and stored for a year in a well ventilated building to dry out, when it is ready for use. 

 

For a standard sewing thread bobbin it needs to be about two inches across and three inches long.  A hole is then drilled through the centre, originally by a man sitting down and offering the piece of wood to a drill which was horizontal, but later by a machine which was much safer because several pieces of wood were placed on a revolving stand which moved on before the drill came down and made the hole.  The holed bobbins were thrown into a large basket as they were taken off the machine and then passed on to the next process.

 

The next man placed the bobbin sideways on to a lathe which first of all cut the centre spindle and then another cutter on the machine cut the end pieces to size.  These bobbins also went into a basket ready for the next process.

 

The third machine did seven cuts, chamfering outside edges and sloping the straight inside part of the edge, which up to now had been very chunky.

 

The last process was to wax the bobbins.  This was done in a machine which looks like a large butter churn with a hatch in it.  About three thousand bobbins were put into it (by the small boys in olden days) and small nuggets of beeswax broken off from a large chunk and thrown in.  (Also done by the small boys.  I don’t know what other jobs they did).  The “churn” then revolved anything from half an hour to three hours when the bobbins should be sufficiently polished.

 

They were then laid in a single layer in wooden trays on racks to dry.  The drying room had a metal lattice floor and was over the boiler room, and was the warmest place in the mill.   Apparently the foreman could often be found there on cold days!!

 

Our visit lasted for about an hour and it consisted of a guided tour with demonstrations of the various machines. The guides were very good, and the demonstrators patient.  Luckily we got there towards the end of the afternoon and had the guide and demonstrations all to ourselves, so probably got some extra attention.  The timber drying building now has placards giving a lot of information.  We thoroughly enjoyed the visit and recommend it if you are in that neighbourhood.

 

Beryl Lambert.