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The internet has made
it so much easier to find pictures of mills. We
have the
Mills Archive of course, which is usually my
first port of call, and also the
Muggeridge Collection which also contains
hundreds of windmill photos. Many museums have put
much of their collections online, and there are
numerous other local history websites often linked
to a particular area, where a search on 'Windmill',
'Watermill', or 'Mill' will often bring up pictures
of interest.
Another source are the numerous Facebook Groups that
relate to a particular place or area, especially if
they specialise in old photos. A number of the
photos posted are from people's personal
collections. Unfortunately many of these groups are
private groups so you have to join to view the
content.
Online auction sites
such as Ebay
have hundreds of photos too, but it is
time-consuming to spot the occasional gem, as many
of the old photos are sold as commercial copies so
therefore are on sale permanently.
There is another
online site called
Easyliveauction which is a site used by numerous
auction houses to allow on line bidding as well as
attending in person. Items are listed prior to the
auction and a keyword search brings up all the items
due to be auctioned. There are sometimes postcards
of mills, and occasionally a photo of a mill will
appear in an album of family photographs. However
it has been most useful for finding paintings of
mills. Windmills in particular were often painted,
sometimes as the subject of the painting or as a
feature in the background.
The most interesting
images are generally those over 100 years old, as
pictures of mills before that time are much less
common. There are quite a lot of mills that
survived into the photographic era where no
photograph has been discovered up to now. Paintings
are also useful and can go back even further, but
sometimes can be subject to 'artistic licence'.
Recently I came
across these two images.
The first, an
unidentified painting of a tower mill which seemed
to be overlooking a large lake or the sea, and
signed D Law 1866, that was up for auction. A
search for details about the artist can often be of
help, but the information I found stated that David
Law painted landscapes all over the country, so no
location clues there.
I thought it had
rather a Hampshire or West Sussex look about it and
wondered if it could be one of the two mills that
stood close to the shore at Portchester – a good
find, as the only photos are that of the stump of
one of the mills. But looking at old maps, the
nearby buildings did not seem to fit. However in
the end I managed to identify it as Langdown mill
which stood between Hythe and Dibden Purlieu. There
are a few reasonable photos of this mill and some
show the surrounding cottages. It looks to be
fairly accurate, though I think the cap of the mill
may have been more of an ogee shape than a dome.
The painting does show the wooden blocks set into
the tower at a height of about 6ft. These would
have been used as attachment points for the striking
chain to stop it swinging about, necessary in such
an exposed location. The large building across the
water is the Royal Victoria Hospital at Netley. The
mill is thought to have been demolished in the late
1800s and replaced with a house called The Windmill
and confusingly marked on maps as such.
The second image is
a drawing which was stated to be of Ann's Hill Mill
at Gosport and signed by M Snape. It had also been
subject to online auction, and the image was found
on a Google search. Martin Snape 1859-1930 was born
in Gosport and did numerous paintings of the area.
I have only ever found one other image of this mill,
a painting from the front by the same artist, so it
was useful to find another view showing previously
obscured details from the rear. It probably dates
to around the turn of the 20th century. Its date of
disappearance is unknown.
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