Barry Shurlock: Adventures in the Hampshire Record Office

THE Hampshire Record Office (HRO) in Sussex Street is one of the hidden secrets of Winchester. Not only does it have an unrivalled store of documents, maps and videos, all carefully catalogued and searchable online, but it also gives access to a wealth of other online resources. And it’s all free.

High on the list is the British Newspaper Archive, which includes this paper up to the early 1900s, and can be searched in variety of ways to track down precisely defined names – people, places, events and much else.

Then there is FindMy Past, a treasure-house for family historians and others who research the past.  Not only that, but at the entrance to the Search Room is the desk of the Hampshire Genealogical Society, where kind and helpful people are available to help with the labyrinth of methods needed to build family trees.

The catalogue itself is a tool for unlocking the thousands of stories that make up the history of Hampshire. Recently, I was faced with the problem of exploring the early years of the threshing machine in the county. There were many attempts to find an alternative to the traditional method of separating grains of wheat from the stalk with a flail, but it took a surprisingly long time for anyone to design a machine that was reliable and cost-effective.

The winner was Andrew Meikle, a millwright and mechanical engineer who lived near Dunbar, in East Lothian. His patent of 1788, which was widely pirated, became a model for building machines which did a good job in a fraction of the time required with a flail.

As a consequence, labourers who could expect to be paid for threshing during the autumn and winter months, were put out of work. Also, the advent of the machines led to loss of community with its traditions and rituals that brought people together and helped to get the work done. All these factors fuelled the Swing Riots in southern counties in 1830 (Chronicle, November 20).

Clearly, the machines were just one step in an evolving industrial scene. Surviving folk songs even painted a jolly picture:

There’s old Father Howard the sheaves to put,

While old Mother Howard she does make up.

And Mary she sits and feeds [the machine] all day,

While Johnny he carries the straw away.

The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, founded in 1826, admonished the rioters in an 8-page pamphlet, An address to the labourers on the subject of destroying machinery. It reminded them that “your clothes, your stockings, your shirts, are all made by machines, far more curiously contrived than the thrashing-machine”.

Some historians have suggested that riots took place in the south of the country because labour was scarce in the north, where men often had the option of a reasonably well-paid job in the one of various industries burgeoning at the time. They have also suggested that the threshing machine was common in the north, but relatively rare in the south. The problem with this idea is that it does not explain why the threshing machine became an object of such hate for the farm labourers of Hampshire and other counties in 1830.

In fact, by the early 1800s a dozen or so of what were then called “thrashing mills” had been put up in parts of Hampshire, albeit “at a very heavy expense”, according to a government report by Charles Vancouver. The purchasers included Sir Henry Tichborne, Admiral Cornwallis and Sir Francis Baring, as well as tenants and less prosperous landowners.

To put some flesh on this story of the riots, at mid-day on November 19, 1830, a mob of 800 or 900 farm workers marched on the house in East Stratton of a man called Francis Callender. He was the land steward to Sir Thomas Baring, owner of the Stratton Estate. The mob broke a threshing machine and bean mill.

It was at least the fourth such machine they had broken on that day, starting at Borough (or Borrow) Farm, then at farms at Weston and Northington Down (Chronicle, October 10). They demanded £5 from Callender, then raised it to £10, which he paid. They then went on to the village pub (today called the Northbrook Arms) before continuing with their rampage.

At the trial held in Winchester a month later, eight men were charged with stealing “ten sovereigns” from Callender: two were found guilty but “recommended to the merciful consideration of the Court, and the other prisoners were acquitted”.

Richard Collis, a labourer from Micheldever, confirmed that on the day the rioters had left “as soon as it was light” and with hammer and pickaxe “beat the machine to pieces” in a succession of places.

The presiding judge, Baron Sir John Vaughan, in his speech sentencing the men, noted that one of them had been “actively engaged in breaking 12 machines at least”.

So, obviously the threshing machine was relatively common by 1830, at least in the Dever Valley.  But where else?  This was when the BNA in the HRO showed its value. And the picture was quite clear: the earliest mention in newspaper adverts of “a threshing machine, winnowing fan and tackle” was at Froxfield, near Petersfield, in December 1815. There were no hits at all between 1780 and 1800, six between 1800 and 1820 and 14 between 1820 and 1830.

Also, the HRO catalogue turned up documents from 1811-12 that show a new generation on the Baring estate at Stratton Park looking to improve its mechanisation of threshing by going back to East Lothian, where it was invented. All this is in letters sent to the Francis Callender mentioned above by his father – and they are full of chitchat on the do’s and don’ts of the machines.

The Callender family hailed from Newcastle-upon-Tyne, itself the scene in the early 1800s of remarkable industrialisation. The father was himself a farmer and obviously had links with others in Northumberland and further north, in the Dunbar area of Scotland.

His son had probably only recently taken up his post with Sir Thomas Baring, who had inherited the Stratton estate in 1810 on the death of his father, Sir Francis, founder of Barings Bank, who, as mentioned above, had been one of the early purchasers of a thrashing machine.

Meikle’s original invention used a great deal of wood, but by the time Callender got quotes much of the machine was “all of metal”, though the Stratton estate would have been required to supply some wood for its construction, either oak or American fir.

As might be expected from a banking family, two possible suppliers were being played off against each. One of the letters provides a detailed specification of all the parts required, including a 28-foot diameter wheel to be turned by six horses walking round a circle.

Callender had considered powering the machine with an undershot wheel driven by water – presumably from the River Dever – but both suppliers said it would be “a waste of money” and recommended horse power.

There is much more about the development of the early threshing machine in these letters, which demonstrate the importance of HRO as a source for heritage and local history.

One final mystery needs to be settled: it is not clear whether Sir Thomas actually did go ahead with the purchase, but if he did, he might have become the owner of one of the most advanced machines in the south.

Note: the article on this page last week, “Gallows loomed for farm rioters”, was written by Barry Shurlock.

CAPTIONS

Hampshire Record Office. Image: Barry Shurlock

Threshing with a flail, early 15th century, from a Book of Hours

An early four-horse threshing machine and barn

Andrew Meikle (1719-1811). Image: Wikipedia Commons

Victorian threshing machine, with “double-blast” winnowing, Museum of English Rural Life, Reading. Image: Barry Shurlock