1966 The Mill .....................................

I could write a book about the mill, not a thick book perhaps, but the whole saga merits more than just a short story.

Bielby (sometimes spelt Beilby) is a Yorkshire village. Somewhere between Pocklington and the wide River Humber. Pocklington? Well it's not far from Beverly. How we (four) came to be there stems from my taking a job with Blackburn Aircraft after I came out of the R.A.F.

I'd already lodged solo in Goole very briefly and a little longer at a 'farm' "somewhere" north of York. While I did that, Glennys and Mitchell and Martin stayed in Blackpool with mother-in-law. It was a Yorkshire winter and I was working at my new job and no doubt trying to find somewhere for us to live.

Perhaps someone at my new workplace recommended The Mill. Anyway, I went and looked and talked to the lady farmer who owned it. The romantic in me was smitten I suspect and I said 'yes' and set about moving the family hence.

Bielby's mill was 111 years old when we moved in. For the afficiandoes of mills, it was driven by a side mounted, undershot wheel. Power was from Bielby Beck (beck is the Yorkshire word for stream - see how much you're learning here folks).

The mill was sited at the end of a short, purpose-built spur from the Pocklington Canal. Initially the mill ground (I think) locally grown grains for flour. As this busines declined it turned to grinding bone meal. In the end, the mechanism, probably due to reduced maintenance, began to damage the building's structure and operation ceased.

When our time to inhabit arrived the building served as accomodation and storage for the adjacent farm.

Our time there, about a year, was filled with a lot of interest and humour and not a little grief. The rest of the chapter can follow in subsequent tales. We were to love and hate Bielby Mill by turns.

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And here, told a little differently, is the same tale. I wrote it for the Pocklington Canal Society's newsletter and they published it. It tells more and less the same story again, perhaps worth a read too:


Bielby’s Mill
We; my wife, two young sons and I, lived in Bielby’s mill during most of 1966 and 67. Fresh out of the Royal Air Force I was working at Holme-on-Spalding-Moor airfield as an inspector on Blackburn Buccaneers.
Supposedly 111 yrs old then, the mill would be 143 yrs old now. I suspect it’s rather older.
It showed its age! Built before damp courses were invented, wet weather would see “the rising damp” rise alarmingly. Downstairs floors were stone I think. The upstairs floors sagged quite alarmingly and every piece of furniture had to be levelled with pieces of wood. Anything like children’s marbles rolled rapidly towards the building’s centre. The roofs leaked here and there too.
We were to love and hate the mill by turns.
On the positive side? On a sunny day it was a lovely place to be. Walks with Lurch, our black lab, along the arm and up and down the canal. Disused then of course it was weed-choked and mysterious. Back then too, before Google, information was harder to come by and I really had little idea of the area’s history - perhaps too young to care much. Ah, careless youth!
The mill was what I think they call an undershot type. Driven by Bielby Bec it was a big whitewashed brick structure. Used to grind corn etc. I think and in latter days, bone meal. I was told it had been taken out of use because the massive machinery was beginning to damage the building’s structure. When we lived there I think the building was used to store animal feed while we occupied the old miller’s accommodation.
Behind the building were several of the millstones. So big and heavy! How did “they” handle such huge items back then? For reasons that elude me now I decided to move one round to the front of the mill where it served as the base for a bird feeder, a tree branch being jammed into the wheel’s pivot hole. Using logs as rollers and assorted levers I gradually move this massive item from A to B. Is it still there I wonder?
Many, many memories, too many for here perhaps but,
‘Jacko’ Jackson, an aircraft cleaner lived in the village. He had a Ford Anglia and I a Morris Mini. We took turns driving each other to work. A gentle, quietly spoken man with a Yorkshire dialect that defeated me sometimes. He’d spent the war in a prison camp after Dunkerque and his brother had died at Imphal in Burma.
In the field opposite the Bielby Arm, ploughing turned up pieces of an aircraft, a WW2 crash perhaps. I hauled pieces of engine cowling from the canal. What, I wonder, was the story behind that.
I remember the Mill’s lighting flickered during high winds and there were stories of haunting. I remember ruined canal locks and a plan to build some sort of punt to use on the canal.
Then Blackburns offered us a council house in Brough and the Mill suddenly became a memory. A year later we emigrated to Canada. Now, nearly a half century later Beilby’s Water Mill remains a vivid moment in my history.