Brewhurst Mill and the River Lox
Brewhurst Mill stands about a mile from the centre of Loxwood, in the low ground beside Brewhurst Lane and the River Lox. Loxwood formed part of Wisborough Green parish during the medieval period. The first direct documentary record of the Brewhurst watermill is from 1554; the site may be older.
The position of a medieval watermill was determined by the fall and control of the water. The builders had to select a point where water could be taken from the River Lox upstream of the mill, held at a higher level and then released through the wheel before returning to the river farther downstream. At Brewhurst this required a head race leading from the river, a millpond beside the mill, banks to retain the water, sluices to regulate it, a wheel pit at the mill and a tail race carrying the water away.
Establishing a watermill on this site required extensive work in wet ground. The races and pond had to be dug, the pond banks raised and made strong enough to retain a large body of water, and timber sluices and other water-control structures constructed where the flow entered and left the pond. Floods could damage banks and timberwork, while silt brought down by the river had to be cleared from the channels and pond. The mill building, wheel and internal gearing then had to be set at the point where the stored water provided enough fall to turn the wheel, and heavy millstones and other equipment had to be brought to the site over the local tracks.
Once the pond, races, banks and working head of water had been established, rebuilding at the same working point was easier than creating another complete water system elsewhere. This makes it likely that later mills occupied the same working site as an earlier mill.
The later water system follows the same basic arrangement. The main course of the River Lox runs west of the mill. Water was diverted along the head race into the millpond on the south-west side of the building, then released through the wheel pits and returned to the river downstream by the tail race. Three large sluice gates and a spillway controlled the water. Brewhurst Farm, the miller’s house, cottages and agricultural buildings developed around this working site.
From John Myll to the Sewards
An earlier Loxwood milling record occurs in the will of William Phillippe, dated 23 January 1520. Phillippe was described as being ‘at the mill in the parish of Green’ and left 13s 4d to the chapel of Loxwood.
The first document in the Brewhurst papers that names the holding and its mill is dated 1554. John Myll senior of Loxwood, in the parish of Wisborough, granted to his son and heir John Myll his messuage called Bruers or Bruars, with the buildings adjoining and the watermill, together with lands, rents, pastures and woods. The deed is dated 24 October in the first and second years of Philip and Mary. A later Brewhurst document also referred back to an annuity charged on the property in March 1552.
The name appears in several forms in the records. The Brewhurst archive includes Bruers or Bruars in the sixteenth century, Brewers in 1615, Bruhurst and Mill Hooke in 1641, and Brewhurst by 1701. These spellings occur within the documentary sequence for the same estate and watermill.
By the later eighteenth century the mill and Brewhurst Farm were occupied by the Seward family. John Seward was followed by his son Thomas Seward, who took over the family farm and mill. The Seward family purchased the property in 1784, and the 1785 Land Tax names Miss Seward as owner and Thomas Seward as occupier. In 1803 Anne Seward, owner of the Brewhurst holding, married Edward Napper of Rudgwick and lived with him at Ifold House. Ownership of Brewhurst then passed into the Napper family. During the nineteenth century the Botting family occupied and worked Brewhurst Mill and Farm.
The Botting millers and farmers
The Botting association with Brewhurst is recorded from the early nineteenth century. A newspaper notice in February 1830 names Henry Botting of Brewhurst Mill, Wisborough Green, as a ‘miller and farmer’, together with Michael Botting of Rudgwick, farmer.
The 1841 census records Henry Botting at Brewhurst Farm as a miller. His wife Mary and daughters Ann and Emily were in the household. Among the other occupants were William Sturt, a fifteen-year-old miller’s apprentice, and William Cooper, another miller. The following year the Wisborough Green tithe schedule recorded Henry Botting occupying Brewhurst Mill and Farm, amounting to about 199 acres, as well as other land in the district.
Henry Botting died on 27 March 1864. In September 1865 the farming stock and household effects of the late Henry Botting were advertised for sale at Brewhurst Farm over three days. The next generation continued the business. John Botting was established at Brewhurst Mill during the middle of the century.
A County Court case reported by the Sussex Agricultural Express in December 1859 records how customers paid for grinding at Brewhurst. Harriet Baker had sent wheat both to a mill at Plaistow and to Brewhurst. From the sack sent to Brewhurst she said that she received three bushels and three pounds of flour and forty-eight pounds of pollard. She told the court that she paid by toll at both mills and that Mr Botting had told her husband that the Brewhurst mill would take two and a half gallons of wheat before grinding. The case concerned another dispute, but Baker’s evidence records the toll system used at Brewhurst and the division of the customer’s grain into flour and pollard.
The mill machinery also changed during the Botting period. The detailed machinery history dates the internal overshot wheel to about 1840. It is twelve feet in diameter and more than seven feet wide, with fifty-six curved wrought-iron buckets, and it drove the internal pitwheel and gearing beneath the mill. A second wheel was added outside the north-west end of the building in 1861. This larger breastshot wheel, fourteen feet in diameter and four feet wide, could be used when flooding made the lower internal wheel difficult to operate.
Water from the wheels drove the millstones and other machinery through gears, shafts and belts. The lower levels contained the hursting, pitwheels and gearing; above were the stones, hoists, grain-cleaning equipment, bins and elevators. Grain entered the mill, was raised through the floors, cleaned and directed to the stones, and flour or meal was then weighed and bagged for collection or delivery.
Maurice and Thomas Henry Botting
John Botting’s sons Maurice, born in 1853, and Thomas Henry, born in 1859, were running Brewhurst Mill by the end of the nineteenth century. The 1899 fire report names them as the owners and occupiers of the mill. The 1901 census records Maurice as a miller, with his wife Emily and their children at Brewhurst, while Thomas Henry Botting was recorded there as a miller and employer.
Maurice Botting’s name appears repeatedly elsewhere in Loxwood. He served on the local School Board, became a trustee of the Reading Room, was a churchwarden and chairman of the chapel trustees, and took a leading part in the Loxwood agricultural show.
The brothers continued to modernise the mill. By the late 1890s an engine had been installed so that milling did not depend entirely on water conditions. That change was followed by the fire of August 1899, which destroyed the upper part of the mill.
The fire of 23 August 1899
At about 2.15 on the afternoon of Wednesday 23 August 1899, Stephen Moon junior was working the mill’s oil engine when he noticed oil escaping from a joint in the feed pipe. While he tried to stop the leak, oil squirted from the joint and caught fire at a lamp. The flame set the surrounding woodwork alight and then reached the weatherboarding and the upper floor. Moon was slightly burned while trying to deal with the leak.
Moon called for help and Maurice Botting, who was working about twenty-five yards away, came to the engine room with several employees. Water was available from the river, but the fire spread through the timber upper part of the mill too quickly for the first attempts to stop it. The heat soon prevented the men from approaching closely enough to work effectively. Their main effort was then directed towards saving the engine, which stood in a room at the eastern corner of the building, away from the waterwheel.
The surveyor of the Petworth Rural District Council, was among the first people from outside the mill to arrive. More help came from Loxwood and from Alfold, where a cricket match was in progress. When it became clear that the fire could not be controlled by hand, a messenger was sent about two miles to Alfold Post Office and a telegram was sent to Horsham for the Volunteer Fire Brigade.
The Horsham brigade had returned that morning from another fire at Faygate. It left Horsham at 3.10 p.m. and reached Brewhurst at 4.05, bringing two manual engines and fifteen men under Captain Brooks and Lieutenant Penfold. Both engines were put to work. After about three hours of pumping the main flames had been reduced, but the brigade had to resume work when an oak tree above the ruins was found burning in two places and the debris continued to smoulder. Water was played on the remains for another three-quarters of an hour before the brigade left for Horsham at about 9 p.m.
The direction of the wind prevented the fire from spreading to a cart shed, cottages and ricks on the other side of a narrow cart road, although those buildings had to be kept wet because of the heat. The mill itself was full of corn. More than one thousand sacks of wheat, oats, barley, maize and peas, together with flour and meal, were destroyed or damaged by fire and water. The upper weatherboarded part of the building and most of the machinery collapsed, leaving the lower brick walls standing. The recently installed engine was only slightly damaged. The waterwheel was not in use when the fire began.
The first estimate put the damage at about £2,000. The buildings were insured with the Kent Fire Insurance Company and the stock with the Equitable Fire Insurance Company. Maurice Botting left two men at the mill overnight, and small outbreaks and smouldering material still required attention during the following day.
Rebuilding the mill
Maurice and Thomas Henry Botting rebuilt rather than abandon the mill. In 1900 Maurice Botting and his elder brother John Botting of Wanford purchased the Brewhurst Estate through two mortgages totalling £7,150; the mortgages were redeemed in 1913.
The lower masonry and brickwork were retained and new timber-framed upper floors were erected above them. The rebuilt mill was taller than its predecessor, with a basement and three floors above ground beneath a hipped slate roof. The Charman mill history attributes the new milling installation to Armfields of Romsey, a firm of millwrights. The upper floors contained millstones, a stone crane, sack-hoist controls, grain-cleaning equipment, weighing machinery, grain bins, a roller mill, a winnowing machine, a bucket elevator and line shafting.
A postcard of the rebuilt mill was posted in August 1904, and information on the reverse dates the photograph to the winter of 1903-04. The building was therefore complete by early 1904. The 1910 sale particulars describe the mill as having been erected ‘about 10 years’ earlier.
The sale particulars give a detailed description of the rebuilt works. The mill measured about fifty-three feet by twenty-one feet and had a basement and three floors. It was advertised as a ‘Modern Water & Steam Power Flour Mill’, with a good water supply from the river through the millpond, overshot and breast wheels and three pairs of stones. The wording records the combination of traditional water power with auxiliary engine power during the first decade after the fire.
The mill formed part of the much larger Brewhurst Estate offered for auction at the King’s Head Hotel in Horsham on 19 October 1910. The whole sale covered about 471 acres in six lots. Lot 1, Brewhurst itself, extended to about 256 acres and included the old residence, farmhouse, cottages, flour mill, agricultural buildings, meadow, arable land, woodland, the river and the large millpond.
The Brewhurst Milling Company and the Blackstone engine
Maurice Botting died in February 1916. By about 1918 local ownership records place the Brewhurst Milling Company at the mill, with Walter Roper associated with the business until 1938. The same records separately name the millers who worked there. Thomas Puttock, for example, is recorded as miller from 1928 until 1949.
In 1928 a 41 horsepower Blackstone horizontal single-cylinder oil engine, number 166890, was installed in a small projection at the north-east corner of the mill. The engine drove the machinery through a large belt and a system of fast-and-loose pulleys. A cantilevered roof and walkway protected the external belt drive between the engine house and the mill.
The Blackstone engine reduced dependence on the river. Water power continued to be available for a time, but regular use ended in 1932 after the internal overshot wheel broke. The external wheel remained beside the building, while the engine became the main source of power. Later three-phase electricity was also used.
The Brewhurst Milling Company is recorded as selling the mill in 1944, after which Walter Nash appears in the local ownership chronology. Thomas Puttock continued as miller until 1949. From about 1950 Brewhurst Estate, including the mill, belonged to William Henry Douglas Riley-Smith and his wife Elspeth. The Riley-Smith family was connected with the John Smith brewing business at Tadcaster, and Brewhurst remained both an agricultural estate and a working mill.
A working mill in the 1950s and 1960s
A West Sussex Gazette sketch published on 26 March 1953 records Brewhurst as a working corn mill. The artist, Harold Roberts, noted that the iron waterwheel was not running when he drew it and that the machinery was being driven by an engine. He also described the miller’s house, farmyard and cottages around the mill and said that on his visits he had seen milling in progress.
Photographs in the mill archive name Bert Kitchener as the miller at Brewhurst in 1956. One shows him outside the mill; another shows him beside the Brewhurst Milling lorry. He was later succeeded by his son.
Commercial corn grinding ended in May 1968. The machinery was occasionally run afterwards, and the planning and machinery reports record its last operation in 1981. Douglas Riley-Smith died at Brewhurst on 9 January 1981. The estate was divided and sold in separate lots in 1984, when the mill was separated from the farm.
The machinery and the later building
Brewhurst Mill was added to the statutory list at Grade II on 22 May 1985. The listing records the brick and masonry lower part of the building, the weatherboarded upper floors, hipped slate roof, external wheel, Blackstone engine and the extensive machinery inside. The listing gives the fire as about 1890, but the contemporary newspaper reports and the Brewhurst archive fix the date at 23 August 1899.
Much of the milling equipment remained in the building after commercial work ended. At lower-ground level are the wheel pits, pitwheels and hursting. The ground and upper floors retain gearing, stone mechanisms, line shafting, hoists, grain-handling machinery, bins, cleaning equipment and other parts of the milling process. The Blackstone engine and its external belt-drive arrangement also remained in place. The statutory listing describes this machinery in detail.
Planning permission in 1993 allowed the first and second floors of the redundant mill to be used for warehousing and offices. A later scheme converted the building to residential use while keeping the milling machinery in the lower parts of the mill. The work was carried out during 2018-19 and received a Sussex Heritage Trust Award in 2019. The mill is now a private dwelling, with the engine room, water-control features and much of the historic machinery retained within the building and grounds.
The present building incorporates several phases of the mill’s history: the earlier stone and brick work, the post-1899 timber rebuilding and the Blackstone engine installation of 1928. The millpond, wheel positions and machinery remain within a site documented as a watermill since 1554.
