Chesterton Mill and the French Family
This history trail audio is narrated by the poet Michael Rosen, with script researched by Helen Weinstein and the team at Historyworks. This recording is part of a series of Cambridge history trails which have lyrics inspired by 'history beneath our feat' performed by local schoolchildren, with poems by the top poet Michael Rosen and songs by the funny team at CBBC's songwriters commissioned by Historyworks. To find more trails and further information, go to http://www.creatingmycambridge.com/trails
If you look out of the windows of St Luke’s Primary School or walk to the top of French’s Road, off Victoria Road, you can still some old barns and a big windmill missing its sails. The reason the road and the windmill is known locally as French’s is because in 1847 William French, a local miller moved to Cambridge and began to rent Chesterton Mills. A few years later “Miller” French paid £440 at a public auction to buy the land with a small farm and orchards surrounding the old windmill. After that the Mill was run by several generations of the French family for well over one hundred years.
The French family still live nearby today, and great great grandson (also called William French), has memories of going out on deliveries with the horse and wagon, and having warm rolls and doughnuts given to him at the bakeries where his family business delivered the sacks of flour. He remembers watching the flywheel spinning at great speed as the belt whizzed around driving the mill-stones. He also has old family photos showing the farm animals such as chickens and pigs, horses and cows.
Just imagine that where the school playground is today, there used to be a lovely orchard where William’s granny kept her chickens, and he would collect the eggs for pocket money to sell at the market. He remembers at Christmas that turkeys would be raised and then killed off and sold. If pigs escaped from the sty, there was a great fuss with all the men from the mill coming to help drive them back home to their pigsty. They’d wave metal tools at them because the pigs were so heavy if they charged at you, they could push you over in the muck & perhaps break your bones!
William French remembers that it was extremely tiring working at the Mill because it was lots of lifting of massive bags of grain and flour. All the workers would also work very long hours, getting up at dawn to deliver the bakeries their freshly ground flour.
For the first 20 years the windmill would have relied solely on the weather, needing the wind in its sails to drive the mill-stones which ground the wheat. However, the Millers discovered that wind power was just not a reliable source of energy to enable the mill-stones to create fine enough flour.
With the arrival of the railways to Cambridge in 1845 and inspired by the steam revolution which was powering the train engines as part of the ‘railway mania’ of the Victorian era, in 1868 William French decided to install a steam engine to power the grinding process. As with the railway engines, coal was burned to heat water to make steam. It was the steam, under pressure, which drove the pistons of the engine which turned the drive wheel and the belt that was connected to the machinery in the windmill. When there was too little wind the new engine would be stoked up with coal and steam power was used instead – a bit like a hybrid motor car the French family now had two sources of power. The steam engine also had its own Engine House with a very tall chimney, and if you look up you can see it does look very similar to the steam engine chimney that was built in 1894 at the Sewage Pumping Station on Riverside nearby. This is now the home of the Cambridge Museum of Technology where you have the chance to see engines in action.
The French family always adopted new technology for powering the mill and just as they moved from wind to steam power in the Victorian era so they moved from steam to gas and then finally to diesel in the 20th century. Other members of the family ran the bakery and general stores on nearby Searle Street. This shop was one of many serving the small neighbourhood north of the river. If you look carefully at the shop on the corner of Searle Street you can see that the large front window used to be a shop window, and there is a large chimney at the back because it was above the bake house. Then the Mill closed and none of the French family descendants are now in the milling and baking business, but the names of those from this era can be found on gravestones in the local churchyard, which runs between Histon Road and French’s Road.
St Luke’s primary school children enjoyed learning about the Mill and looking inside. They thought about the different sounds the Mill made in the various ages of technological change. Inspired by this history they wrote a fantastic song about the Mill which you can listen to on the website.