No 203. Hand Mills.

Two Fotos via Picassa

No 203. Hand Threshing Mills.
The first real threshing mill is credited with being designed by Andrew Meikle, 1719 to 1811, of Houston Mill, Dunbar. He invented his first one in 1784 and patented it in 1788. There were other devices tried before that but he got the credit. These mills could only be afforded by large farms. His invention allowed for the threshing, shaking and winnowing of corn by one machine, driven usually by horse power on a mill course. Previously threshing even on large farms was endlessly tedious using the flail. Barn men often had short lives, the incessant dust leading to fatal lung conditions. Heated stacks in a bad harvest even into my own time gave cause of farmer’s lung, progessive and often eventally fatal. Emphysema was another lung complication exacerbated by the old threshing methods.
Early inventions had a long way to travel before effective design but progress always moves on. Meikle’s basic principal was a revolving drum to strip grain off the straw, and there was much trial and error on the way.
Large Threshing Mills which bigger farms could afford were beyond the resources of crofters, and I remember Stronsay crofters still using the flail. At Whitehall we had a large threshing mill built in situ into the barn, immovable. It required a large steam engine or it’s successor, a large oil engine. It was a tenant’s fixture and had to be taken over at valuation at outgoing by the incoming tenant. High speed drum and all the trimmings!!! Davie Davidson of Scarths in Kirkwall rebuilt that one in my early days in Stronsay, going on to do the same later for our father at Greenland Mains and Stemster Mains.
A crofter had neither the room nor the buildings to put in a large mill, nor the money. They had to make do with what they could afford, and the invention of a small hand threshing mill would have been a great step forward from the flail. The earliest small one I have come across was the “Tiny” Hand Mill of George W. Murray of Banff Foundry. There is one still existing in Orkney. In his firm’s Catalogue of 1878, now reprinted by myself, he described his “Tiny” No 1. Hand Mill. Made entirely of iron, he stated that it was ideal for triopical countries as it would neither warp nor rot in the damp heat, nor be eaten by termites!!
Murray’s No 1 “Tiny” Thresher was designed as a Crofter’s mill, cost in 1878 was £6.10/- for the basic machine. Within six months of the first one being introduced Murray had sold over a thousand units. No mean feat for a small Foundry in Banff, though he had his Tiny Hand Mill tested and well publicised before full scale production. Orders came in from every country, and Murrray stated in his 1878 Catalogue “Over Ten Thousand in use in Great Britain and on the Continent and Colonies.” Murray’s “Tiny” Mill was driven by two handles either side of a central shaft, two men turning though one could have done a turn. That shaft turned a large toothed pinion which turned a smaller pinion on the drum shaft which gave the required speed to the threshing drum. Murray’s 1878 Catalogue recommended 36 to 40 turns of the hand per minute for wheat, less for oats, and an upward gearing of 6 times is my best estimate.
So I am guessing that the drum speed would not less than 200 revs a minute, lets say 250. That was not too far off the 300 rev speed of the later semi-high speed drums.
Feeding was recommended at one third of a sheaf at a time, easy does it. The grain dropped below through a mesh screen onto the floor and would have then been put through a grain fanners which was an old and simple design which stood the test of time for many long years. The straw was ejected over the end onto the floor. A few sheaves at a time, but with only a couple of cows on a croft that would suffice.
Fanners were invented quite some time before the threshing mill. In William Tait’s Diaries 1880 to 1941 there was constant reference to “Dressing oats” - a phrase for cleaning grain in the loft with the fanners.
The Royal Northern Agricultural Society, after thoroughly testing Murray’s Tiny Mill working powers prior to 1878, awarded it the Society’s Silver Medal, expressing in their report that “It worked so satisfactorily that it recommended itself to crofters and small farmers.”
Bear in mind that emigration to North America, Australia and New Zealand was in full swing by that time. So the immigrant sodbuster of the U.S.A. and Canada, getting a quarter section of a square mile -160 acres - as his homestead allocation, could carry on his way West a Murray “Tiny” Hand Mill, light enough and portable enough and tough enough to hitch a lift tied to the side of a Covered Wagon.