Chapter 10
Tales My Grandfather Told

My paternal grandfather, Henry Chappell, farmed at Upper Kilcott when I was a boy. Every Sunday morning he walked to our Chapel for the service there, had his dinner with us and then, after a rest and a smoke from his pungent pipe, walked back to Lower Kilcott where he conducted a service in the kitchen of Mrs. Watts farmhouse.
He was a good story-teller and he had a mine of reminiscences from which to entertain us. In his younger days he had lived at Greenfield Farm, Hillesley where he provided for his growing family by slaughtering porkers bought locally and then taking the carcases in his horse and cart to a pork butcher in Bristol's Old Market. He also bought cattle for local farmers at the Bristol Market. It was then a great centre for the sale of Irish cattle. They were sold by haggling, not by auction, and grandfather could mimic the Irish accents of the dealers with great effect.
Seventy-four when he died in 1919, grandfather could remember something of the distress which existed in England after the Repeal of the Corn Laws. That historic Act resulted in cheaper food for the industrial workers but in farming areas the lowered price of wheat made farmers put their land to grass and sack many of their workers. White bread, grandfather told us, cost a shilling for a quartem loaf and wages were eight shillings per week. In order to fill their stomachs, poor people had to eat what were called barley 'scauters', i.e., cakes, so heavy and hard that they had to be gnawed and nibbled.
He told us of the great explosion which took place during the excavation of Wickwar Tunnel. Some dynamite was ignited by a spark from the blacksmith's forge, some men were killed and others injured. One of the wounded, a man from Hawkesbury Upton, was taken to the Infirmary in Bristol. Hospitals were notorious at that time for the poor and scanty food they provided. When, on a Sunday, two of the injured man's friends walked from Hawkesbury to Bristol to see him, his first words were, "'Ave 'e brought anything to eat?" All the visitors had with them were two of these hard barley cakes and the sick man was eager to hide them under his pillow so that he might gnaw them in the night. As grandfather told us this we often wondered if the two men were able to buy something else to eat on their long walk back to Hawkesbury.
Henry Chappell had married a Mary Curtis whose father ground corn at the mill which was on the site of the bungalow at Kilcott. One of Mary's sisters, Emma, married a Mr. Thompson and she became the grandmother of Mr. Will Thompson so that he and I share the same great-grandfather. When Miller Curtis was young he was in charge of the grinding at Northleach Gaol. Whether the treadmill was the power unit for the grinding I do not know, but the day came when the young miller was ordered by the Governor to flog a prisoner. He refused and was sacked at once. He found his way down to Ozleworth Bottom and there became tenant of Knowles Mill. Only a few stones remain of this building now but it was marked on the Ordnance Survey Map until quite recently. From there he moved to Kilcott and there brought up his family. In his day, grandfather told us, his father-in-law ground corn not only for farmers but for cottagers as well. There were at one time forty acres of allotments at Hawkesbury and thrifty labourers grew a patch of wheat as well as potatoes. This they managed to get threshed when the steam thresher came around and the resultant wheat they carried to Kilcott to be ground into flour. Great-grandfather Curtis had a small field in which he grew beans. When his customers brought their precious bit of wheat to him for grinding, they would ask him to grind a few beans with it. They had never heard about protein but they instinctively knew that beans put 'a bit of strength into it'.
A dry period was the nightmare of the old water millers. The square stone building near Mrs. Woodgate's farm was originally a subsidiary mill to the one upstream. In dry times the water in the top pond would be used in the morning, stored in the lower pond and used again in the afternoon.
I think that Miller Curtis fell on hard times when the two horses with which he delivered his flour contracted parasitic mange from an infected collar he bought at a farm sale. I expect that was the reason for his move to the mill now owned by Mr. Medlam where be became simply a grist miller instead of a buyer of grain and a seller of flour.
Another of grandfather's yarns took us back into the days of highwaymen. When the big farmers of the district rode into Bristol they collected their harvest money from the merchants in Corn Street. Before the South Wales - Paddington line was created the wooded hollow at Coalpit Heath, which the railway now runs over, was a noted haunt of robbers and foot-pads. When the gold-laden yeomen reached the danger spit they put their horses to a gallop and rode through the woods like the 'Light Brigade'.