The Cow Is A Mamal

We were just doing the last bits of preparation for our 'Wartime Mill' event this coming weekend - Saturday 27th and Sunday 28th April, 12 noon to 5pm as you're asking - and were looking for something to set our (wooden) cow in context when we came across the following piece in a book about life on the Home Front.  It is so wonderful it just had to be shared...

Many evacuees were seeing the country for the first time.  The nine o'clock news on 29th October 1939 ended with an essay by a ten-year-old East London evacuee:

"The cow is a mamal.  It has six sides, right, left, an upper and below.  At the back it has a tail, on which hangs a brush.  With this it sends the flies away so they do not fall into the milk.  The head is for the purpose of growing horns and so that the mouth can be somewhere.  The horns are to butt with, and the mouth is to moo with.

Under the cow hangs the milk.  It is arranged for milking.  When people milk, the milk comes and there is never an end to the supply.  How the cow does it, I have not yet realized but it makes more and more.

The cow has a fine sense of smell, one can smell it far away.  This is the reason for the fresh air in the country.

The man cow is called an ox.  It is not a mamal.  The cow does not eat much but what it eats it eats twice so that it gets enough.  When it is hungry it moos and when it says nothing it is because all its inside is full up with grass."

So, if you're nearby, do come along and have a try at milking Blossom, our wooden cow, (in the background of the picture above), or Dig for Victory, work a stirrup pump or the air raid siren, practice a gas mask drill, taste some ration book recipes, be recruited to the Home Guard, handle wartime artefacts, take a tour and see wheat being ground into flour and discover how our little rural mill played an important part in the war effort.

The Wartime Mill

We've just had a lovely weekend at the mill exploring some of the more recent history of the building. 

Since around 1870, the mill had been grinding animal feed rather than flour for people.  But when the Second World War broke out in 1939, Britain's grain supplies from Canada were blockaded in the Atlantic and the steam mills at Liverpool were being blitzed.  Hundreds of little rural mills, including Stretton, which had been clinging on to existence were to rise to the challenge during those dark days and play their part in feeding the nation.  Stretton Watermill was operating night and day, seven days a week to produce the flour needed.

Volunteers in the Women's Land Army worked in fields in the area, converting pasture land into arable for a more productive food resource.  One lady who had been a Land Girl stationed at nearby Tilston told us how on her first day she was sent by the farmer to take a cart load of grain to Stretton Mill.  She had never been close to a horse before and was a little nervous.  She needn't have worried, as the horse knew the way and took the grain, waited for the flour and returned to the farm without her having to touch the reins. 

So we welcomed visitors, collecting some stories and memories along the way.

We laid on a display of ration book recipes, including mock sausages, eggless cake and the famous Woolton Pie.

In between blasts from the portable air raid siren we listened to wartime songs on the gramophone. 

Children tried "German Jumps" - skipping with elastic and seeing how far their could get the stirrup pumps squirting. 

A folding paratroopers bicycle was spotted leaning against the watermill.

Chris told a tale of the rediscovery of a soldier's story etched on a water bottle which intrigued visitors and left some with tears in their eyes.

We often think of our mill as being full of ancient stories, which indeed it is, but this was a lovely reminder of some of the memories which are just within touching distance today.