Agricultural and rural columns in newspapers sometimes include descriptions of agricultural tasks and machinery. These help the general readers understand what they were seeing as they were going out and about these areas.
These accounts includes ones relating to threshing mills, including the travelling mill, and threshing. One account from 8 October 1946 was published in the Dundee evening telegraph. It is a general account which also includes some general historical information. It is worth quoting at length:
“Things a threshing mill does
You’ll see it lumbering along the country roads in the late afternoon – a large and cumbersome box-like affair pulled by a traction engine.
It’s the threshing machine moving on to a new farm.
The thresher is an expensive piece of equipment, so farmers prefer to hire their use by the day.
Each mill has its own district and it’s kept busy from now till the end of April. Its crew of two usually live in a caravan towed behind the mill.
As soon as the day’s work is over at one farm the outfit moves on to the next usually arriving after dark.
The crew are shown where the mill is to be set and get busy at once putting it into position and levelling it up.
It won’t work properly unless it is dead level, so spirit levels are fitted into the machine.
Next morning the mill men are up before the farmer, raising stream in the engine boiler and oiling their machinery.
When the real work starts one man feeds the corn into the mill drum which whirls round a thousand times a minute, while the other attends to the machinery.
Exchange jobs
The two change over frequently. Feeding the mill is hard toil. Keeping it operating is dusty and unpleasant.
The modern mill is a clever piece of mechanism. Not only does it separate the grain from the ear. It removes the chaff and cleans the grain by means of air blasts and riddles. It throws out thistle heads and small weed seeds. It sorts out the true grain into three grades-seed corn, seconds, and tailings.
It can deal with 80 sacks of wheat in a day.
Petrol driven threshers are common in some districts, but the steam type is still in the majority. Many still on the roads are over 70 years old-a tribute to the quality of old-fashioned workmanship, but to the great pride all thresher crews take in caring for their machine. Till 1743 all grain was threshed by hand, the corn being beaten on a barn floor by flails. It was laborious and expensive. It employed man men, and the barn floors had to be removed frequently.
Then a Scot named Michael Menzies invented the first crude threshing machine in which flails were operated by water power.
In 1786 Andrew Meikle, an East Lothian millwright, had a much better idea. His machine had a central drum armed with fixed beaters and rotating at a high speed.
Meikle couldn’t get a Scottish patent for his invention because he had operated the mill in public before applying for one. But he obtained an English patent.
Threshing machines were worked by horse or water power till 1850, when the first steam-driven models were introduced.
Now a combined harvesting and threshing machine, imported from Canada, Australia, and the USA, looks like putting the other methods out of date.”
