This article, about the last woad mill in Lincolnshire, was followed up a month later with a photograph showing the immense crushing machinery. The mill closed in 1932.
“Lincolnshire’s Latest Lost Industry.
That the Early Britons bedaubed themselves with blue paint was one of the fanciful touches which enlivened our history lessons. Their dye was obtained from woad, and until recently the crushing of the root-leaves of the plant could still be labelled an industry. The Lincolnshire Directory for 1909 recorded two woad-growers as still in business, a figure reduced to one in 1922. In the earlier year a woad mill could still be seen at Parson’s Drove, near Wisbech. Now, we learn, there is but one woad-grower left in England, and it is the Lincolnshire cultivator who has refrained from planting.
The Origin of ‘Wad’?
Regarding the treatment of woad, one of the most exhausting crops known, an authority says: – ‘The blue dye is obtained from the root-leaves, which are crushed in a mill by rude conical crushers dragged round by horses, and the pulp thus make is worked up into balls and laid out for some weeks to dry. These are then thrown in a heap in the dark, mixed with water, and fermented, being left for a considerable time before being packed into casks for sale. This dye is now always used with indigo.’ One of the leading national daily papers, commenting upon the industry, remarks: – ‘If the balls, or lumps, were ever known as ‘wads,’ the etymology of ‘wad,’ which the dictionary says is obscure, becomes perhaps intelligible.'”
The Stamford Mercury, 22nd December, 1927.
“Reference was recently made in our columns to the fact that only a solitary plant for the conduct of the ancient industry of woad milling survived in Lincolnshire. Depicted above is the cumbrous and archaic process followed in the mill at Parson Drove. The huge metalled wheels are used for crushing the plant, the motive power being provided by two horses.”
The Stamford Mercury, 30th December, 1927.