Portsmouth Block Mills - Publicity

Publicity

These machines and the block mills attracted an enormous amount of interest from the time of their erection, ranging from Admiral Lord Nelson on the morning of the day he embarked from Portsmouth for the Battle of Trafalgar on 1805, to the Princess Victoria at the age of 12, as part of her education. Even during the time of the Napoleonic Wars, until 1815 there was a stream of foreign dignitaries and military men wishing to learn. The machines were fully described and illustrated in the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, (1811), Rees's Cyclopaedia, (1812), the supplement to the 4th edition of Encyclopædia Britannica (1817) and the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana. Later encyclopaedias such as Tomlinson's Encyclopaedia and the Penny Cyclopaedia derived their accounts from these earlier publications.

These accounts concentrated almost entirely on the blockmaking machinery, and ignored the saw-milling side of the mills, and in consequence modern commentators have not discussed this aspect of the Block Mills. The sawmills were important since Brunel was enabled to develop his ideas which he employed later in his private veneer mill at Battersea, and the Royal Navy saw mills at Woolwich Dockyard and Chatham Dockyard, as well as mills he designed for private concerns, such as Borthwick's at Leith in Scotland.