Leonard Squirrell: Wolvercote Paper Mill, 1949

ABOUT THE ARTIST

(This text is printed on the back of the greeting card)

This postcard of Leonard Squirrell’s painting of Wolvercote paper mill shows the mill as it was 1949. There was a mill on this site as least as early as 1139, when it was presented as a gift to Godstow Abbey. During the Civil War part of the mill was used to grind swords but as early as 1674 it was making some kind of rough paper. By 1683 it was making paper for books and was leased to a succession of paper-makers by the dukes of Marlborough who by then owned it. Towards the end of the eighteenth century the paper-maker John Swann greatly enlarged it, ending the corn-grinding business in order to produce the extra paper required by the Clarendon Press. In 1855 it was sold to Thomas Combe who completely rebuilt it in 1856, before selling it to the university in 1872.

As the main source of the paper used by the Oxford University Press, the mill was enlarged throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth. Steam- and gas-driven machinery was installed in 1898, electricity in 1920, although some water power was used until 1943. In 1953, four years after Squirrell had completed his painting, the 1856 building which he had faithfully rendered was destroyed in order to make way for further expansion. Today, as the mill is demolished all over again, the question of the site’s future remains an open one.