Papermaking in the United Kingdom

The first recorded paper mill in the United Kingdom was Sele Mill near Hertford owned by John Tate. Founded around 1488, this mill was visited by King Richard VII some 10 years later and a report of it was printed by Wynken de Worde. Sheets bearing John Tate’s watermark have been found in books printed in 1494.

Other early mills included one at Dartford, owned by Sir John Speilman, who was granted special privileges for the collection of rags by Queen Elizabeth and one built in Buckinghamshire before the end of the 16th century.

During the first half of the 17th century, further mills were established near Edinburgh, at Cannock Chase in Staffordshire, and several in Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Surrey.

Hollander Beater

During the first half of the 18th century, the Hollander Beater (or rag-engine) was widely introduced into the UK, replacing the stamping mills that had previously been used for pulping rags. In December 1724, Henri de Portal was awarded the contract for producing the Bank of England watermarked bank-note paper at Bere Mill in Hampshire. Portals, now part of the De La Rue group, have retained this contract ever since but production has now moved to the Overton mill. In 1757 James Whatman developed a new ‘woven’ wire fabric for his paper mould leading to his production of the first Wove paper, a significant improvement on the Laid pattern of the earlier moulds. With its straight wires, the traditional mould produced paper with characteristic ridges that did not give a clear sharp ink impression when printed. The new Wove pattern provided the solution.

By 1800 there were 430 paper mills in England and Wales and less than 50 in Scotland, mostly operating a single vat, and, of course, producing paper by hand. Total output was just 11,000 tons (an average of 23 tons per mill) and the process is estimated to have consumed 24 million lbs of rags. UK demand for paper exceeded home supply and was supplemented by imports, mainly from the continent.

The Birth of an Industry

With the country at war with Napoleon’s France, there was a shortage of labour for making paper and, in the new spirit of the age, mechanisation was the obvious answer to both this shortage and the increasing demand for more paper.

The start of the solution came from the most unlikely source, France, where Nicholas Louis Robert, an accountant at the French paper mill of Essonnes had invented and, in 1799 patented, a hand operated machine for making paper in lengths of up to 12 feet. Unable to get finance to develop his invention in France, he sold the rights to his patent to his employer Leger Didot who in turn approached his brother-in-law, John Gamble (whilst in Paris organising the exchange of prisoners) to take out an English patent and secure financial backing.

Gamble used Robert’s original French patent drawings to secure an English patent in October 1801 and secured financial support from Henry and Sealy Fourdrinier, partners in the City stationery firm of Bloxham and Fourdrinier, in return for a one third interest in the patent rights.

In 1802, the Fourdriniers appointed John Hall of Dartford to construct a working machine based on Robert’s drawings and his working model that had been brought to England soon after the Treaty of Amiens brought a pause to hostilities. Progress was at first slow but once Hall’s brother-in-law, Bryan Donkin, took charge the project made rapid progress. The Fourdrinier brothers had a new engineering works built for Donkin in Bermondsey and leased Frogmore Mill in Apsley, Hertfordshire, as the site of their new paper mill in 1803 where the first, improved Robert machine was installed later that year. In replication of the hand-making process, a dilute pulp suspension was poured onto an endless wire cloth from which water was drained as it travelled along to the press section where it was transferred to a continuous felt blanket and pressed between rollers to make it dry enough to be rolled on a reel. Finally it would have been cut off the reel into sheets and loft dried in the same way as hand made paper.

Two Waters Mill

Supported by Gamble and the Fourdriniers, Donkin continued to refine the design of the machine. A new machine incorporating many new ideas was designed and engineered in Bermondsey and installed at the Bloxham and Fourdrinier, Two Waters mill in 1805. Further developments of both machines were made over the next two years and additional patents were acquired in 1803 and 1807 recognising the enormous advances that had been achieved in developing a machine that could produce good paper commercially.

In 1806 the Fourdriniers issued a public statement about the benefits of their machine. They claimed that the cost of making a Cwt of paper by machine was 3 shillings and 9 pence (19p) compared to 16 shillings (80p) by hand. Furthermore, their machine with 9 workers could produce in one 12 hour day the same amount of paper that it would take 41 workers using 7 vats to produce by hand. The cost of a 54” wide paper machine was £1,040.

It was not to be until 1822 that Donkin adopted TB Crompton’s 1821 patent for drying paper continuously over steam heated drying cylinders and the paper machine that today’s paper makers would recognise as their own – the Fourdrinier – was finally completed.

Meanwhile, in 1809 at neighbouring Apsley Mill, John Dickinson installed and patented a different kind of paper machine. Instead of pouring a dilute pulp suspension on to an endlessly revolving flat wire as in the Fourdrinier process, this machine uses a cylinder covered in wire as a mould. The cylindrical mould is partially submerged in a vat containing the pulp suspension and as the mould rotates, water is sucked through the wire depositing a thin layer of fibres on the cylinder.
The cylinder mould machine, as it was named, competed strongly with the Fourdrinier machine for many decades and was the type of machine first used by the fledgling US paper industry (1819). However, during the 20th century, the Fourdrinier became the dominant technology for fine papermaking and the cylinder mould machine is now primarily used for making boards (heavier weight papers) or, because of its superior watermark ability, for the production of high security papers.

By 1850 UK paper production is estimated to have reached 100,000 tons and the pattern for the mechanised production of paper had been set. Subsequent developments concentrated on increasing the size and capacity of the machines as well as finding volume alternative pulps from which paper could be reliably manufactured.

Geographical changes also took place as many of the early mills were small and had been situated in rural areas. The change was to larger mills in, or near, urban areas closer to suppliers of the raw materials (esparto mills were generally situated near a port as the raw material was brought in by ship) and the paper markets. By the end of the century there were fewer than 300 paper mills in the UK but they employed 35,000 people in producing 650,000 tons of paper a year.

From rags to riches

Sorting Rags

The increasing demands for more paper during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries led to shortages of the rags needed to produce the paper. Part of the problem was that no satisfactory method of bleaching pulp had yet been devised, and so only white rags could be used to produce white paper. Chlorine bleaching was being used by the end of the eighteenth century, but excessive use produced papers that were of poor quality and deteriorated quickly.

The potential of wood as a source of fibre for paper had been noted, in France, by Reaumur as early as 1719 from his observations of wasps, nature’s papermakers. Little was done to follow up his work until Jacob Christian Schäffer of Regensburg published the results of his experiments in using other materials, such as sawdust, rye straw, moss and spruce wood in 1765. In 1800 Matthias Koops, working in Bermondsey, also published his work on rag substitutes. This book included five leaves of paper made entirely from wood but without a description of how he achieved it. Finally in 1844 Charles Fenerty, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, demonstrated that ‘chafed’ wood could be used for paper manufacture and, in Germany, Keller patented a wood-pulp grinding machine making the production of Mechanical wood-pulp for newspapers a practical reality.

However, mechanically ground wood-pulp was not ideal for producing fine papers so the search continued for a better means of pulping wood. The first practical alternative, the Soda Process, was developed by Burgess and Watt in 1851 working at Frogmore Mill using caustic soda to chemically pulp the wood fibres. But, without any large forest interests in the UK, little financial support was forthcoming and Burgess went to America to secure his patent in 1854. The first mill to use this process was built near Philadelphia and began operations in 1855 under the direction of Burgess himself, who served as manager of the mill for nearly forty years.

An improved chemical wood pulping process, the Sulfite process, based on sulforous acid was invented by Benjamin Tilghman around 1868 and turned into a practical system first by Fry and Ekman in1870, improved upon again by Mitscherlich in 1876 and again by Ritter and Kellner in 1880. This process speeded up the ‘cooking’ time for pulp production significantly. The final commonly used chemical process for the preparation of fibres from wood was developed by Dahl in Germany in 1883. The Sulphate process is similar in many ways to the soda process, and its development was spurred by the desire to replace the unavoidable loss of soda with some material cheaper than soda ash.