Toby Downer

My wife Sue, and I, went for a walk at Calbourne one summer’s evening in 2002 and on the way met a man who turned out to be Alan Weeks, whose family had run Calbourne Mill for over 100 years. As we walked we chatted about the mill and he told me about a man called Toby Downer who’d worked there during the thirties and when I said it would have been nice to have taped him, to my surprise he said, “You still can, he lives just down the road! He’s well over 80 but sharp as a pin.” Alan himself wasn’t keen on being recorded but he put us in touch with Toby who immediately agreed to talk to us, so nearly 20 years after we had made our first recording, we sat down with Toby in his cottage at Lynch Lane to record him. He was as sharp as Alan had promised.






One of the Calbourne stones being dressed in the early fifties – possibly by “the chap from Cowes” who Toby refers to in the recording.
Three roller units, designed to either break the wheat grain open or to smooth and refine the flour, depending on the size of rollers fitted.

Calbourne Mill closed in 2024. One of the reasons was the pit wheel, seen here, had cracked and would cost £70,000 to repair. The Mill said at the time “it’s too much money to fix, we managed to fix the teeth on the wheel, but a lot still needs to be done.”
Toby told us, ”Sometimes you would have to stop if the pond got too low and give it a break for an hour and let the pond build up again and it would build up very quickly. There was always rats on the pond, (laughs) moorhens, that kind of thing, and rainbow trout. You had to keep your eye open and make sure the damned herons didn't get in there. When the pond went down and went into pools the herons would have a feast if you weren't careful.”


The mill and pond in the 1970s.