Robin Longbottom on how Australia owed a debt of gratitude to a mill in the hamlet of Goose Eye

UNTIL 1910, banks in the six federal states that constituted the Commonwealth of Australia issued their own banknotes.

However, from that date the federal government decreed that it would issue all future notes and that all others had to be withdrawn from circulation.

Although the new banknotes were printed in Australia, the contract for making the note paper went to a British company called Portals Limited.

The company had been founded in 1711 by Henry de Portal, a Huguenot refugee, and had been making the paper for banknotes for the Bank of England since the 1720s. Although its principal manufacturing base was at Laverstoke in Hampshire it passed the Australian contract to its paper mill at Goose Eye, near Keighley, which it had acquired shortly before the outbreak of the Great War.

Goose Eye Mill had originally been built to spin cotton but during the first decades of the 19th century there had been a sudden decline in the local cotton industry, and it was acquired by John Smith, a paper maker from Edinburgh, and his brothers-in-law, John and Joseph Town. They turned the mill over to paper making, renamed it the Turkey Mill and had it up and running by 1822. It is most likely that the new name was adopted to associate their product with that of the Turkey Mill in Maidstone, Kent, that had been producing the finest quality writing paper since 1740.

However, paper making was not a new industry in Keighley – paper had been manufactured at a mill in Ingrow since the late 17th century. The Ingrow mill had originally been built for fulling woollen cloth, but after it was sold in 1685 it became a paper mill. Both fulling and paper making used large, heavy trip hammers powered by water wheels. In fulling they were used to felt cloth and in paper making to pound linen and cotton rags into pulp. The original Ingrow mill stood a short distance below Ingrow Bridge, on the site of what is now Appleyard’s Nissan and Suzuki garage.

The Town brothers, whose father was a leading member of the Baptist Church in Keighley, may well have served their apprenticeships at Ingrow Paper Mill before setting up in business with John Smith at Goose Eye. However, in 1831 Smith left the partnership and set up on his own account at Sunnydale Mill in East Morton. It was already an established paper mill and he had worked there at the time of his marriage to Elizabeth Town in 1819. He now bought the mill from his previous employers, Messrs Hagar & Son, at public auction.

With the departure of John Smith, the Town brothers concentrated on producing fine quality printing and writing paper. After Joseph’s marriage in 1830 he moved to Leeds where he opened offices and a wholesale warehouse in Albion Street. His brother, John, continued to run the mill in Goose Eye until he stepped down in 1840 after which the daily running was left in the hands of a manager.

Under the direction of Joseph and his three sons, the Turkey Mill continued to expand throughout the century. In the 1860s they bought Brow End Mill in Goose Eye from the Briggs family and used it as a ‘rag mill’ to store bales of rags, sort them and cut them up ready for reducing to pulp.

The whole mill complex was connected by a series of narrow-gauge tramways along which small wagons, or tubs, of materials and waste were trundled between the processing departments.

Paper for banknotes and a fine quality paper, Huguenot, were made at the mill until the end of the Second World War. The mill finally ceased production in the late 1940s and has since been converted into dwellings.