A Present from Yorkshire

The Museum was recently contacted by Kate Genever, an artist who found a watercolour painting whilst browsing in the Hull Scrapstore. She bought it for £1 and set about locating the mill it portrayed. The signature is H Crawforth, and the East Riding Museum holds three of his pictures, depicting the local Skidby Mill, a windmill near Beverley, painted in 1917.  Not a great deal is known about H Crawforth. The surname seems commonest in the Humberside area, so it was a long task, and probably a surprise, for East Riding Museum to eventually locate the mill as the Abbey Mill, Tewkesbury. The date is right for the painting, so it is likely to be the same artist. There’s no record at all of him in Tewkesbury, and we can only speculate upon what brought him (or her) here for long enough to create a lovely image of the Abbey Mill.

When she found the mill, Kate decided to send the painting home, and offered it to the Museum, who gladly accepted it. She was even kind enough to cover all the costs of packaging and postage of such a fragile parcel. It is now safely in the Museum and proudly displayed; a very welcome, and rare, view of the Mill in its later working days, before corn grinding stopped in 1921.

Whilst the mill building itself is very recognisable, the sluice structure on the west has changed completely and the Ham bank is unrecognisable. The Museum would love to hear from people who might know more about these old features, and the general changes made to the Mill Avon between the Ham and the Victoria Gardens.