Brusher Mills

Two weeks ago, on 5th November, I was still caravanning in the New Forest, just outside Brockenhurst. It was another wet day, but I was determined to get some exercise and decided to explore Brockenhurst a little better than hitherto. Emerging from a rather soggy footpath on the south side of the village, I noticed that the local parish church was only a few hundred yards away, so, crossing the Lymington Road, I set off down a lane. 

On my left, an extensive graveyard came into view, and notices explained that this was partly given over to graves for the wartime dead, the soldiers of the First World War that hadn't recovered after being taken to the nearby No.1 New Zealand General Hospital, set up at Brockenhurst to care for wounded men evacuated from Flanders. Click on these and other shots to read the detail.

The church itself lay a little further along. It was ancient, but of course extended over the centuries, and during the last century had acquired memorials, plaques and stained glass windows inside, mainly (but not exclusively) to do with the Hospital and the many New Zealanders who recuperated there, or failed to. 

I picked up this leaflet. 

Over the years I have developed enormous respect for fighting soldiers. They do the dirty work so that the rest of us can live comfortable lives. Much like the police. You can have armchair views on how the army and the police should behave; but I challenge anyone, if placed in a real-life conflict situation, especially one that involves extreme danger, to make perfect decisions in the heat of the moment. I know that if faced with death, I would myself behave with knee-jerk ruthlessness to stay alive, and not philosophise about the rights and welfare of anybody else. It would be them or me. So watch out, if civilisation collapses, and we both want that last tin of baked beans! 

Leaving the church, I decided to look at the war graves. Not all were for New Zealanders: there were some from Indian regiments too. I think that in 1914 it was legally the case that if Britain declared war, it committed the entire British Empire to join in. And the Empire certainly responded, even those parts that weren't keen to, and eventually sought independence. Such was the call of duty in those days. Britain owes an enormous debt to its one-time overseas territories. The war in the Western Front, and elsewhere, could not have been won without them. But their stories are not told. 

Yesterday evening, when listening on BBC Radio 4 to a ten-part podcast series about Colditz, I heard about an extraordinary Second World War escape to Switzerland from occupied western France by two Indian soldiers, both of them officers, one of them lately transferred from Colditz. Both passionately yearned to escape. But of course Indians stood out in places like wartime France. How did they manage to make their way across France to Switzerland without being apprehended? I must research this and find out. Despite their planning, it was almost a suicidal attempt, with very little chance of success. If caught, they would have been summarily shot by the Gestapo or SS, and not simply returned to their camp. Such bravery. 

I was moved by the graves and memorials at Brockenhurst, even though I'd seen much larger war grave cemeteries. 

This little stone was especially impressive. An only son had died in the service of freedom. His parents came all the way from New Zealand to erect the stone in his memory. 

You'd have thought all this would have used up all the interest and compassion I might muster on a wet afternoon, but no. I looked about as I headed for the exit, and noticed a gravestone with a nicely-carved scene on it. It deserved a closer examination. 

My goodness! Brusher Mills!

I'd known about Brusher Mills for fifty years, but didn't know he was buried here at Brockenhurst. The god that leads photographers to interesting graves had done well.

How had I known about him? Well, back in the early 1970s, perhaps in 1973, I'd bought the first of three books by a man called Gordon Winter. This one, called A Country Camera 1844-1914, was the Penguin paperback edition of a book first published in 1966. 

Note the price - 75p! It's a slim volume, only 120 pages, but even so you'd probably pay at least £20, were it newly published in 2022. How the value of money has changed. 

Books full of period photographs, with extended captions, weren't exactly the rage in the 1960s, when everybody was looking forward to the future, and Mr Winter was something of a pioneer in this genre. I soon discovered two other books from him, also in this Penguin paperback edition: A Cockney Camera, dealing specifically with London life over much the same period and first published in 1971, though the Penguin edition ((£1.25) came in 1975; and The Golden Years 1903-1913, first published in 1975, with the Penguin edition (still £1.25) following in 1977. The Golden Years was in the same format as the other two books, but included many revealing cartoons from sources like Punch, which caught the mood of this short era, basically the reign of King Edward VII, and how people were reacting to social changes and the growing inevitability of a war with Germany. 

The Golden Years ends with a 1960 poem by Philip Larkin, MCMXIV - Roman numerals of course for '1914' - which I consider most evocative of an era about to close:

MCMXIV

Those long uneven lines

Standing as patiently

As if they were stretched outside

The Oval or Villa Park,

The crowns of hats, the sun

On moustached archaic faces

Grinning as if it were all an August Bank Holiday lark;

And the shut shops, the bleached

Established names on the sunblinds,

The farthings and sovereigns,

And dark-clothed children at play

Called after kings and queens,

The tin advertisements

For cocoa and twist, and the pubs

Wide open all day;

And the countryside not caring:

The place-names all hazed over

With flowering grasses, and fields

Shadowing Domesday lines

Under wheat's restless silence;

The differently-dressed servants

With tiny rooms in huge houses,

The dust behind limousines;

Never such innocence,

Never before or since,

As changed itself to past

Without a word - the men

Leaving the gardens tidy,

The thousands of marriages

Lasting a little while longer:

Never such innocence again.

Philp Larkin was the Librarian for Hull University - an odd position to take, you might think, for someone who could have aspired to become a household name. But he scorned such celebrity, and certainly didn't want to be the kind of national treasure that John Betjeman, his contemporary, became. He was it seemed an impatient man with a dim view on many things, and opinions that jar somewhat with modern attitudes, and in recent years his personal reputation has taken some knocks; but nevertheless he was a fine poet. I 'met' him at Hull Paragon station in 2018, meaning that I encountered this lifelike statue of him there:  

He was in a hurry to catch a train, and certainly had no time to waste with a woman like me. Hey ho!

Back to Brusher Mills. This is the half-page Mr Winter devoted to him in A Country Camera:

Born in 1840, he was a Victorian countryman who caught snakes for a living. You called him in, if any invaded your cottage. He lived rough in the New Forest, at first near Lyndhurst, but for the second half of his life near Brockenhurst, a few miles to the south. His 'house' was a primitive charcoal-burner's hut, which looked like a turf-covered wigwam. It seems unlikely, but it must have been warm and snug enough for all kinds of severe winter weather. But he must have shared this living space, such as it was, with dead snakes and the products he made from their body-oil after boiling them up, such as ointment, and there were absolutely no mod cons. Did he ever wash? Presumably he smelled to high heaven. But then any niffiness would have passed unremarked in the Victorian countryside, where there were no luxuries whatever. 

Was he poor? As well as his income from cottagers with a snake problem, he got a bounty for catching poisonous adders from the New Forest authorities, equivalent to £5 per snake in modern terms, and he caught plenty of them. He also sold snakes to zoos, as live food for caged predatory birds. Then he sold snake-derived medicaments to locals, and snake skeletons to tourists, and in the cricket season he would brush the nearby pitch in between matches - hence his nickname 'Brusher'. He must have made enough in the warm months to get him through the winters, and his super-frugal lifestyle would have made his income go far. He was able to stay out of the dreaded workhouse.   

He was a solitary man, but a well-known figure, and probably helped to put Brockenhurst on the visitor map, to the benefit of village businesses. When he died, at age sixty-five, there were enough grateful people around to put up that rather fine gravestone.

There's a bit more about him in the Wikipedia article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brusher_Mills, including a note that late in life he decided to build a more substantial home for himself. However, this was damaged by spiteful local persons who did not want him to establish 'commoner's rights' by erecting a permanent building. To my mind, this setback hastened his end. 

And here I was at his graveside, after fifty years. 

Considering how rarely one sees a snake in this country, it seems remarkable that someone could have made a living from catching them, even when based in a tract of wild heathland and forest. Grass snakes and adders made up most of his haul. Well, I'm no stranger to country paths, but I've seen a grass snake only once in my life. Adders a little more often, though not recently. Here are some pictures of two I saw on the South Downs in 2005:

I think they were engaged in a courtship ritual when I snuck up on them, camera in hand, but they quickly adjourned to nearby undergrowth, and I was lucky to secure those shots. Brusher Mills must have had a very soft tread and a lightning technique for capturing these very alert animals.