Brimscombe and Thrupp

Brimscombe and Thrupp () is a civil parish made up of the villages of Thrupp and Brimscombe, in the narrow Frome Valley slightly south-east of Stroud, Gloucestershire, England. The parish also includes the hamlets of Quarhouse and The Heavens. The population taken at the 2011 census was 1,830.

History

The mills

Although small-scale textile weaving and cloth manufacturing had been taking place for centuries it was with the construction of the Thames and Severn Canal and Brimscombe Port in 1789 that the two villages expanded rapidly, and many cloth and woollen mills were constructed. Many of these were later adapted for other purposes.

Bourne Mills at one time housed a company that produced walking sticks. Griffin Mill was founded in 1600 by the Griffin family for the making of cloth and was subsequently used for furniture making. Ham Mill produced textiles from 1601 to 2000, when the carpet manufacturer occupying the premises ceased trading. Phoenix Mill was the site of the old iron works (see Phoenix Iron Works below). Port Mills was at one time a grist mill before later becoming a textile mill (until the 1930s); then, in the late 1930s and 1940s, it housed a garden tractor company and an engineering works (see under Brimscombe Port below).

Phoenix Iron Works

Early records indicate that there was a cloth mill at Thrupp dating back as far as 1381. By 1770 the premises had expanded to include a house, four fulling mills and a gig mill.

The gig mill, which eventually became known as Thrupp Mill, was leased to Edward Ferrabee in 1793. By 1828 the entire premises were leased to the Ferrabees, and an iron works, the Phoenix Iron Works, had been established. The Ferrabees became well known for their production of cloth-making machines, steam engines, agricultural machinery and water wheels. It was here that John Lewis had invented a machine in 1815 to shear the surplus fibres or nap from the surface of cloth, using a horizontal blade.

In the 1820s Edwin Beard Budding, a machinist or "mechanician", was employed by Edward's son, John, at Thrupp. It was while Budding was working at Thrupp that Lewis' machine was developed to use rotary cutters, and Budding realised that this machine could be adapted for other purposes. Using gears, a revolving horizontal shaft and three blades he developed a machine to cut grass, which until then had been cut manually, using a scythe. This resulted in the world's first lawn mower being invented at Thrupp. It received its patent in 1830. Budding is also credited with the invention of the screw adjustable spanner.

Brimscombe Port

Brimscombe was an important local centre during the Industrial Revolution with its canal and rail links, with Brimscombe Port serving as the hub of the Thames and Severn Canal.

Brimscombe Port was originally built to transfer cargo from Severn trows, which travelled from the River Severn down the Stroudwater Navigation, to Thames barges which carried the goods eastwards towards London. This was necessary because the locks to the east of the port were too narrow to accommodate the larger sea-going trows. There were also several boat-building yards at the port, including Abdela & Mitchell, who exported boats, notably paddle steamers, all over the world.

Until the construction of what is now the A419 road along the bottom of the valley in 1815, Thrupp Lane was the main thoroughfare between Stroud and Chalford. The condition of this road was such that it required a whole day for a team of horses to draw a loaded waggon and return, a distance of only four miles each way. Later, the coming of the railway transformed the valley into a major route eastwards from Stroud (see Brimscombe railway station).

According to one source, the legendary riverboat ''Queen Of Africa'', which gave a star performance in the John Huston movie '' The African Queen'', was built at the Abdela & Mitchell Brimscombe works between 1908 and 1911. However, other sources state that the boat, which still exists in the USA, can be identified from the plate on her boiler as being built by Lytham Shipbuilding and Engineering Co. as ''Livingstone''. Naturally many vessels built for export by various companies resembled each other. The distinguishing feature which differentiates ''African Queen'' from the Brimscombe boats is the use of a vertical boiler on a vessel larger than vessels built by Abdelas with such boilers. Abdela preferred to use horizontal boilers for vessels of this size.

Many of the Abdela & Mitchell river-boats went to the Nile, the Niger

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