David's tragic tale of the 'restless miller'

Eventually he died in Oving absolutely penniless, with nothing to show for his life of toil.

David Johnston tells the tragic life story of William Chalcraft, his great grandfather, in his new book The Restless Miller: Scenes From Rural Life In Bygone Sussex, Surrey And Hampshire (Pomegranate Press, ISBN 9781 907242 03 8, 8.50).

The tale of a well-to-do miller who fell to the level of a pauper and was buried in an unmarked grave, the story is thronged with a lost world of farmers, auctioneers, innkeepers, wine merchants and smugglers - the fascinating characters who mingled in the borderlands of Sussex, Surrey and Hampshire in the Victorian age.

Chichester, Petersfield, Bedhampton, Leigh, Harting, Chiddingfold, Dunsfold, Wisborough Green, Barford, Headley, Colworth and Oving are all locations in the story. In each, poor William failed to reverse his fortunes.

David, who lives in Petworth, has brought together the book using a wealth of images handed down to him through the family. Fortunately for posterity, the images - unusually - were all identified.

"There are all these named pictures showing the identities, pictures from the mid-Victorian days. So often old pictures aren't identified at all. My mother preserved this collection, and when she died she left them to me."

Chalcraft was born in 1838 in Dunsfold and died in Oving in 1910.

"He was walking around the fields in 1909 absolutely penniless. They were freezing cold in the house and he wanted to pick up a few twigs from the hedgerows. They were destitute by then. The farm bailiff asked him what he was doing. He said 'I am picking up some firewood'. The bailiff told him to leave it and to go home."

Chalcraft's father had employed 14 men. But Chalcraft junior never enjoyed such luxury: "He went from one farm to another, from one mill to another, and he had a series of setbacks.

"The milling industry was going through a particularly difficult time. There were a lot of imports of corn from Europe, and everything was against him."

His son died of cancer; his last farm was at Wisborough Green: "By then he was very elderly. He couldn't make it work and he retired. By then, he had gone broke."

As for that restlessness, David suspects it was the thought that things might perk up for him somewhere else. Sadly they never did...