The 16th TIMS Symposium has been postponed

The 16th TIMS Symposium will take place in Chorzów, Poland from 16th to the 25th of June 2023.

Registration will be in the afternoon on the 16th, the welcome dinner will be in the evening of that day. The Symposium officially ends on the evening of the 24th with the farewell dinner.

In addition, there will be a post-tour organized from Toruń. During the Post-Tour participants will visit the medieval towns of Toruń and Gdańsk and numerous mills in the area.

The Post-Tour will start on the 25th and will end on the 30th of June. Full details will be posted later on.

The venue of the Symposium

Symposium will take place at the Museum “Upper Silesian Ethnographic Park in Chorzów”. Chorzów is a city next to Katowice and has a very good connection with Katowice Pyrzowice Airport.

Call for papers

We call on all TIMS members to present their molinological research as a formal paper and/or as an informal short contribution. Papers on all molinological topics are welcome.

Our theme will be: “The Future of mills”.

Papers are expected to be about mills' protection, renovation, giving them new functions, law adjustments, promotion of mills, the functionality of mills in the modern world, and the way of saving them for future generations.

Formal papers

The symposium participants will get the possibility to download the papers in advance and are expected to have read the papers; therefore, authors will receive only 20 minutes for presenting a summary of their paper and 10 minutes for engaging in discussion with the audience.

On the first day of the Symposium, some guests will be invited from different Polish mills, research, and academic centres, and other organizations.

Informal contributions

We expect in advance detailed information (paper or presentation file) on the subject.

The time required to present the informal paper: maximum of 20 minutes including discussion.

The deadline for submission will be the 1st of April 2023.

All contributions must be in the English language.

The Organising Committee will decide on the acceptance of submitted papers and informal contributions, and its decision will be final.

All papers will be published after the symposium in the TIMS transactions. Please make sure, that your pictures and drawings have the copyright for the TIMS publication!

Registration

Registration will start in February 2023, as due to the current economical and geo-political circumstances more time is needed in the preparation of the Symposium. All details will be published on TIMS website.

If you have any questions about the paper presentation issue, please contact the Symposium Chairman.

We look forward to meeting you in Chorzów,

Paweł Roszak-Kwiatek
Symposium Chairman
e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Summary of articles in International Molinology No 101 which were published in December 2020

‘The Sugar Windmills’ by Willem van Bergen.

This article deals specifically with wind-driven cane sugar mills of the Caribbean. The author explains that these were situated along the windward coasts, and very few complete examples now exist. The earliest form were horizontal mills but from the early 18th c. were of the vertical tower type. The openings in the towers were always aligned with the prevailing trade winds; the mills had no brake and the caps had limited winding capability (due to the annexe for the crusher). Vertical crushing rollers were replaced by horizontal ones from around 1800. The article describes the equipment and staffing of the mills, and includes a number of historic photographs.

‘An English country millwright at the beginning of the 20th century: Thompson & Son of Alford in Lincolnshire’ by Colin Moore.

This paper is the continuation of the history of Thompson’s of Alford whose beginnings were published in TIMS Journal No 97, December 2018. It covers the period from 1900 to the death of Robert (Senior) on 5 January 1933. During this period the company survived the hardships of World War I and the huge reduction in working traditional mills in Lincolnshire, and then the economic depression of the 1930s. They did so by adapting their skills to other work and extending their radius of business, using the railways, tractor, motor cycle and car.

‘Reconstructing the distribution of boat mills in Northern Poland in the early 19th century’ by Dariusz Brykała and Maciej Prarat.

Floating mills were a significant element of the large European river valleys, but there has been little published on those in Poland. This article reflects on the research by the authors on the location of these mills in the Vistula River basin, from historical sources. This task was often made difficult due to both their frequent movement and the attitude of the authorities (they were seen generally to be just an obstacle to navigation). This attitude ultimately led to their demise.

‘Kingsgarth Mill, Barton on Humber (N. Lincolnshire, England) and the pioneering work of Robert Sutton’ by Jon Sass.

The shell of this elegant windmill is now occupied by a restaurant, but there is a fascinating history hidden here. Built around 1800 from local clunch and face with brick, it was initially fitted with six sails of Sutton’s Patent for grinding chalk and pearl barley production. These were self-regulating but had shutters running the length of the sails; this could not have been a success as they were replaced with sails of Cubitt’s Patent around 1820. At that time it was converted to a corn mill. Other features of the work of the millwrights, Norman & Smithson, are described here. Illustrated with the drawings of John Brandrick.

‘Description of an exceptional architectural ensemble at the beginning of the 20th century, and the conflagration of the Mills of Meaux (Seine-et-Marne, France), June 16, 1920, through old postcards’ by Jean-Pierre Henri Azéma.

The five mills on the Market Bridge of Meaux dated back to medieval times and were a truly astounding sight. They all operated as ‘moulin pendants’, elevated on huge stilts and able to work across a wide range of river level conditions. The author here displays some of his best images of the mills from his collection of postcards c.1900. He uses this information to analyse the buildings and their layout. He then goes on to describe the course of the terrible fire that destroyed them all in one night (June 17, 1920), again illustrated by contemporary postcard photographs.

Also included in this edition of International Molinology are an obituary to Johan Bakker, and there is one book review, by Leo van der Drift, on ‘How the Wind Spun. History and present of traditional windmills, windmills with annular sails and windpumps (Co Roztáčel Vítr. Historie a současnost větrných mlýnů, mlýnků a čerpadel)’, by Jan Doubek, Břetislav Koč and Radim Urbánek.