Britain at Work
A Pictorial Description of Our National Industries

142 BRITAIN AT WORK. Photo: F. Downer & Son, Watford. BEATER HOUSE, CROXLEY PAPER MILLS. That the Paper-making industry has of late years advanced by leaps and bounds may go without saying. In England and Wales the number of paper-mills is 233, in Scotland 59, in Ireland 8. Altogether, therefore, there are some 300 mills in the United Kingdom engaged in the manufacture of paper, and it is impossible to set any bounds to the development of this important industry. The counties, in which the manufacture is most extensively carried on are Lancashire, which has forty-four paper-mills to its name ; Kent, which has thirty; and Yorkshire, which has twenty-seven. Between them these three counties have to their credit more than one- third of the total number of paper-mills in all Great Britain and Ireland. The Kentish mills include those of Messrs. Edward Lloyd, Limited, at Sittingbourne, more generally known as the Daily Chronicle mills ; the Daily Telegraph mills at Dartford ; and the Tovil mills (near Dartford) and the Horton Kirby mills (South Darenth) of Messrs. A. E. Reed and Co., who also own the Merton Abbey mills in Surrey and the Wycombe Marsh mills in Buckinghamshire. In another of the Home Counties, Hertfordshire, are the extensive mills of Messrs. John Dickinson and Co.—the Croxley mills, near Watford, to which some of our illustrations relate ; two others at Hemel Hempstead, and a fourth at King’s Langley. Multitudinous as are the uses to which paper is put, one is hardly prepared to find that there are at least eighty different “species,” while of “varieties” the number is past counting. Besides writing paper and blotting paper and printing paper, there is manifold paper and typewriting paper, tracing paper and drawing paper. Then—not to speak of the many kinds of brown paper, of which the production is enormous—there are papers for bank-notes and bills and cheques, for hosiery and pins and needles, for collars and caps, for cigarettes and tobacco, for butter and tea and groceries, for portmanteau boards and carpet felt, for railway tickets, and for a host of other purposes, all of them made by more or less different processes. The wood from which, as I have said, the cheapest printing papers are made does not reach our manufacturers in its natural state, but in the form of what is known as pulp. So far, indeed, is it removed from