The Mill on the Tillingbourne
Shalford Mill is a timber-framed watermill on the River Tillingbourne, built around 1750 by John Mildred of Guildford. It is an unusually large structure because it originally housed two separate mills, each with its own waterwheel and grinding machinery. The mill ground corn for the surrounding area for almost two centuries before falling out of commercial use in the early 20th century.
By the 1930s, the building was derelict and facing demolition. The timbers were to be sold off and the land marketed for building plots. The mill's survival is owed entirely to a group of young women who called themselves Ferguson's Gang.
Ferguson's Gang
Ferguson's Gang were six women, all in their twenties, who adopted pseudonyms – Bill Stickers, Sister Agatha, Kate O'Brien, The Nark, Red Biddy, and The Lord Beershop – and dedicated themselves to saving threatened buildings for the National Trust. They dressed in masks and disguises, ambushed friends and acquaintances to raise funds, and delivered their donations in deliberately theatrical fashion: wrapped in cigars, folded into fake pineapples, or stuffed inside bottles of sloe gin.
In 1932, Peggy Pollard (Bill Stickers) and Brynhild Jervis-Read (Sister Agatha) persuaded the Godwin-Austen trust to donate Shalford Mill to the National Trust, with the Gang underwriting the repair costs. They made the mill their headquarters and continued their conservation activism from there until 1966. Their identities were kept secret for decades.
The mill is now Grade II* listed. The machinery is intact and the building stands much as Ferguson's Gang found it, a quiet monument to one of the most eccentric and effective conservation campaigns in English history.
