In 1859 Robert Tertius Campbell, at 48 recently returned from Australia, where his family were wealthy traders and landowners, found the country estate he had been looking for, the semi-derelict Buscot Park Estate, bounded to the north by the Thames, and standing astride the turnpike road between Faringdon and Lechlade. The estate totalled over 3,500 acres and included the parishes of Buscot and the depopulated village of Eaton Hastings. Not much more than half was productive farmland, and the majority of that was pasture. This run-down estate was to become one of the most highly industrialised farms in nineteenth-century England.
  
There was little on the estate at that time to excite today’s industrial archaeologist, apart from the flash lock and weir next to the Anchor Inn at Eaton Hastings and the pound lock at Buscot. There was also a short canal from the Thames, known as Buscot Pill, with its attendant wharf, a small brick and tile works, a malt house and a cheese wharf on the river. Surprisingly, there was no wind or water mill on the estate, probably because other local mills served the need, which was no doubt small bearing in mind the high proportion of pasture.

After Squire Campbell had moved into his eighteenth-century mansion, in 1859, his first move was to drain thoroughly the land; then in 1863, at a reputed cost of £80,000 to £90,000, he built a 20-acre reservoir on a hillside to the west of the house; this was fed by two large water-wheel-driven pumps on the Thames, one with a single wheel at Buscot lock, the other with twin wheels at Eaton Hastings weir. About one hundred men were employed on this work, and the village pub, the Campbell Arms (now the Apple Tree), was enlarged to take these hard-drinking navvies.

The object of the reservoir and pumps was to supply an extensive irrigation system on the estate. The work was supervised by Baldwin Latham, a competent but little-known civil engineer specialising in drainage and irrigation work.

These were the first moves in what must have seemed a fantastic scheme to make sugar and to distil spirit alcohol from sugar beet. This was a practically unknown science in England at the time, despite an unsuccessful attempt around 1860 to make spirit on a commercial scale from mangolds at Minety, in Wiltshire. On the continent, it had reached a commercial level, having been encouraged by the Napoleonic Wars and the failure of the grape crops due to disease. Campbell’s spirit was exported to France at 2s 6d per gallon.

The distillery set up in 1869 by Robert Campbell, on the island near Buscot lock, and closed in 1879. The photograph appears to show the distillery being worked and so was presumably taken between these two dates.
  

The distillery set up in 1869 by Robert Campbell, on the island near Buscot lock, and closed in 1879. The photograph appears to show the distillery being worked and so was presumably taken between these two dates

The distillery, built at a reputed cost of £100,000 on the island adjacent to Buscot lock, was opened in 1869. The island is still known as ‘Brandy Island’; the legend persists that it was brandy that was produced there. The stills, by Savalle & Co., produced excellent quality spirit from juice collected by Collett presses. In 1871 the Collett presses were discarded and Campbell adopted the Le Play system, in which fermentation takes place in the sliced beet.
   
To collect the 10,000 to 12,000 tons of sugar beet per year and other produce from the farms, and for general farm haulage, Campbell built a narrow-gauge railway round the estate. The railway, of 2ft 8in. gauge, had over six miles of track. Three 0-4-0 tank engines were used, built by Appleby Brothers of Southwark, and named after Campbell’s daughters, Edith, Emily and Alice. The engine Edith was illustrated and described in Engineering on 20 January 1871. For communications, the estate was equipped with a telegraph system.

To complement the distillery, Campbell also built on the island a mill for the manufacture of oil cake, a gas works, an artificial fertiliser works and vitriol works, the latter two using the by-products of the gas works. Coprolite (fossilised dung) and night soil were also employed as fertiliser at Buscot.

The south-east terminus of the railway was at Oldfield Farm, where Campbell built a large corn mill driven by an impulse-type water turbine, fed from the nearby reservoir, which in turn was fed by the main irrigation reservoir. The power from the turbine was put to good use and there were numerous power take-off points used for threshing and to drive other machinery. The dairy was also at Oldfield, and this too was a highly organised commercial enterprise; milk was collected from local farms and dairy produce sent to London, continuing an old estate tradition.

Campbell put the by-products of his factories to good use. Sugar-beet pulp was used for the intensive fattening of livestock under conditions that would cause comment even today, when the merits of ‘battery barley beef’ are hotly debated. The cattle were housed on slatted oors and their movement restricted for six weeks, while there was sufficient beet pulp for 12,000 sheep and 2,500 oxen per year. Campbell probably also carried out breeding experiments to find the strains with the best conversion ratios and used Indian cattle in these experiments.

With a light railway and a turbine-driven mill, it is obvious that only the very latest had any place on Campbell’s estate. The main cultivations were carried out by one pair of 20 hp and two pairs of 30 hp Fowler ploughing engines, the 30 hp being over twice the size of normal engines and the largest built at that time. They pulled six-furrow ploughs and at times worked through the night by ‘lime light’. Deep cultivations were also tried, and ploughing to the depth of 30 inches is recorded. He also arranged that the water pumps could be driven by traction engine in times of drought. Similarly, the Oldfield mill could be driven externally by traction engine should the turbine fail. Traction engines were also widely used for estate duties.

Campbell had a good reputation as an employer, instituting a nine-hour day and paying well. He was also reputed to have tried a six-day week for his dairy cows, though whether this was motivated by religious zeal or to give both man and animal a shorter working week is not recorded. The plan did not work!

In 1871 Campbell told a visitor that the enterprise made a profit, but this state of affairs did not last long. Unfortunately for Campbell, the Frenchmen he brought over to operate the distillery were called back to their country because of the Franco-Prussian War, leaving only the relatively inexperienced Englishmen to run the plant. The war no doubt also killed the export trade. The excise men were another thorn in Campbell’s side, and even smuggling was not unknown, with stories of casks being sunk in the Thames for later collection. Campbell was a sick man at this time, and a tragic incident involving one of his daughters did nothing to improve his health. The obvious overcapitalisation of the estate must have added to his difficulties.

The outcome of these problems was that Campbell decided on what must have been a courageous move, to close the ‘Berkshire Distillery’ and to cut his losses. Ten years after their opening in 1869, the distillery and factories had gone; everything saleable was sold off and the site cleared.

he section of railway from Buscot village to Oldfield Farm was retained for farm transport and remained in use until around 1900, but horses were used for haulage, the locomotives having been sold. The cattle barn continued in use and Oldfield mill operated until about 1920, when the repairs needed to a broken turbine shaft could not be justified.

Most of Campbell’s money came from gold trading in Australia, but during the early years of his ownership of the estate he raised £176,000 in the form of mortgages and other loans. Two years after his death in 1887, the estate was sold by his trustees for £83,400, of which £68,000 was required to discharge mortgages. Yet much of what was left of this remarkable enterprise continued to serve the estate and some remains can still be seen.