Qualla: Maud Foster Windmill

Maud Foster Windmill: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit BardofL, CC BY 3.0. Two brothers named Reckitt commissioned this windmill in 1819, paid the Hull millwrights Norman and Smithson exactly £1,826 10 shillings and sixpence for the work, and then ran it as millers and bakers for fourteen years before poor harvests broke them. One of those brothers, Isaac, lost the mill, walked away from Boston, drifted to Nottingham, then to Hull, and there started over selling a blue laundry starch that eventually became Reckitt Benckiser - the multinational behind Dettol, Lysol, Strepsils, and Durex. The mill he could not keep is still here, taller and more productive than ever, grinding flour at the head of a Georgian drainage canal in the eastern fens.

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Image: BardofL | CC BY 3.0

Maud Foster Windmill: Five Sails on a Tower

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:Warofdreams, CC BY 2.5. Maud Foster is not the typical English windmill, which has four sails - in fact she has the slightly perverse number of five. Odd numbers behave strangely on a windmill. A four-sailed cross naturally pairs into opposite couples; a five-sailed cross has no opposite, so if a single...

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Image: User:Warofdreams | CC BY 2.5

Maud Foster Windmill: The Maud Foster Drain

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard Croft, CC BY-SA 2.0. The mill takes its name not from a person but from a watercourse - the Maud Foster Drain, an eighteenth-century channel cut by the great civil engineer John Rennie to carry fen drainage water out toward the sea. The brothers Reckitt built their tower on the east bank of this drai...

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Image: Richard Croft | CC BY-SA 2.0

Maud Foster Windmill: From Mill to Multinational

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Keith Havercroft, Public domain. Isaac Reckitt was thirty-two when the harvests failed and the mill went to auction in 1833. He had a wife and children to feed and no fall-back. He tried various small businesses in Nottingham, found nothing that worked, moved his family to Hull, and in 1840 started a small opera...

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Image: Keith Havercroft | Public domain

Maud Foster Windmill: Working Order

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ashley Dace, CC BY-SA 2.0. Maud Foster fell out of use after the Ostler family, who had run her as Ostler's Mill since 1914, closed the business in 1948. She stood neglected, sails frozen, for the next four decades until James Waterfield and his family bought her in 1987 and put her back into proper grindi...

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Image: Ashley Dace | CC BY-SA 2.0

Maud Foster Windmill: Living Architecture

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ashley Dace, CC BY-SA 2.0. What makes Maud Foster unusual among English windmills is not just that she still grinds, but that she does it in something close to her original 1819 condition. The unusual cast-iron weather beam was probably an early replacement, and modern roller bearings have replaced some of...

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Image: Ashley Dace | CC BY-SA 2.0