The Dakeynes continued to alter the water supplies. At some stage after 1835 they built a third and larger dam, the Potter, higher up the valley above the Regulator and the Fancy. Like the Fancy this was essentially a reservoir.
However, although my grandfather clearly remembered the Romping Lion working in his childhood in the 1860's, by then the flax industry was in decline. It was being replaced by cotton, a much softer fabric that not only appealed to the housewife, but was easy to manufacture.
James died in 1862 aged 84, two years after his brother Edward. Neither had married and so James left the whole of his estate including the mill to Charles and Baldwin Dakeyne, the sons of his eldest brother, Daniel. Already in their fifties, they struggled on, but despite something of a boom when cotton supplies from the US were severely curtailed by the Civil War, they were fighting a losing battle.
Following the death of Baldwin the previous year, Charles died in 1881, coincidentally at the time of the Census. A note pencilled in the margin of the 1881 Census states that the mill was "out of use". Flax spinning had ceased for ever.
Shortly before his death Charles had established the Dakeyne Trust to manage the estate. With neither he nor Baldwin having any descendents, the principal beneficiaries of the Trust became the six children of their niece Catherine, daughter of their brother Arthur. Catherine had married the Rev. James Dearden Cannon, and after Charles' death, they moved to The Holt.
The mill, by now severely run down, was leased for a short time to a glove manufacturer. From 1887 it was occupied by J T Hope Brothers, manufacturers of twine and string. They must have had some success because in 1894 they invested in a 60hp Gilbert Gilkes water turbine. Supplied from the Regulator via a penstock in the Bell Tower it was located in a cellar below the mill at brook level. Presumably this replaced the triple water wheels. But in 1901 they pulled out.
A local furrier and fibre cloth manufacturer took a part of the mill in 1913. Then for a period during the First World War the mill was requistioned by the army as a training centre for the Leeds Rifles.
After the death of the Cannons and of their eldest son it was decided to wind the estate up. The bulk of the properties were sold at auction in 1924 but the mill itself was withdrawn at £2200. However it was sold for £2400 in the following year to Sidney and Ernest Johnson whose father had a corn mill on the River Lathkill at Alport.
They converted it to a flour mill and were highly successful, buying a former plastics factory and a small corn mill in the area after World War 2. But it was a highly competitive business dominated by the really big players. In the 1950's they sold the flour business to a competitor but after a few years bought it back, gradually switching to the production of animal and pet foods.
This was very profitable. The business employed some 140 people and the mill output was around 60000 tons per year at its peak. But the economics became progressively more difficult through the latter part of the twentieth century. By 2004 the continuation of manufacturing was totally unviable. The mill had to close for good.
It is extremely unlikely that the Dakeyne Mill will ever hear the hum of machinery again. At the end of 2007 planning permission was granted for the conversion of the mill into apartments and offices. The shareholders of S&E Johnson Ltd decided to put the company into administration early in 2010. They had occupied the site as long as had the Dakeynes. In November 2010 Seb Perez, a local property developer, bought the mill.
But what happened to the disc engine? Sadly the answer is that we do not know. It may have continued to run whilst the Dakeynes ran the mill. Maybe not. The 1922 Ordinance Survey Map shows that the engine house was still there. Would anyone have removed it? Maybe it simply sat there until the Engine House itself was demolished - and again maybe not.
This extract from the 1922 map shows what is still called a Flax mill. The Engine House is the square building to the bottom left above the letter "t" in "Derwent".