There's an old Mill by the Stream.

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“There’s an Old Mill by the Stream, Nellie Dean”

It was first published in 1905 as "You're My Heart's Desire, I Love You Nellie Dean" . The original sheet music is scored in B-flat major for voice and piano.

It was taken up in 1907 by the British music hall singer Gertie Gitana, becoming her most famous song and subsequently became popular in the UK as a pub song, particularly the chorus (There's an old mill by the stream, Nellie Dean…), which was often sung by itself.

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However, today’s spiel is not about Nellie, I may save her for another day, but about streams.

I live here in Bourne End where a stream joins a river. The stream is the Wye and the river is the Thames. There are various claims as to where the name Bourne End came from. On old maps it is sometimes shown as Bone End and it is claimed this is because of ancient burial sites nearby. I think the most likely reason that it is so named is because it is at the end of a ‘burn‘ or ‘bourne‘. The old English words were ’burna’ and ’burne’, which meant - spring, brook or stream.

Now to go back to where I was “born”!…..Bournville.

Here again we have the word ‘bourn’, but here it is the name of the small stream that runs nearby. The stream actually starts off as Griffins Brook but further downstream is shown as Bourn Brook.

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An early picture in Bournville park.

It was here that the Cadbury brothers set up their chocolate factory in 1879, when Richard and George moved their town centre factory from Bridge Street, off Broad Street, to a greenfield site between Bournville Lane and Linden Road.

The stream (the Bourn) runs west-to-east through the factory site. To this the Cadbury brothers added the French word ville meaning 'town', for it was fashionable at that time for confectionery to be thought to be French or Swiss.

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A 1940's picture of Dad and I in the same park.

Dad was home on leave from the RAF.

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