In 1856 the entire property was put up for sale. The auction was to be conducted by Messrs Beadel & Sons at the Plough Hotel (now the Regent Arcade) on Thursday 22 May and the five-page particulars of sale survives, giving us the only real description of these buildings (at least what they were like at this particular time).
The mill was a three-storey building situated at the rear of the bakery and accessed via the yard. The ground floor was predominantly a warehouse with corn bins, weighing machine and jumper, but also included driving machinery worked by the salt works’ engine on the other side of a connecting wall. The first floor contained more machinery for driving the two mill stones, a smutting machine, blower, and flour dresser, while the top floor was the granary with corn and flour bins and two store rooms. There was also a lift from the ground floor to take grain from the ground floor to the second floor for milling.
The bakery was of brick construction with a slate roof, with the shop occupying the very corner of Bath Road and Oriel Terrace (as indeed a shop does today). Directly behind the shop was a parlour and kitchen while upstairs were three bedrooms and a sitting room and downstairs a cellar and area vault. A door from the shop led into a yard across which, at a lower level, was a bakehouse containing two ovens, one of ten bushels and one of five bushels. Over the bakehouse was another shop (which appears to have been separately let at different times) with a sitting and bedroom above. The yard could be accessed from a pair of folding doors on Oriel Terrace and also contained stores over the bakehouse, a coal store, and a stable which suggests the baker made deliveries.
The property failed to sell at auction but new lessees were found at the end of 1856 who planned to renovate the baths which were presumably still in a somewhat poor state following the flood of the previous year. They swiftly found a tenant for the steam mill and bakery as in April 1857 its new proprietor, a Mr W F Price who also had premises at Gloucester Docks, is advertising in the Cheltenham Looker-On under the heading ‘Steam Flour Mills and Corn Stores, Montpellier Baths, Bath Road’. His business is later referred to as the Unadulterated Bread And Flour Company and the actual miller and baker was one Anthony Smith.
In December 1857 and January 1858 a very public spat was carried out in the Cheltenham Chronicle and Cheltenham Examiner between Price and one of his predecessors, Henry Margrett, now operating from the High Street. In this series of correspondence Price defends himself from the allegation that he was trading on Margrett’s name as the latter had left two marble signs bearing his name on either side of the door of the corner shop when he vacated the premises and which Price had not removed from public display.
To be fair to Price, and as he himself explains in one of his public letters, Margrett had left some years previously (in either 1851 or 1852) and the signs were still present during the subsequent brief tenancy of Charles Morgan. Price found himself in the press twice more during his tenancy. In 1858 Anthony Smith was charged with embezzling from his employer and in 1859 he was witness to the drunken assault of a policeman at the Bell Inn across the road. The 1861 census lists the current baker and miller as a Charles Tilley who continued his trade until late 1863 or early 1864, when the Montpellier Gardens Company – now lessees of the entire property – gave him notice to quit as they had plans to use the space for a second swimming bath. Nothing came of this at the time but the idea was still being considered in 1870 following major renovations the previous year; this too failed to materialise and in 1871 the corner shop had a tenant again, no longer a baker but a greengrocer.
By the 1880s the mill itself was being used as stores but whether the mill equipment was removed then or had already been cleared in 1864 or 1869 ahead of the potential second swimming bath proposal is unknown.
Incredibly, it seems that the ovens were still in situ almost 50 years after the bakery ceased operating. as shown on this 1916 floor plan which includes indicates the ‘upper portion of oven’. Sadly there is no indication of when this area was cleared, not even in borough council minutes, or whether any of the lower portion of the over remains under the later concrete floor.
