RETIRED solicitor Nick Gooding has published a book telling the story of his family’s West Somerset business, with a little help from the Free Press.

‘A Raking Tide. A portrait of a vanished world’ is an account of a business based around a water mill in Washford managed by four generations of the Gooding family starting in 1799, during the Napoleonic Wars.

It follows the family’s changing fortunes from wool production through corn milling, with diversions into edged tool manufacture, farming, manure manufacture, and even production of hydro-electric power, before closing its doors at the end of the Second World War.

The company by then had become a manufacturer of mortar and cement, organic and chemical fertilisers, and a significant local employer.

Mr Gooding, who lives in Taunton with his wife Pat, who edited the book, was born in Minehead, went to school in Bruton, and practiced law in Glastonbury until retirement.

He said: “As retirement drew near, I started thinking about the old photographs, occasionally produced by my grandfather, showing beached sailing ships in nearby Warren Bay, together with scenes of laden donkeys being led up from the beach to the lime kilns on the cliff.

“I was surprised and delighted then to learn from my step-mother Ann Gooding following my father’s death, that those photographs and lots more had survived.

“These photos included the original plate images of the beached ships, alongside various posed family members, taken around 1890.

“There were also photos of the stone-laden donkeys, the cliff paths, and family beach picnics and staff outings taken around Blue Anchor from the early 1900s.”

Mr Gooding also had a set of the company’s financial records given to him by his father for the period from 1911 to the closure of the business in 1946.

He was helped by visits to the Somerset Heritage Centre to access invaluable documents from the Luttrell family archive, such as leases, mineral agreements, estate maps.

The archive also contained an old shoe box with bundles of faded pieces of paper tied up with old string which turned out to be hand-written letters dating to the late 19th century and representing courses of correspondence between Mr Gooding’s forefathers and agents representing the Luttrell family, of Dunster Castle, of whom the family were tenants.

Mr Gooding said: “This was a bit like having a direct line to my forebears and their contemporaries, along with an insight into the everyday concerns and thought processes of those involved in a now forgotten industry.”

He also drew on his memory of fireside chats with the business’s last proprietor, his grandfather Claude Gooding, and the ‘births, marriages, and deaths’ columns of the Free Press, which provided him with ‘an invaluable source of detail of these family events, from the colour of the bridesmaids’ dresses at a wedding to the hymns sung at a funeral’.

Mr Gooding said: “My earliest encounter with the paper was being carried as a toddler up some stairs to an office in Long Street, Williton, by my step-grandfather Ray Farrar, who worked for the Free Press from 1904 to 1950.

“His father, A.H. Farrar, also worked for the paper, writing the popular ‘Notes by the Way’ column from 1884 until his death in 1923.

“His many reports included the Free Press coverage of the catastrophic storm which fell on Watchet at the end of 1900 with devastating effect on the harbour and the town’s economy for years to come.

“Mr Farrar personally witnessed the climax of the storm, a fact which lent his report a dramatic immediacy, and the paper published a whole page photographic feature which was one of the first of its kind.

“My step-great-grandfather’s report forms the basis of chapter nine of my book.”

A foreword for the book has been written by Julian Luttrell and illustrations are by Mr Gooding’s old school friend Philip Dyke, including the cover sketch based on one of the old photographs featuring his great-grandfather as the figure on the left.

It has been printed by First Graphic Communications, of Porlock, and self-published by Mr Gooding under the name Bluerock Publishing.

It is on sale in Watchet Museum, the Museum of Somerset, in Taunton, and Brendon Books, also in Taunton.