Did you know The Cocoanut in Mill Street is the only pub in Britain with that name?

Or that coconut shies originated in Kingston? Or that coconuts maintained three major local industries and were a valuable source of employment in the Royal borough?

I knew none of these things, and neither did anyone else, until Hugh Harries swung into action.

Hugh is literally nuts about coconuts and, as a qualified agronomist, gave them 30 years of his working life.

He spent 10 of them as a coconut breeder in Jamaica before moving on to the same occupation in Thailand, Tanzania and Mexico.

He also served as a scientific adviser on combating and treating coconut diseases.

Now retired, but active as a research associate at Kew Gardens, his interest is keener than ever. So when he heard that Kingston had once had a cocoa-fibre factory, he embarked on a two-year investigation.

Sifting through archive material at Kingston Museum's local history room and other places, and combining them with his own knowledge of coconut provenance, he has reached conclusions that give a surprising new slant to Kingston's economic past.

It is well known that there were corn mills on the Hogsmill river from Saxon times.

It is also known that in the 19th century three of them had been given over to other uses. Chapel Mill, sited on what is now the corporation refuse depot off Villiers Road, became an oil mill.

Hog's Mill, at the junction of what became Penrhyn road and Denmark Road, became a metal polish works.

Middle Mill at the bottom of Mill Street, became what its advertisements in the Surrey Comet described as "The Patent Cocoa Fibre Co Ltd the only cocoa nut fibre manufactory in Surrey. All descriptions of mats in cocoa nut fibre made to order wholesale."

It has always been assumed that these three mills were separate entities. But Hugh believes they were all linked by coconuts (spelt cocoa-nuts or cokernuts in those days).

He points out that Chapel and Middle Mills were not only in close proximity but were both owned by one man, Joshua Lockwood. Coconuts for the Middle Mill fibre factory would have been imported whole so, having processed the husks to obtain coir fibre, the copras, or kernels, would be sent to the Chapel Mill to have their oil extracted.

But the coconuts' uses didn't end there.

As Hugh points out in his treatise (published in Kew Gardens' Palm Magazine) coir dust piles up when the fibres are beaten from the husks, copra meal remains after the oil is extracted and there are piles of bone-hard coconut shells, split into two cup-like halves when removing the copra.

Today, he says, coir-based products for the soil are actively encouraged by the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew to reduce the plunder of peat moss from endangered wetlands.

Yet this material was available to the Kew gardeners some 130 years ago, when Kingston's coconut fibre works was advertising "cocoa nut fibre refuse for garden purposes.

Fetched from mill in carts or vans at 4d a bushell. Sent to all parts of the kingdom by rail, in bags or by truck".

But what about the coconut shells which, says Hugh, were of no value in industrial Britain?

"The Middle Mill manager might have found ready outlets for coir dust and copra meal, but the unused piles of shells would have remained as mountainous monuments for many years," he says.

He thinks they eventually led to the founding of another local industry in 1895: Yewsabit, a paste that was advertised as "The King of Metal Polishes".

The firm's trademark was a drummer boy of the British Guards an appropriate choice as the War Office was the firm's biggest customer. And Yewsabit was said to have "put a shine on most of the British army" during the Boer War.

Johnston's said Yewsabit was made from five secret ingredients and told a Comet reporter in 1901 that the "principal ingredient which does the trick in cleaning metal is first put through a powerful mill and ground to powder, and then run through a trough into water tanks and allowed to settle. The water is run off and the finest powder retained and dried, the remainder being ground down again".

Hugh says that ground coconut shell is still used to clean metal today, so one of Yewsabit's "secret" ingredients might well have come from the multitude of coconut shells left behind years earlier.

By 1910 Yewsabit and Johnston's had vanished from Kingston. This, he thinks, is because the mountains of unused coconut shells from Middle Mill had dwindled to nothing.

As for coconut shies, he believes they were introduced at Kingston's great annual Pleasure Fair in 1867 when, for the first time, the event took place on the Fairfield. The Comet reported how "for the small sum of one penny, you could have three throws with sticks with the prospect of getting a cocoa nut...".

Hugh theorises that "when the Middle Mill boys played games on the Fairfield perhaps they threw sticks at coconuts. And when the funfair came to town, perhaps the management of Middle Mill, the nearest industrial producer and employer, supplied coconuts at cost as a gesture of goodwill."

That could be, given that the coconut shy as we know it took off in the years between the Kingston Pleasure Fair of 1867 Pleasure Fair and the closure of the fibre mill in 1880.

Today the only reminder of Kingston's lucrative association with coconuts is The Cocoanut (spelt the old way) in Mill Street, which was the principal route to Middle Mill for several centuries.

The pub, originally the Joiners Arms, had become The Cocoanut by 1858 in honour of the nearby factory.

And landlord Tim Hourigan is so thrilled by Hugh's findings, and so proud of his pub's historic associations, that he commissioned a stained glass window for the front door, and laid on a champagne celebration for local residents after it was unveiled last week by the Mayor of Kingston, Councillor Ed Naylor.

The window, designed and made by artist Simone Kaye at her studio in Hawks Road, Kingston, shows the Hogsmill river, the three mills and the pub that's our last living reminder of a once-treat industry.

Footnote: Hugh notes that coconuts, previously rare in England, took on economic value following the marriage of Queen Victoria and the christening of their first child. In 1840 Price's Candle Co (which acquired Kingston's Chapel Mill in 1922) introduced a cheap candle "for the purpose of the general illumination on the occasion of Her Majesty's marriage..." It was made from a mix of stearic acid and coconut stearine, and proved so popular that it was soon being manufactured in bulk. The nut had a further boost in 1842 when, to quote The Times, the floor of St George's Chapel, Windsor "was covered first with a matting made of the husk of the cocoa-nut" for the christening of the Queen's first child, the future Edward VII.