Over a period of more than 150 years between the late eighteenth century and the 1930s the South Yorkshire rural landscape was transformed by coal mining and the movement of coal. But it was not just the development of collieries, canals and railways that caused this transformation.
The population of the coalfield grew at a phenomenal rate and the new mining population, many of them migrants from other parts of the country, had to be housed near to the collieries where they worked. Small residential colonies were built near the new collieries, existing rural villages expanded, new satellite villages were established and completely new mining communities were created, the later ones carefully planned and laid out in the form of geometrically designed estates.
Here is an extract from the book South Yorkshire Mining Villages by South Yorkshireman Melvyn Jones. His book explores the history of the physical and social development of these very varied mining communities.
South Yorkshire Mining Villages by Melvyn Jones is published by Pen & Sword Books and is available here.
Extract:
The history of the region’s coal mining villages is not only about places but also about people, many of them migrants. Shown here are William and Elizabeth Vernon. William was born in the hamlet of Micklebring just north of Maltby in 1829, and his wife was born in Wadworth a few miles to the north-east in 1837. The photograph shows them in later life. After their marriage they migrated just 13 miles westwards where William was employed by Newton Chambers & Co Ltd. William Vernon has two claims to fame. It was he who blew the buzzer at Tankersley Colliery on 21 January 1870, in his capacity as ‘engine tenter’, to warn troops and police in Barnsley that riots were taking place during the Thorncliffe lock-out of 1869–70. He then hid under the floorboards in the engine house. (see Chapter 2). His second claim to fame is that in later life he became a grocer and founded the first co-operative store in the Chapeltown area on Warren Lane in the Vernons’ own cottage.
Willian and Elizabeth Vernon
Small Isolated Mining Colonies on the Exposed Coalfield
Not all mining settlements were in the form of large villages or fairly substantial satellites with a nucleated shape; some were relatively tiny or were linear, consisting of one or two long rows of housing, with possibly a church, chapel or school at one end or the other. There are five examples of small colonies lying relatively close together in the Dearne valley near Wombwell: Lundhill Row originally built to accommodate miners working at Lundhill Colliery; Concrete or Concrete Cottages consisting of eight parallel streets of diminishing length built in 1876 in a field south of the Dearne & Dove Canal, beside the Elsecar Branch railway south-east of Wombwell; Mitchell Main built just to the south of Mitchell Main Colliery.
The Junction, between Wombwell and Concrete Cottages, part of which it is said was known as ‘three-cornered hell’; and Broomhill about a mile to the east of Wombwell. Lundhill Row, Concrete Cottages and Mitchell Main are looked at in detail below. Another example is Long Row, built beside Wharncliffe Woodmor 4 & 5 (New Carlton) Colliery and which is depicted in a painting by Eric Hill on the front cover of this book. There were also two very different colonies associated with the firm of Newton Chambers: the Westwood Rows at High Green built in 1870 to accommodate ‘blackleg’ labour after the locking out of 850 miners at their pits by Newton Chambers in 1869, and The Warren at Chapeltown that also accommodated miners working in Newton Chambers pits and most of which survives as part of a suburban outlier of the city of Sheffield. Another is the colourfully-named Klondyke between Monk Bretton and Cudworth. Woolley Colliery, the settlement not the colliery, was also a tiny colony consisting of just two terraced rows parts of which still survive.
Lundhill Row and Concrete Cottages
It is not possible to discuss the growth of these small mining colonies in the Dearne valley in isolation without considering their relationship to the growth of the town of Wombwell, because they fed off each other. Wombwell was too far away from the new collieries springing up around the town to expect everyone employed in sinking or working at the collieries, especially key personnel, to try to find accommodation for their families in the emerging town and yet the collieries were too near to Wombwell to expect any new colonies associated with them to develop into fully-fledged settlements with a wide range of services (and entertainments).
Wombwell in the 1850s was still an agricultural village perched on an outcrop of Oaks Sandstone above the flood plain of the River Dove. Within half a century it had seen enormous expansionand become a thriving town in a township that had become an urban district and whose population had increased from 1,169 in 1841, to 10,952 by 1881 and by 1901 to 17,536. By 1901 the town was populated not only by coal miners but also by business and trades people and their families. The town had been lit by gas from the town’s gasworks from 1870 and by the end of the century running water was supplied to most houses from the town’s waterworks. In 1886 a new parish church had been built to replace the largely medieval chapel of St Mary and there was a wide range of nonconformist places of worship. Education in the town was also well catered for and by 1900 there were three board schools with 1,550 children attending.
The High Street had become a very important retailing and business area by the beginning of the twentieth century. The market place had been opened in 1875 and across the road on the south corner with Station Road stood the new Town Hall built in 1897. Along High Street and its extension to the south (Park Street) was a wide selection of businesses vying for the custom of the population of the town and the small coal mining settlements in the surrounding area (Figure 2.1). There were three banks, a succession of public houses, drapers and milliners, jewellers, pawnbrokers, newsagents, tobacconists, confectioners, greengrocers, fishmongers, hairdressers, butchers, fishing tackle dealers, cycle agents and, most imposing of all, from 1902 a new building containing Branch No. 3 of the Barnsley British Co-operative Society (boot & shoe dealer, draper and butcher in its early days).
Figure 2.1 High Street, Wombwell, c. 1900. (Old Barnsley)
And so, as the collieries were sunk in the surrounding area and coal started to be produced,
small settlements grew up in their vicinity and, not far away, Wombwell responded not only by accommodating miners and their families but also by taking on the functions of a town providing an ever increasing range of services for its own population and for those settling in the new mining settlements in its immediate hinterland. Three of these are discussed below.Lundhill Row was built as accommodation for workers at Lundhill Colliery which was opened in 1855 to take advantage of the nearby Dearne & Dove Canal and the branch line of the South Yorkshire Railway to reach its markets. This colliery was the scene of a large explosion soon after its opening with an enormous loss of life. This occurred on 19 February 1857. At the time of the disaster 220 men and boys were down the pit and 189 lost their lives. The impact on local communities was calamitous: 90 wives lost their husbands and 220 children were rendered fatherless. A second explosion took place three hours after the first explosion with a column of flame one hundred feet high. The colliery was re-opened after the disaster and continued as a separate colliery until the late 1880s when coal from the workings began to be wound to the surface at Wombwell Main Colliery.
Lundhill Row is the most primitive of the isolated mining colonies in this part of the Dearne valley. It consisted simply of one long row of brick-built cottages with shared privies (Figure 2.2).
Figure 2.2 Lundhill Row. (Brian Elliott)
There was no school, just a chapel and a nearby public house, the Lundhill Tavern. In 1901, when the inhabitants would have been working at the neighbouring Cortonwood Colliery, Wombwell Main or the Elsecar collieries, the 53 cottages were occupied by just under 300 people. Although the majority had been born in South Yorkshire, there were in-migrants from all parts of the British Isles. There were those from the neighbouring counties of Derbyshire, Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire on the eastern side of the Pennines; from Lancashire across the Pennines and from other industrial and coal mining counties such as Durham and Staffordshire. They had also come from north and south Wales, Scotland and even from London. And they had come from the smallest of rural villages deep in the English countryside to try to earn a living in the mining bonanza of South Yorkshire. There was one person living in Lundhill Row in 1901 who had been born in Stoke Climsland in the Tamar valley in Cornwall and another who had been born in the tiny village of Redgrave in Sufffolk.
Figure 2.3 Concrete Cottages: (a) as shown on the 25-inch OS map published in 1903 and (b) inset: a rare photograph of the cottages. (Old Barnsley)
The settlement called Concrete Cottages (or just Concrete as it was called at the time of the 1901 census) was built in a field south of the Dearne & Dove Canal beside the Elsecar Branch Railway. It was sometimes referred to as New Wombwell or Little Palestine (because the houses had flat roofs, it is said). It had been established in 1876 by the Cortonwood Colliery Company following the sinking of Cortonwood Colliery the previous year. It was composed of eight unnamed streets, varying in length from nineteen to four houses, 106 homes altogether (Figure 2.3). Each street faced north-east so that the view from the windows of most of the cottages was into the backyards of other cottages. And as the name of the settlement implies the cottages were indeed made of concrete: the walls, the roofs and even the spouts. There were two rooms on the ground floor, a living room which contained a black leaded fireplace, and a kitchen with a Yorkshire range fireplace, a ‘copper’ (a boiler used for heating water and washing clothes) and a stoneware sink with a cold water tap. Below the kitchen was a cellar used for storing coal and foodstuffs.
Upstairs were three bedrooms, one large room and two small rooms. The large bedroom had a fireplace. In the early years the living room and kitchen were lit with gas but candles had to be used upstairs. Each cottage had its own private backyard with earth closets. At the northern end of the settlement, beside Knoll Beck Lane, stood a small (two-room) school and a Wesleyan chapel (the ‘Tin Chapel’). There were small shops where the shopkeepers operated from their front rooms, a tiny post office and a fish and chip shop. Allotment gardens were provided in the field next to the village. The cottages were occupied until 1958.
In this tiny purpose-built mining settlement in 1901 lived 580 men, women and children. And as in all the other mining settlements that had sprouted up across the exposed coalfield during the nineteenth century many were in-migrants from all parts of the country and beyond. They had been born in neighbouring Cheshire, Derbyshire and Lincolnshire, from Lancashire, Durham and Staffordshire and from further away from London and Kent. There were also people who had been born in Flintshire and Anglesey in north Wales and from Ireland. And they had come from the most rural parts of England – from Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire. Most surprising of all there was one person who had been born in the ‘US of America, British Subject’.
The area once covered by Lundhill Row, Concrete Cottages and Lundhill and Cortonwood collieries has now been landscaped and contains a dual carriageway, suburban housing, a lake, a golf course and retail park.
Mitchell Main
The short-lived isolated colony at Mitchell Main was associated with Mitchell Main Colliery (or as it was originally known Mitchell’s Main Colliery). This colliery, located between the Dearne & Dove Canal and the South Yorkshire railway (by 1904 the Great Central Railway), just half a mile north-west of the centre of Wombwell, began to be sunk in 1871 and the Barnsley seam was reached in 1873 at 307 yards. From the early 1900s the seams below the Barnsley seam (Parkgate, Fenton, Silkstone and Swallow Wood) were exploited. The colliery changed hands in 1883 and the Mitchell Main Colliery Company retained ownership until nationalisation in 1947.
A small settlement, roughly rectangular in shape, was built immediately to the south of the colliery mainly between the canal and Barnsley Road (Figure 2.4). It comprised four streets of cottages: one in the west with cottages on one side of Barnsley Road; another with cottages along one side on Bradberry Balk Lane in the south; a long street in the north called Myers Street with cottages on both sides; and through the middle Hammerton Street cutting through Myers Street to Bradberry Balk Lane. There was also a substantial house just outside the colony on the corner of Barnsley Road and Bradberry Balk Lane. Across the canal was a short row of six cottages called Pit Cottages and further to the north-east across the railway were four cottages called Railway Cottages. There was also a single row of about a couple of a dozen cottages (that still survive) on the Barnsley Road to the north beside the Aldham Glass Bottle Works, which stood between the cottages and Mitchell Main Colliery. There was a Wesleyan chapel but no school. Myers Street and Hammerton Street were still marked on the Ordnance Survey Street Atlas published in 1996 but are now gone. The chapel still stands.
Figure 2.4 Mitchell Main (the colliery and the settlement) as shown on the 25-inch OS map published in 1906
An analysis of the 1901 census returns for this small settlement, which was recorded under the name Mitchell Terrace, is most revealing. In the main settlement (i.e. excluding the Railway Cottages and the long row opposite Aldham Glassworks), there were 89 cottages containing a population of 434. These cottages were the homes of 150 working men and boys of whom 123 (82 per cent) worked at the colliery. Nineteen men and boys (13 per cent) worked at the glassworks. There were six widows heading households, one of whom was a shopkeeper selling sweets and another two who were said to be lodging house keepers. One male head of household was a railway worker, one was retired and all the others not working at the colliery or in the glassworks were offering services – two were wagonnette proprietors, one was a barber, one was a grocer, one was a butcher and one was a ‘yeast hawker’, i.e. a ‘barm man’. What is not surprising is that of the 150 working men and boys living at Mitchell Main in 1901, only three of the 83 fathers and 21 of their 52 sons and one of the 15 boarders had been born in Wombwell. Fiftyfive of the working men and boys had been born in the rest of South Yorkshire and a further 22 had been born elsewhere in Yorkshire. There were also migrants from neighbouring counties, the West Midlands and the more distant counties of Suffolk and Cornwall. There were also four migrants from Wales (from Flintshire, Denbighshire and Glamorgan) and seven from Ireland. Significantly, the next household recorded by the enumerator after leaving Mitchell Main was on a canal boat called Annie Lee!
The Long Row at Carlton
The Long Row or to use its formal name, Carlton Terrace, was located about half a mile from the centre of the village of Carlton across Shaw Bridge between the Barnsley Canal and the railway, beside what was at first called Carlton Main Colliery and later Wharncliffe Woodmoor 4 & 5 or New Carlton to distinguish it from Wharncliffe Woodmoor 1, 2 & 3 (Old Carlton) to the west of the village. The colliery was leased to the Yorkshire & Derbyshire Coal & Iron Company. The first sod was cut by the Earl of Wharncliffe of Wortley Hall, under whose estate the coal was going to be exploited, on 12 November 1873. But sinking did not commence until the following year. The nine feet thick Barnsley seam was reached in 1876. The colliery was closed between 1910and 1924 when it was taken over by Wharncliffe Woodmoor Colliery Company who operated the colliery until nationalisation in 1947. The colliery closed in July 1970.
Within just a year or two of the opening of the colliery the Yorkshire & Derbyshire Coal & Iron Company had built Carlton Terrace beside the colliery (Figure 2.5). At first it consisted of sixty brick and twelve stone cottages and by 1890 another twelve cottages had been added. The original weekly rents were four shillings and sixpence (22½ pence) for a stone cottage and four shillings and threepence for a brick cottage. In 1901 there were 81 occupied residences on the row including a shop and a working men’s club. Small as they were, some were very crowded with one household consisting of 14 people and another of 12. Seventeen households contained boarders.
The total population was 492. What is not surprising is how many people were incomers. Of the 173 working men and boys all but six (which included the shopkeeper and the club steward) worked at the colliery including those in senior positions such as a colliery underviewer, a coal inspector and eight pit deputies down to coal hewers, banksmen and colliery labourers. But only 18 (10 per cent) of these 173 workers had been born in Carlton and they were mostly the sons of migrants. Seventy-four (43 per cent) of these working men and boys had been born in the rest of Yorkshire, overwhelmingly (65 or 38 per cent) from just a few miles away in West Yorkshire. Most of the other migrants (30) were from the West Midlands of whom 22 were from Staffordshire. There were also migrants from the most unlikely places in rural England: there was a coal hewer who had been born in the tiny village of Redgrave in Suffolk anda colliery deputy whose birthplace was Cornwall. There were also two migrants from Scotland, two from Ireland and four from south Wales but none from north Wales, even though Carlton had a thriving and growing community from North Wales. The migrants from north Wales all worked at Old Carlton pit and lived in other parts of Carlton and in Smithies (see Chapter 4). Wharncliffe Woodmoor 4 & 5 closed in July 1970, and soon afterwards the colliery headgear and associated colliery buildings and Long Row were all demolished. The 130-acre area was contoured and landscaped, the canal diverted, the road network improved and Lyons Bakery covering eight acres (and said to be the biggest cake factory in the world!) was built there.
Figure 2.5 The Long Row at Carlton
The Westwood Rows
Taking a country walk through the wooded Thorncliffe valley and in and around the former Tankersley deer park, now largely converted into a golf course, about halfway between Barnsley and Sheffield, it is difficult to realise that you are in the vicinity of a former settlement connected to one of the most celebrated labour disputes of the nineteenth century (Jones, 1993). The dispute in question rivalled, in its physical confrontation between locked-out miners and the forces of law and order, the more recent national strike of 1984. After the dispute was over, the employer involved, Newton Chambers & Company, described it as ‘the most determined contest between capital and labour which is to be found in the mining history of this or any other country’. They went on to say that the action of the miners created ‘not only indignation but astonishment in this and other countries’.
Figure 2.6 An aerial view of Westwood Rows shortly before their demolition towards the end of the 1960s. (Chapeltown & High Green Archive)
The settlement concerned was called the Westwood Rows (Figure 2.6). This isolated settlement was built at the end of the 1860s to house ‘blackleg’ miners recruited by Newton Chambers and it was demolished towards the end of the 1960s. It had come and gone within a hundred years.
The site was subsequently open-cast mined and then landscaped and seeded to form part of Westwood Country Park. Today no sign remains of a settlement that for most of its existence housed more than 300 men, women and children. The dispute that gave rise to the building of the Westwood Rows lasted for seventeenth months from 24 March 1869 to 17 August 1870. There had been a dispute only three years earlier that had lasted for nine months and this was followed by an uneasy two years in which there were two more disputes, but all that had gone before paled into insignificance when compared to the bitterness, resentment and physical disturbance associated with the 1869–70 dispute, the worst violence talking place in and about the Westwood Rows. Briefly the dispute stemmed from the decision of Newton Chambers to reduce wages by 7.5 per cent and their refusal to negotiate with the Miners’ Union. Workers were to continue to be employed provided they agreed to abide by the rules and by-laws of the Company’s collieries which involved them in, among other things, negotiating individually over wages and working an eight hour day when required to do so. It was essentially then, an attempt to eliminate collective bargaining, and the workers at the company’s collieries – Thorncliffe Drift, Tankersley, Norfolk, Newbiggin and Staindrop – were given a month’s notice to cease work or to submit to the company’s demands. On 24 March 1869, 850 men and boys were locked out, although several hundred remained at work.
The evidence – which includes evidence from the miners’ union, company records, personal diaries, newspaper reports, letters to local and national newspapers, court proceedings and the 1871 census - is particularly rich and interesting. The diaries are particularly interesting. One surviving diary is that of George Dawson, head of the ironworks, a figure seen by the striking miners as a major stumbling block in the way of a swift and fair settlement. Another is that of William Nesbitt, a man from north-east England, who had been appointed foreman engineer in the fitting shops at Newton Chambers in December 1868, only a few months before the dispute began. The early entries record a sense of personal danger of someone very close to the action and later ones of a ‘fly on the wall’ watching the action unfold.
The evidence reveals a situation in which there was constant tension, anxiety and foreboding. The employer stood firm and attempted to replace the striking miners with blackleg labour from other parts of the region and from other coalfields. The strikers, not surprisingly, tried to persuade the blacklegs to return home. They succeeded in this to some extent, but inevitably the supply of blackleg labour increased and this was combated by outbreaks of violent behaviour aimed at intimidating the newcomers. This, in turn, led to police and military reinforcements being brought to the area, and inevitably the tension increased. The immediate surroundings of Newton Chambers’ Thorncliffe Works must have taken on the appearance of a town under siege. William Nesbitt recorded the beginning of the dispute in his diary in a very matter of fact way:
March 24th Finished 3 ft pulley for hay cutting machine for company’s farm, being 5 days in the lathe.
Mr Thomas Chambers youngest daughter was married today to Mr Hawett of Nottingham and the affair came off very quietly.
All the coalminers of the Thorncliffe Colliery Co’y came out on strike.
By the beginning of April he noted that several policemen had arrived at Thorncliffe ‘to protect property and the men that have started work at the pits, against the men who are on strike.’ The next day (2 April) he noted that two blacklegs who had started work at Thorncliffe Drift Pit ‘were guarded to work by policemen’. A month into the strike and with no sign of a settlement, Nesbitt noted that orders had been given ‘for all tenants to clear out of Thorncliffe Cottages as he (Mr John Chambers, the partner principally concerned with the running of the collieries) wanted the houses for his blacksheep. The Thorncliffe Cottages (or Thorncliffe Rows as they are better known) lay much nearer the ironworks than Westwood Rows would be, in the valley of the Blackburn Brook south of Thorncliffe Drift Colliery. They had been built during a previous dispute in 1866 to accommodate non-union labour. Despite the fact that some newcomers were being induced to return home before taking up residence and work at Thorncliffe (Nesbitt recorded blacklegs being met at Chapeltown station and having their return passages paid for them), the eviction of the striking miners and their families from Thorncliffe Rows and the installation there of blackleg miners and their families led to the first major outbreak of violent behaviour. William Nesbitt, who was himself living in Thorncliffe Rows at the time, wrote that a body of striking miners, about 200 in number, came at 10 o’clock at night and ‘Drove the policemen out and broke all the windows in five houses’. The policemen ‘ran in all directions, some hiding themselves in the water closets’.
Throughout the rest of 1869 there were outbreaks of violence of varying degrees of severity and periods of mounting tension when it was believed that a major disturbance was about to occur, these being accompanied by reports of ‘many strangers being in the district’. Potential blackleg miners continued to be met at the local railway stations by angry crowds of strikers. By 23 October it was reported in the Sheffield and Rotherham Independent that representatives of Newton Chambers were seeking the assistance of the army in the form of a permanent garrison because the neighbourhood was ‘in a state of constant terror’ and an attack was expected on the homes of the working miners. In November 1869 the miners’ union admitted that as many as a hundred ‘blacksheep’ were working in the firm’s collieries. Leading members of the firm also began to receive threatening letters. For example the following letter was received by Mr Arthur Marshall Chambers:
Mr Chambers 1870 Sir. Prepare to meet thy God, as I insist on thee been a dead man before long. If thou means to keep us this winter. We are determined not to let you see the end of it. if thou means to let us clam & starve. we mean to have it out of you you bugger as thy Days are numbered. So prepare to meet thy God.
Yours truly one who wishes you in hell fire.
Then on 7 January 1870, a crowd of strikers attacked Tankersley pit, broke windows, smashed lamps and pushed several corves (coal wagons) down the shaft. The engine ‘tenter’ (i.e. the person who looked after the engine) alerted the local population by a long and continuous blowing of the pit buzzer, and as the rioters broke into the engine house he hid himself under the floorboards.
This was followed on Friday 21 January at seven o’clock in the morning by an attack on the fronts and the backs of the new cottages at Westwood Rows. The crowd of attackers, variously estimated at between 300 and 1500 men were ‘armed with pistols, some with bludgeons, the heads of which bristled with spikes, some with picks’ according to the Sheffield and Rotherham Independent.
The cottages were defended by a force of ten policemen who were overwhelmed, though not before dispatching a messenger to Barnsley for reinforcements. In the ensuing mayhem windows were smashed, doors and furniture demolished, houses looted and an unsuccessful attempt was made to set fire to the cottages by burning clothing, bedclothes and broken furniture. Police reinforcements then arrived from Barnsley and set about the crowd with cutlasses to which the miners replied with their bludgeons. Thankfully no one was killed. Twenty-three men were eventually sent for trial at York assizes, eleven receiving sentences of imprisonment, three of them for five years.
Following these disturbances soldiers, about one hundred in all, were quartered in the Workmen’s Hall at Mortomley Lane End and at Tankersley Farm for six months, and an uneasy peace returned to the area. The dispute lasted another seven months, ending on 17 August. Wages were reduced, former workmen had to re-apply on an individual basis and there were no vacancies at Thorncliffe Drift Pit, presumably all places being already filled by non-union men, local and migrant. The concessions made by the company were relatively minor. Subscriptions to the accident fund were to be optional rather than compulsory, all Saturday working was reduced to half a day (it had previously been one half day Saturday per fortnight) and although fortnightly pay remained, money could be advanced on a weekly basis if earned.
So who were the blacklegs who were recruited by the company and installed in Westwood Rows? We know that the company employed an agent to recruit miners in other coalfield areasand that the miners’ union tried to combat this by distributing leaflets in the same areas, putting their side of the argument and asking miners to stay away from from Thorncliffe. One of these, for example, claimed that the company was giving a false name to the collieries concerned ‘for the express purpose of deceiving you, and, thereby, leading you into the Black Trap.’ Some light can be shed on the origins of the non-union miners by analysing the enumerators’ returns of the 1871 census for the Westwood Rows, the census having taken place just seven months after the end of the dispute. The returns show that 47 of the fifty cottages were occupied with a total population of 327.
Twenty-two of the 47 households had lodgers. Altogether there were 125 males in employment whose ages ranged from 10 to 69 years of age. Ninety per-cent were employed in collieries, overwhelmingly described as coal miner, miner, collier or pit labourer, but also including three trappers, two pony drivers, two engine drivers, two engine tenters, two deputies, a carpenter, a blacksmith, an assistant underground steward and an underground viewer.
The evidence provided of the birthplaces of the residents suggests that the majority were families or single men from other areas who had been recruited during the dispute. That they were recent migrants is proved by the fact that in some families there is a young child born locally in contrast to his or her older siblings born elsewhere. For example, in the Jervis family there were eight children, seven of whom were born in Derbyshire, including the next to the youngest, four-years old Charles, who was born in Ilkeston, but the youngest child, Arthur, who was two, was born in Tankersley (i.e. in the Westwood Rows). Similarly in the Grealy family, of their four children, two were born in Derbyshire, the next to youngest, Michael, who was three, was born in County Durham, but their youngest daughter, Mary, who was one year old was born in Tankersley. Both parents were born in Ireland. Of the 125 employed males, 35 were born in South Yorkshire, mostly in Tankersley and
Ecclesfield parishes; the next biggest group (22) were born in Derbyshire and seem to have been recruited in the Chesterfield and Ilkeston areas; there were 18 from Leicestershire, all born in and around the mining settlements of Moira and Donisthorpe in the north of the county and from Overseal just across the county boundary in Derbyshire. There was another substantial group (14) who had been born in Ireland, although the birthplaces of their wives and children show that they had been resident in south Lancashire, north Derbyshire, Durham and the Black Country before coming to the Westwood Rows. Most of the remainder of the employed male migrants originated from mining areas around the country including Lancashire, Durham, Northumberland, Shropshire, south Wales and Scotland.
The Warren
The Warren has the distinction of being one of the three of the isolated colonies discussed in this chapter that survives to this day, but now it is simply a semi-isolated suburban strip. Warren was a residential colony for local workers developed rather late bearing in mind its proximity to Newton Chambers’ Thorncliffe Ironworks and related collieries. The first Six-inch Ordnance Survey map, surveyed in 1850 shows just four buildings at the western end on the south side of Warren Lane and a public house at the east end on the south side of the lane. Warren Lane is so called because the lane ran along the former southern boundary of Tankersley deer park, that part of the park just north of the lane was named The Warren because it was a part of the park where the red deer hinds gave birth to and looked after their young fawns. The park belonged to Earl Fitzwilliam of Wentworth Woodhouse but the land to the south of the lane belonged to the Duke of Norfolk, hence the name of the public house at the end of the lane, the Norfolk Arms.
In 1881 there were 732 people in 154 households living on Warren Lane. There were 227 employed persons of whom 105 (46 per cent) worked in collieries. The rest were in a wide variety of occupations including a slater, a toll bar ‘tenter’, a schoolmistress, and a bootmaker but most were employed at the Thorncliffe Ironworks in a variety of capacities. Interestingly, one of the inhabitants of Warren in 1881 was William Vernon who has two claims to fame. First, he was the engine ‘tenter’ at Tankersley pit in 1870 when it was attacked by rioters. He blew the buzzer to warn troops that rioting was taking place (then hid under the floorboards). Secondly, he ran the first co-operative store in the district from his own cottage on Warren Lane until the society erected a purpose-built shop.
Figure 2.7 The Miners’ Arms, Warren Lane.
In 1881 just over 60 per cent of the employed men and boys living on the Warren were migrants, i.e. they had been born outside Ecclesfield parish in which Warren Lane was located. The biggest group of worker migrants (37 per cent) were from the rest of Yorkshire, mostly short and medium distance migrants but there were also long distance migrants from the East Riding (Hull) and the North Riding (Scarborough). The next biggest group of migrants (16 per cent) were from the neighbouring counties of Derbyshire, Lancashire, Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire, but, as in all the other South Yorkshire mining communities in the second half of the nineteenth century there was a sprinkling of long distance migrants in this case with representatives from Somerset, Devon and Wiltshire in south-west England, from Northumberland in the north of England and one head of household born in Ireland.
By the time of the publication of the 25-Inch Ordnance Survey map published in 1903 there were buildings all the way along the south side of Warren Lane as far as the modern Thorncliffe Road that links the A616 (Stocksbridge by-pass) with the Thorncliffe industrial estate. This consisted mostly of housing in the form of terraced rows, including at the western end some short rows of back-to-back housing. It also included two more public houses, the Thorncliffe Arms and the Miners’ Arms (Figure 2.7), a Wesleyan chapel and Sunday school built in 1859 (which had originally operated also as a day school) and across White Lane at the eastern end of the settlement, Warren School, opened in 1900 with places for 100 infants and 268 older children.
Today the remaining terraced houses on the south side of Warren Lane are accompanied by twentieth century-built bungalows and semi-detached and detached housing on the north side.
Klondyke
This small industrial colony lay on Burton Lane between Monk Bretton and Cudworth. At the beginning of the twentieth century it consisted of two short rows of terraced houses on Burton Lane itself and three short terraces leading off to the north at right angles called Faith Terrace, Hope Terrace and Charity Terrace. So the settlement as a whole formed a small square (Figure 2.8). Within walking distance lay Monk Bretton Colliery to the south-west, a brick works to the east, the Midland Bleach works to the north-east and railways almost encircled it. There were, therefore, employment opportunities in almost every direction.
In 1901 the population of Klondyke was 253, living in 43 households. Household size varied from two to 14 and ten of the households contained boarders or visitors including a female evangelist preacher from Liverpool. There were 92 employed men and boys living in Klondyke in 1901. Of these, 72 (78 per cent) worked in a colliery, from deputy down to trammer and pony driver. Six men or boys worked on the railways, four at the brickworks and three at the bleach works. One person, an elderly man born in Ireland, worked as a farm labourer. Another two worked as grocers, presumably from a small shop in a front parlour.
Figure 2.8 Klondyke as shown on the 25-inch OS map published in 1906.
The birthplaces of these employed men and boys were as varied as in all the other mining villages in South Yorkshire at the time. Forty-one (45 per cent) were from South Yorkshire but only five had been born in Monk Bretton parish where Klondyke was located and only one from neighbouring Cudworth. Nine had been born in other places in Yorkshire and nine had been born in Staffordshire. There were then small numbers from Derbyshire (six), Lancashire (six) and Ireland (six). Among the other interesting birthplaces were four from the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire, which was also a coal mining area, and one each from Walsham in Suffolk, and Rotherfield in Sussex, both distant rural villages. One man who worked as a colliery horsekeeper was born in Scotland and another who worked at the brick works was from Whitechapel in the East End of London. But perhaps the most surprising migrant living in Klondyke in 1901 was a fourteen-year old trapper who had been born in Iowa in the mid-west of the USA! His father, who had been born in Royston must have crossed the Atlantic in both directions. If the boy had been told that the family was leaving the USA to go to Klondyke, he may have believed he was going to Klondyke in the Yukon in north-west Canada to mine gold not to a small settlement in South Yorkshire to mine coal!
The settlement still retained the name Klondyke in the 1950s but later became officially known as West Green. It still survives to this day in part.
South Yorkshire Mining Villages by Melvyn Jones is published by Pen & Sword Books and is available here.
