YORKSHIRE COALMINING HISTORY BOOKS

For 150 years the Dearne Valley was the centre of coal production in the South Yorkshire coalfield and names like Grimethorpe, Manvers Main and Hickleton Main became famous throughout the area. This first part of the book details the growth and the eventual closure of the 18 pits in the valley. The second part describes the mining villages that grew up alongside the collieries. The third part illustrates the transport networks that developed to transport the coal and the people of the valley, by road, rail and canal. The book features 230 illustrations, many of which have never been previously published.

In 1863, John Buckingham Pope headed a consortium of promotors keen to exploit the coal reserves in an undeveloped portion of the South Yorkshire Coalfield. With a reputation for commercial efficiency, the Denaby & Cadeby Main Collieries Ltd developed Denaby and Cadeby Main Collieries and built a settlement of 2,100 house to accommodate their workforce, with the aim of producing 2,000,000 tons of coal per year. The colliery company created a frontier settlement, where they had almost despotic powers over the entire village and the ruthlessness of the colliery management naturally hardened the men's attitudes but did the village really deserve the reputation of being the worst village in England?

Doncaster was once home to several picture postcard publishers and this nostalgic book details their photographic output and forms a fitting tribute to their work. Postcard publishers Edgar Leonard Scrivens, James Simonton & Sons, Doncaster Rotophoto, Regina Press, Donlion Productions, Arjay Productions, Empire View Productions, and several smaller firms comprehensively photographed the town and its surrounding villages, leaving a superb photographic legacy. The illustrations for this new book have been kindly supplied by members of the Doncaster & District Philatelic & Postcard Society.

• Part 1 Introduction – The Picture Postcard – Doncaster’s Postcard Publishers
• Part 2 A tour through the town centre
• Part 3 A tour through the suburbs
• Part 4 A tour through the surrounding villages
• Index and Further Reading

Rossington is reputed to be one of the largest villages in the country but, at the time of the 1911 census, it only had 371 inhabitants. However, the following year a group of industrialists and dignitaries assembled in a field near Holmes Carr Wood where the wife of Maurice Deacon, (the Managing Director of the newly formed Rossington Main Colliery Company Ltd) cut the first sod of turf, prior to the sinking of the shafts for the new colliery. Under the guidance of Maurice Deacon and Lord Aberconway, within 20 years, a new purpose-built planned settlement of over 1,500 colliery-owned houses was constructed to accommodate the 3,000 employees at the pit which was expected to produce 1,000,000 tons of coal per year. Thus, a new chapter in Rossington£s history commenced as people from all over the country moved to the area to undertake a new life dominated by coal. This book is presented in three parts: Part 1 features 16 pages of colour illustrations, Part 2 details the development of the colliery from 1912 to its closure in 2006, and Part 3 documents the development of the village of New Rossington.

Originally known as Edlington Main Colliery, the renamed Yorkshire Main Colliery and the village of New Edlington were developed by The Staveley Coal & Iron Company as a partial replacement for their declining coal reserves at their older Derbyshire collieries. Under the dynamic leadership of the Staveley Chairman, Charlie Markham, the new colliery at Edlington would eventually employ 3,500 men who produced over 1,000,000 tons of coal per year. However, this would not be enough for the ambitious Charlie Markham who wanted the pit at Edlington to live up to its new name and become the biggest colliery in Yorkshire?