Valentines Volunteers
On Saturday 14th February, our volunteers returned to site – after the longest, wettest, dullest January that anyone can remember; the country being lashed by Storms Goretti, Ingrid and Chandra, but the light had returned! It was still a bit nippy though as the Friends arrived at Hemingfield – with no water for the birds in Pump House Cottage garden, only ice – despite the brighter skies!
Mostly Moss
After getting the fire going in Pump House Cottage (thanks Paul!), and warming hands and hearts, the volunteers headed out: some into the garden to weed the beds and prepare the ground for some spring colour – Janet and Jeff working wonders there.
Others to the water shaft, to try to make a start on tidying the surface of the concrete pumping shaft collar, reducing the slip hazard created by the growth of moss on the pitted surfaces. Scrapers at the ready!
The long wet winter had allowed moss to accrue, colonising the concrete surfaces, particularly around the shafts, so some dedicated moss-clearing was required. We’re not anti-moss, indeed we’re pleased to see all bryophytes adding some life and colour on site, but we are anti-slip!
It’s surprisingly hard work – but always fun when you’re working with fellow volunteers. More to do, but a good start, thanks to Andy, Andrew, young David and Chris!
Out and About
On Tuesday 17th February, The Friends were pleased to visit Wombwell Methodist Church for an evening talk about the history of the colliery and the origins of the Friends group. The Ladies friendship circle meeting were an attentive and knowledgeable audience, with first-hand memories of local coal mining life and traditions and even had family connections to Hemingfield Colliery which the Friends hope to follow-up as we seek to research, capture and share the stories of the site.
We were also humbled to receive a donation from the group which will go to ensuring the Friends work on site and interpretation of its history will be sustained.
Untangling Tingle Bridge
A little bit of local history. Tingle Bridge just down the road from Hemingfield Colliery is now mostly associated with the the road Tingle Bridge Lane of the same name which leads up the hill to Hemingfield proper, but it was also a place-name where many of Hemingfield Colliery’s workers and their families came to reside and work, as well as rest and play in the nineteenth century. Indeed, at times Hemingfield Colliery was referred to as Tingle Bridge Colliery because it was so close, so a little scan of its past is not without interest. But first of all – why is it called Tingle Bridge?
The name Tingle Bridge dates back to the mid-17th Century, from 1662 at least, when it appears in reference to the Taylor family of Tingle Bridge in the Parish Registers of Wath upon Dearne, and also in the will of John Taylor in 1675. The origin of the name remains somewhat obscure – placename scholarship suggest a bridge supported at several points, strung across the beck, like a mason’s tingle (A.H. Smith, The Place-Names of the West Riding of Yorkshire, Part I, Cambridge University Press, 1961, p.104), or perhaps there was a Tingle family association? – further research may bear fruit on this point…
Mapping it out
Tracking it back in time, we can see that although Hemingfield itself appears, Tingle Bridge per se does not appear as a feature or placename on early maps covering the area, such as the 1675 Britannia road map book by John Ogilby (1600-1676), or the large 1720 map of Yorkshire by John Warburton (1682–1759):
Around a hundred years after the first recorded reference to the location, it does finally appear on a map in the remarkable 1771 survey of Yorkshire by Thomas Jefferys (1719-1771), Geographer to King George III (seen here in a 1775 revision):
The original feature was clearly a singular bridge over the Knoll Beck, a crossing point over a stream linking mainly small farming settlements in a landlocked area of the Dearne Valley in South Yorkshire. It is still something of a boundary today: where Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council and Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council rub along gently, linked by later road, rail and water connections, although both of the latter two are currently abandoned.
It originally connected Hemingfield with Royds (the farmstead had a through lane to the crossing) and also up to Woolseycroft, past Rainborough Grange (both now buried under Elsecar Main Colliery’s spoil heap), headed towards West Melton, Brampton and Wath – the site of the mother church of the ancient Parish of Wath Upon Dearne.
Waterway revolution
The area around Tingle Bridge was literally transformed – physically, economically and socially by the coming of the Dearne and Dove canal in the 1790s. The Elsecar Branch navigation cutting required significant engineering works, with locks, overflows, and culverts, redirecting parts of the Knoll Beck as well as creating the huge reservoir at Elsecar.
It also created the need for an additional bridge, one over the new Dearne and Dove navigation, and another matching stone bridge over the rechannelled stream. The main landowners at Tingle Bridge were John Birks, the local solicitor of Hemingfield (and later Canal Agent for the Dearne and Dove), and William Storey, farmer, whose farmland also provided a stone quarry to help build the bridges over the canal and retaining walls at Elsecar Reservoir.
The canal brought boats, slow lumbering humber keels or sloops of 60-70 tons capacity, pulled by horses along the tow path. Each keel brought small crews, requiring refreshment, stabling for the horse-marines towing the boats, and workers to load and unload the cargoes. Along the Elsecar branch the Canal Company’s lock keeper monitored traffic and collected the appropriate dues.
From December 1798, the Elseccar branch was open to traffic, and all of it heading to Elsecar New colliery had to pass under Tingle Bridge canal bridge and through the lock. At first the keels brought in limestone from Conisborough along the River Don, and took away cargoes of coal, and pig iron from the furnaces at Elsecar and Milton. The traffic grew as more collieries developed along the canal and the blast furnaces grew into larger iron works and the Georgian Canal era slowly transitioned into the Victorian period of wider industrial development.
The earliest Ordnance survey map for the area was surveyed in 1839, and published in 1841, showing some outline details of the buildings at Tingle Bridge at that time. Greater detail would have to await the 6 inch survey in 1849-50, published in 1855, by which time the South Yorkshire Railway line had arrived at Elsecar – adding a further connection – and level crossing – to the area.
Ale and Hearty
Today when people speak of Tingle Bridge, they will doubtless think of the Elephant & Castle pub and restaurant. It is a redoubtable survivor, and a key part of the history of the place. Originally the public house was known simply as the ‘Elephant Inn’ (ignore the typo in the 1855 map!). It has been built by 1811 when John Bagshaw a publican from Rotherham mortgaged the newly-built property to Richard Brooke. It was a business meeting the growing demands of a bustling canal route.
By the 1840s, at the time when Hemingfield Colliery was being sunk just up the road, Tingle Bridge was starting to become a small settlement, although only the left-hand side of what is now tingle Bridge lane was developed at first. Joseph Windle was landlord at the Elephant and Castle, and owned land next to the pub on which four tenements were built, with stables, outbuildings, and warehouse. One of the buildings became a beer house. Others would follow.
Booze became a major part of the business activities at Tingle Bridge serving the waterside clientele. Alongside the Elephant and Castle, were two other beerhouses set up in the following decades. The names varied over time, but included Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Traveller’s Inn. These were superseded by the Ship Inn, and the Sailors and Miners, both of which establishments disappeared into history when their licence renewals were refused in 1906 and 1918 respectively.
Alongside ale, other shops spring up, John Halmshaw ran a grocer’s shop in addition to the Uncle Tom’s cabin beerhouse in the 1850s and 60s. In 1855 he and his wife were subject to a violent robbery, but lived to tell the tale. Later, the Wright family from Wombwell ran a grocers shop. Alongside retail premises, Tingle Bridge also became home to a boatyard, complete with dry dock for repairs. The Turner family ran the business for around twenty years, and even built and launched a number of keels for use on the canal – a subject we shall return to in future posts.
Life at Tingle Bridge
By the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century, with growing colliery workings all along the Elsecar branch, and increased demand for labour, and thus for housing, there had been quite a growth in private development in and around Tingle Bridge, as Ordnance Survey maps reflect:
On the right-hand side of Tingle Bridge Lane, next door to the Sailors and Miners (no.25) were two sandstone-build houses, numbered as 21 and 23 Tingle Bridge. Both were described as four room buildings, consisting of a living kitchen, sitting room, two bedrooms and a cellar kitchen. This last feature is recalled in the memories of Mr Harry Frost, whose own family history notes from 1965 provide a useful sketch of life there.
His great-grandmother, Mrs Ann Martin was the third wife of John Martin, and they lived at 21, Tingle Bridge. Harry’s aunt, Doris, a granddaughter of Ann Martin, went to live with her grandmother. Doris recounted that when she was a girl there were steps leading up to the back door which she had to wash and then coat and polish them with sour milk to give them a sheen! The steps led to a large communal courtyard utilised by other members of the family living in other houses. Beyond it was a garden where Mr Martin grew rhubarb. Doris also described the window at the front of the house was not like a normal house window, but more like a shop window.
In the yard behind nos. 21 and 23 was a further stone cottage, no.19, together with a stable for two horses and coach house with upper chamber, together with 5 pigsties, and a detached washhouse and storeroom built of brick with slate rooves.
All change at Tingle Bridge
When Hemingfield Colliery ceased mining operations in May 1920, workers moved on, either to Elsecar Main or to other pits nearby. The Elsecar Branch of the Dearne and Dove Canal closed in part at the same time with only the Cortonwood end in active use until around 1928. The loss of waterside custom had already been evident for some time, with the beer houses closing, but with the abandonment of the canal, the focus of life at Tingle Bridge, switched to gentle decline. So much so that in the Twentieth Century Wombwell Urban District Council undertook programmes of slum clearances which once again changed the face of Tingle Bridge.
Two aerial photographs, one from 1948 and another from 1962 tell some of this story and bring us up to more or less the present time. Post-war demand for housing in the emerging welfare state would lead to significant house-building programmes.
Firstly in the 1948 image, we can see on the right hand side of the photograph Tingle Bridge Lane with apparently no housing on the right hand side down the hill. At the bottom of the lane we can also glimpse the growing spoil heap of Elsecar Main Colliery – consisting mainly of tailings from the coal washery.
Compare this with the 1962 image, albeit from a different angle (90 degrees anti-clockwise), now Tingle Bridge Lane is top-centre, and the house building progress on both sides of the lane is clear. At the bottom, little remains from the original canal-side buildings. What does the future hold?