Event - Trading Histories: 700 years at Sheffield Castle Market

Come and find out about a new HLF-funded project which will be investigating the life and history of Sheffield Castle Market and its trading community. They will provide details of the project and let you know how to get involved in activities throughout the year. Bring your ideas for research themes which they can incorporate into our project. All welcome!

The project team includes:
Ian Beesley, photographer
Ian McMillan, celebrated poet
Kid Acne & Anne Mawdsley, Sheffield artists
Sheffield Archives & Local Studies Library
Sheffield City Council
University of Sheffield, English Department

Sat 3rd November 2012, 10am-12noon
Discovery Centre, Sheffield Manor Lodge, S2 1UL

To book a place please contact:
Grace Tebbutt, Community History Project Officer,
Green Estate, Manor Oaks Farm, 389 Manor Lane, Sheffield, S2 1UL
e: G.Tebbutt@greenestate.org t: 07713308122

Via SCHF

Book - Dead but not forgotten... time to revive poet’s reputation (Austerfield/Stanley Cook)

Stanley Cook wrote incomparable poems about Yorkshire people and places yet he has largely been forgotten. Ian McMillan remembers him.

How’s this for a poetic description of one of the kids in your class at school: “Unhealthily pale as if he were grown indoors/or underneath a brick that excluded the sun” ?

Or this, for a likeness of one of your old teachers: “His fading youth was underlined by wrinkles/and floodlit by the sporty shirts he wore”? Yes, we’ve sat with lads like that in assembly and been taught by the bloke who “maintained his ideals in a mild-mannered way/that only invited opposition”.

Those exact and lyrical descriptions are from poems by Stanley Cook, one of Yorkshire’s unsung writers who died 20 years ago this year and whose reputation is well-worth reviving in preparation for the 90th anniversary of his birth next year.

Cook was born in Austerfield in the flatlands near Doncaster in 1922, and lived a quiet and unremarkable life, going to Doncaster Grammar School then to Oxford and a career teaching in secondary schools and lecturing at what was then Huddersfield Polytechnic.

However, he produced a remarkable body of work that should give him a place in the Yorkshire Poetic Hall of Fame somewhere between Ted Hughes and Simon Armitage, between the nature poet and the sharp observer of human frailty and majesty.

Many years ago, I went to interview Stanley Cook at his house for a now-defunct literary magazine. I was nervous at meeting the great man, a poet whose work I admired and who had sent kind and thoughtful rejection slips or elegant acceptances when I submitted examples of my own verse to him in his role as editor of Poetry Nottingham magazine.

I knocked on his door in Sheffield and he answered straight away, as though he’d been waiting for me. I was sweating and flustered, having got off the bus a couple of stops too early and marched briskly to his house.

He took my coat and held it up. “I’ll put in the wardrobe,” he said, and he put it in one that just happened to be at the bottom of the stairs. Then he locked the wardrobe door and put the key in his pocket. “You’re not in Barnsley now,” he said with a twinkle in his eye.

He began to publish in the early 1970s and the poems about the pupil and the teacher I quoted above are from his two excellent pamphlets Form Photograph and Staff Photograph, snapshots of the children he taught and the colleagues he worked alongside. Although they’re sharp and incisive, these poems are never mealy-mouthed or cynical; there’s humanity here, and a kind of love.

Here’s the naughty boy, portrayed with depth and sympathy: “Officially bad, he looks long-suffering and pale/from staying up too late to watch his anti-heroes/ on the telly, skipping breakfast next day/to get to school.” And here’s the teacher who can’t control the class despite (or because of) his wife being an ex-stripper: “He sometimes yelled for quiet/ but couldn’t do a thing about discipline;/ a few more serious boys drew up to his desk/for snatches of education underheard/below the general din.”

Those poems are typical of the observation he was so good at; Yorkshire in general and South Yorkshire in particular captured his imagination and he was determined throughout his writing life to try and capture the essence of the landscape and the people.

There’s George the Barber, “Plump, with a fat man’s manual dexterity” and an unforgettable image of Worsborough Dale near Barnsley in winter “cold fixes birds like toys to the boughs”; Crow Edge is illuminated as “…the village that bumps its head/against bad weather high up on the moors” and Grandpa Spencer “a little man with a trowel-shaped face tipped with a silver beard”.

His long poem Woods Beyond a Cornfield, published in 1979, is a masterpiece, I reckon; it’s an examination of a terrible murder in a pastoral setting and a tour-de-force of nature writing that combines description and imagery with a knowledge of history: “Oh for the learned crofters of a century ago/reciting Homer at the plough to the birds who followed!”

Stanley Cook also wrote poems for children but for me Cook’s lasting legacy should be his portrayal of Yorkshire landscape and people and the spaces and connections between the two.

It’s odd that writers can all too often just slip out of the public view once they die; let’s hope that, as anniversaries of Stanley Cook’s birth and death appear on the calendar, he can be remembered.

Stanley Cook’s Collected Poems Woods Beyond a Cornfield is published by Smith/Doorstop, Sheffield.

From: http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/lifestyle/the-arts/dead_but_not_forgotten_time_to_revive_poet_s_reputation_1_3833884

Event - Day of disaster when the earth stood still (Houghton Main)

A mining disaster that took place 125 years ago is still bringing the people of Darfield together. Star reporter Rachael Clegg looks ahead to this week’s unveiling of the restored Houghton Main Disaster monument.




IN THE South Yorkshire village of Darfield near Barnsley, the date December 30 has a chilling resonance. It was on this day in 1886 that the small mining community was struck by tragedy.

Here, on a cold winter’s night at around 7.50pm, 10 miners were killed when a cage lift bringing them up at Houghton Main colliery overwound, plummeted several hundred yards at a speed of more than 200mph and the men in it were crushed to death.

The 10 workers belonged to just three families.

Known as the ‘Ten Men’ disaster, the catastrophic event was immediately immortalised with a huge granite memorial in Darfield Churchyard a year later. Today, more than a century on, Darfield residents still remember the terror and bravery of those 10 men.

And local residents and The Friends of Darfield Churchyard have now raised more than £4,000 to restore the memorial and re-set the lettering which lists the names of the men whose lives were lost.

The group, with supporters including Darfield resident and national poet Ian McMillan, Darfield-bred author Martyn Johnson, Black Diamonds author Catherine Bailey and mining historian and writer Brian Elliot, will unveil the restored memorial this Sunday.

It’s more than just a ceremony. Sunday’s unveiling marks a historical event which is central to Darfield’s heritage as a mining village, as Martyn Johnson, 69, who lives in Wentworth, explained.

“Ninety per cent of people in the area were employed by the Coal Board and people are very much still moved by the story,” he said. “It’s part of our psyche in Darfield - there were no other jobs for the men in the village apart from the pit.

“My father worked at Houghton Main and I feel proud - as so many other people do - that he worked so hard so that I wouldn’t have to work down there. It’s that pride factor that made us all want to raise money to restore the monument. We’re carrying on the history.”

As with so many other South Yorkshire villages, such as Dinnington and Edlington, Darfield’s entire community was centred around the pit.

“It was fantastic being brought up in a mining community – I had hundreds of mums and dads,” says Martyn. “If ever I wanted a glass of water I could knock on any number of doors. Children really respected the adults because everybody knew who everybody was. When the mine properly shut down it was a huge loss to the community.”

But the warmth of mining communities such as Darfield’s was - in part - borne out of necessity. Fathers, sons, brothers and husbands were working in extremely dangerous conditions. Mining disasters were not uncommon, so the community above ground pulled together and supported one another.

Mining historian Brian Elliot, now in his mid-60s, said: “My dad worked at Wharncliffe Woodmoor pit, where there was a huge disaster, killing 58 men in 1936.

“My dad wasn’t working that shift but I can still remember how anxious my mother was when she was giving my dad a kiss and his lunchbox before he went to work.

“Even as a child I picked up on her anxiety but then the disaster at that pit happened only 20 years earlier. I think that feeling of anxiety was pretty typical - all miners had some kind of experience at the pit and it was because of the danger of the occupation of a miner that people really supported each other.

“In the pit there was a sort of battlefield camaraderie. Men, even if they didn’t really like each other as people, looked out for each other and tried to save each other. That’s why when the pits closed in the 1980s and ’90s it was such a blow to the communities. Those supportive relationships gradually eroded.”

The details of what caused the Houghton Main disaster are not known, but we do know it was caused by the cage being overwound and thus dropping to the bottom of the shaft.

“It was a strange situation,” said Brian. “The disaster happened at about 7.50pm, which was the afternoon shift for the miners. There were 10 men in the cage, which was being drawn up to the top.

“It was a three-deck cage operated by a very trustworthy man called Alan Beresford. He was about 150 yards from the top when he heard a loud noise from above. He was hit on the head by some wood and the cage failed to hold, it overwound and hurtled down about 500 yards at a speed of 200mph.

“It took 10 to 12 seconds to reach the bottom and when it did the men were killed instantly. The bottom smashed through an oak beam and the wood and iron structure of the cage was described as looking like ‘matchwood’. The men didn’t stand a chance. The 12 seconds it took to get to the bottom must have been absolutely terrifying.”

The Houghton Main disaster may have happened in 1886, but the support for the restoration project has been staggering.

“The money has been raised from people like my mother with 20p pieces, to locals coming into the churchyard and making donations after seeing what we’re trying to do,” he said. “We’ve also had donations from people as far afield as Canada and North America, whose ancestors probably worked at the pit.”

The monument will be restored with Yorkshire stone, which was used on the original monument, and the edifice will be in granite.

This Sunday’s ceremony will take place at Darfield Churchyard at 11am and wll include a service at All Saints Church, Darfield. There will be readings and talks from Friends of Darfield Churchyard chairman John Kendall, Ian McMillan, Martyn Johnson, Brian Elliot, Catherine Bailey and a performance by the Houghton Main Voice Choir. The director of The National Coal Mining Museum, Dr Margaret Faull, will also attend.

Colliery history
Houghton Main pit was sunk between 1871 and 1873.

It was commissioned by the Houghton Main Colliery Company, who wanted to create a mine that could extract coal from the ‘Barnsley Main’ seam - an abundant supply of coal that was efficient and economical to mine. It is for this reason the pit takes the name ‘Houghton Main’.

The mine was between Houghton and Darfield, which is why so many Darfield residents worked there.

Despite the catastrophe of 1886 Houghton Main suffered far fewer fatalities than other pits, with a record of ‘only’ five to seven deaths a year.

The Houghton Main pit also had a coking plant, where coal was processed to create chemicals.

It wasn’t until 1931 that Houghton Main built baths for the workers. Until then workers had to wash at home, though few - if any - had their own tubs.

The pit closed in 1992.

From: http://www.thestar.co.uk/lifestyle/features/day_of_disaster_when_the_earth_stood_still_1_3499890