News - Robin Hood pub slips into history after 200 years (Stannington)

GLASSES were raised for the last time as a Sheffield pub closed its doors for good after more than 200 years.

The Robin Hood Inn, tucked away in countryside at Little Matlock in Stannington, was packed last Sunday with regulars and others witnessing the end of a piece of local history.

“There was a stream of people during the day we had not seen before, taking pictures and saying we want to take one last look,” said Bridget Appleyard, whose family bought the pub eight years ago.

“Quite a few of the locals brought food down and we had a barbecue. It was like an old-fashioned get-together. It was lovely.”

Sunday night “was all about being the hub of the community. Some of the children were crying. They had been there since they were toddlers. It was the place they had gone with dad when he took the dog for a walk!

“When it got to about midnight, everything stopped and one of the locals read a speech and another had written an ode to the Robin Hood.

“People said were really upset the place was closing but they understood. In all fairness, they said they had been given an eight-year reprieve and they wished us all the best.”

The Appleyards bought the Robin Hood to save it from closure and established its reputation as a place for good food, real ale, community activities and attractive accommodation.

But after the whole family “put their heart and soul” into trying to keep the pub going, they say they can no longer continue pouring their money into the business.

One of the main obstacles was the relatively remote location in the Loxley Valley.

With the pub having been on the market for a year, and no takers, a planning application has been made to the council to convert the grade II-listed building at the end of Greaves Lane, off Wood Lane, into three apartments with the intention that the family move into all of them.

They say they are not motivated by property development but the pub has proved to be financially unviable.

The pub was built in 1804, with trees and shrubs planted in the area to replicate Matlock in Derbyshire.

Half of the building was originally cottages, whilst the other half overlooking woodland was called the Rock Inn, which survived the 1864 flood.

The name was later changed to reflect the Loxley connection.

Bridget’s daughter Keeley was licensee and husband Scott, son Elliot and Bridget’s mum, dad, mother-in-law and uncle and friends have all pitched in.

Scott flew back from working as a project manager in a paper mill in Brazil – a job taken to help meet the pub’s overheads – for the last weekend.

“It’s your social life as well as a business,” said Bridget. “We have made a lot of friends, and it’s the end of an era.”

The family are still waiting to hear from the council about the planning application. “We are no further forward. We don’t know where we are,” said Bridget.

The council says it is still assessing the application and the implications for the listed building.

From: http://www.sheffieldtelegraph.co.uk/news/business/local-business/robin_hood_pub_slips_into_history_after_200_years_1_3733662

Book - Life and death choices in the Great Flood (Sheffield Flood)

FOR Joseph Dawson, the Bradfield village tailor, the choice was stark but simple.

As flood waters tore around him he tried carrying both his ill wife and their two-day-old baby to safety.

Battered by the rising current, he had not the strength to keep hold of both.

“I was obliged,” he later recounted, “to leave the child to its fate, or I could not have saved my wife.”

Thus, the still-unnamed baby – whose body was found days later in a coal cellar – became the first of some 240 Sheffielders killed in the city’s largest Victorian tragedy: the Great Flood of March 11, 1864.

The statistics from that stormy Friday night are still astounding.

An estimated 650 million gallons of water – travelling at 18 mph and in some places more than 24 foot high – destroyed or damaged 800 homes, 100 factories and 15 bridges.

It surged down the valley from the newly-built Dale Dyke Reservoir, where a collapsed dam released the torrent, through Hillsborough, into the city centre and on to Attercliffe. One body was found as far away as Mexborough. A witness, Samuel Harrison, declared “a bombardment with the newest and most powerful artillery could hardly have proved so destructive”.

It is against this catastrophic backdrop that a new novel by city writers Maggie Lett and Geoff Rowe is set.

Flood Waters, published by ACM Retro, is a multi-layered love story which tells the tale of a community torn apart by the devastation.

It is a work of fiction but many real people appear, including John Gunson, the reservoir’s engineer who many blamed for the disaster.

“When I first arrived in the city in the 1970s, I stumbled on some plates commemorating the flood in Weston Park Museum, and I’ve been fascinated ever since,” says higher education tutor Maggie, of London Road.

“This was such a huge disaster yet the more I spoke to people about it, the more I realised very few people had any idea about it. There isn’t even a monument.

“I researched it for years – vaguely thinking I might publish a leaflet – but when I found myself unemployed in 2005 I sat down with Geoff and we thought a novel was the best way of telling the story.”

Certainly, there was no lack of harrowing drama during the incident.

Among the victims, entire families were wiped out, including the Armitages, a family of 11 who ran the Stag pub in Malin Bridge, and the Tricketts, a farming family of 10 from Loxley.

Dozens of children were drowned in their beds, including the two sons of the paymaster sergeant at Sheffield Barracks, and 17-year-old Jonathan Turner, in Nursery Lane, city centre, who awoke to find himself trapped in his ground floor bedroom as water poured in through the window.

And yet, if the victims were many and tragic, there were also great tales of heroism and bravery from the flood.

At Damflask, a woman known only as Mrs Kirk refused to leave her home until she found her cat and dog, eventually carrying both pets to safety only seconds before the water washed her house away.

William Watson, meanwhile, had been washed from his bed at Malin Bridge and said later he feared certain death only to be literally plucked from the torrent by a stranger hanging from a first floor window.

"The records of the flood are so complete and so vivid, it made describing the scenes difficult because they are so harrowing,” says one-time Sheffield Telegraph reporter Maggie.

“But I do think this is something to be commemorated more in Sheffield.

“Of course I hope our book is popular but I also hope it can help the city sit up and take notice of its past.”

From http://www.thestar.co.uk/community/the-diary/life_and_death_choices_in_the_great_flood_1_3522729

Article - Debauchery, workhouses, child labour, gin palaces – welcome to 19th century Sheffield . . .

In the mid-19th century there were 110,000 people living in Sheffield


Squalor, child labour and debauchery – that’s the Sheffield history revealed by one family tree, as Star reporter Rachael Clegg discovers

WHEN Suzanne Bingham started looking into her family history, she had no idea what was in store.

For years Suzanne worked in Sheffield Central Library’s Local Studies department, helping other people research their ancestors. Until recently, she had never explored her own family history.

But her research revealed more than genealogy.

Through the lens of the Bingham family’s history, focusing on her great-great-grandfather, James Bingham, Suzanne discovered not only how he lived, but how the majority of working class Sheffielders lived in mid 19th century.

Her findings could rip the rose-tinted spectacles from the face of anyone delving into the past.

James Bingham was born in 1847 in one of Sheffield’s workhouses – complexes designed for housing the poor.

Workhouses could accommodate thousands of paupers and their children. Women did domestic chores such as laundry and cooking while men worked long days doing heavy labour – jobs such as bone-crushing for fertiliser or stone-breaking.

Suzanne doesn’t know the precise circumstances that led to her great-great-great-grandmother giving birth in the workhouse, but she speculates there could have been a variety of reasons for her being there.

“The whole family could have been in hospital or she could have been kicked out of service in her ninth month of pregnancy,” said Suzanne. “Or she could have been sent there as punishment. Unfortunately, like a lot of things with genealogy, we’ll never know.”

By 1851 the young James Bingham had made it out of the workhouse to live with his grandfather, Samuel Bingham, on Ropery Row.

His grandfather shared a house with young women, all of whom worked as white metal rubbers.

By 13 years old James had moved in with his employer, working as an apprentice pearl and ivory fluter. “He lived with his employer and worked for food and lodgings – he didn’t get a wage,” said Suzanne.

“That was common in those days – many young lads lived with their employers and would work in their employer’s backyard or workshop.

“My great-great-grandfather shared a house not only with his employer, but with the employer’s wife and their four children. And these weren’t big houses – they were bigger than back-to-backs but they were modest terraces. It must have been cramped.”

James’s apprenticeship lasted seven years. By the time he was 20 he was a fully-trained ivory and pearl fluter.

By today’s standards, it seems criminal a 13-year-old should endure a full-time, physically exhausting job, but by mid-19th century standards, James was relatively old when he started his apprentice. Children as young as five worked in the cutlery trade, working 60-hour weeks in terrible conditions. The average life expectancy of an adult in Sheffield was just 27.

But there was relief: debauchery and drinking. In 1844 the social scientist Friedrich Engels reported that “immorality among young people is more prevalent in Sheffield than anywhere else”.

“The younger generation spend the whole of Sunday lying in the street tossing coins or fighting dogs, go regularly to the gin palace where they sit with their sweetheart until late at night, then take walks in solitary couples.”

Thousands of people lived like James, in cramped conditions. There was no sanitary infrastructure – all waste was dumped in the street and flowed through an open sewer.

This was less of a problem for Sheffield’s wealthier classes who, according to Suzanne, generally lived at the top of a hill. But, for the poor dwelling in squalid tenements at the bottom of the hill, disease was rife as sewage and waste surrounded them.

“You can’t imagine what it was like. It would have been like a different planet – absolutely filthy,” said Suzanne.

Contrary to our perception of the Steel City with its huge steelworks and colossal industrial complexes, much of the work done in the mid-19th century was piece work, completed on a small scale, self-employed basis.

“Sheffield wasn’t like Manchester in that we didn’t have the huge ‘satanic’ mills at this stage,” said Suzanne. “Instead people were completing their work at home, in their backyards or little mesters’ workshops, with a steam engine powering the machinery.

“Many of the workmen would collect their commissions on a Saturday, have Sunday, Monday and Tuesday off, work half a day on Wednesday and then put the hours in before they returned the work on Saturday, often working all the way through on a Friday night.”

This gritty but fascinating history is the result of Suzanne’s research into her family history, looking at census records, death and birth certificates.

“You’d find all this out looking at any family tree and now there is more and more information online,” she said.


“You’d never be able to find this sort of detail out so easily 15 years ago but now it’s all at the touch of a button. And more and more people are becoming fascinated by their own history these days.”

But the capacity of the internet has its limits. “It would be wonderful to go back in time, wouldn’t it?” says Suzanne.

“But looking at the state in which most Sheffielders lived back then, you wouldn’t want to stick around.”

Suzanne Bingham has just launched a website – https://sites.google.com/site/researchyourfamilytreecouk/home – to help people discover their family history.



rise of the little mesters
In the mid-19th century there were 110,000 people living in Sheffield

Most men and women were employed in the cutlery industry, working on a piecemeal basis in little mesters’ workshops or somethimes in their backyards.

Suzanne’s great-great-grandfather worked as a pearl and ivory fluter. We know there were at least 2,000 men working this particular trade, as after the Great Sheffield Flood of 1864 as many as 2,912 ivory and pearl fluters made small claims for damaged property as a result of the flood.


Many paupers lived in Sheffield’s workhouses. Northern General Hospital was originally built as Fir Vale workhouse, and provided schooling, food and accommodation for hundreds of Sheffield’s poor.

From http://www.thestar.co.uk/news/debauchery_workhouses_child_labour_gin_palaces_welcome_to_19th_century_sheffield_1_3516585