Article - Headline act Alan has the final word...

IT’S A career that spans eight decades.

From the flutter of pigeons carrying football results in the 1940s to the tweet and Twitter of the digital age.

Through the smoky newsrooms of wartime Doncaster, pit disasters, air crashes, assassinations, strikes, coronations, moon landings, revolutions and a lot of Parish Council hot air.

Alan Berry MBE has seen it all in his time as reporter, sub-editor, stand-in racing desk man and feature writer in Sheffield and Doncaster.

But now it’s over.

At the age of 82 Alan’s calling it a day. His next Bygones column in the Doncaster Star will be his last.

“It’s difficult for me to physically write a column these days,” said Alan at the home he had built in scenic Harwell overlooking Everton on the Nottinghamshire/ South Yorkshire border 40 years ago.

“I can’t use the keyboard as slickly as I could. Computers aren’t really made for old men.”

But Alan is to continue to write the sermons he delivers as a Reader at one or more of the United Benefice of churches in the villages of Everton, Clayworth, Gringley and Mattersey.

If those Sunday addresses are as lyrical and evocative as his Doncaster Star columns have been for the past 15 years those tiny parishes are as well-served as they have been since the Pilgrim Fathers themselves walked through these fields to evensong 300 years ago.

“I’m slowing down to two services a month now, though I have done three in a day in the past, it can be quite onerous and I’m not up to that any more.”

Alan is also the author of two local history books and an expert on the area - the ancient village of Everton is mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1085.

He met his music teacher wife Verna in Doncaster and they married in 1953. They have two sons Andrew and Stephen. Verna is from Reading originally and moving to Doncaster in the 1950s was quite a shock.

“I used to go to meetings with him sometimes when he was a reporter,” she said. “Coming from the south it seemed very industrial and grim up here back then. We lived in Wheatley then and there was the constant smell from the glue factory and the dirt on windows and windowsills. All I knew about the north was from geography at school and it was all mills and pits. It was a different life up here but I got used to it.”

There have been many poignant moments in Alan Berry’s 65-year career and although the memory is fading now, he remembers one or two in particular.

“We covered all the big stories back then, newspapers were where everyone got information, not like today. We used to have Scunthorpe and Gainsborough editions of our paper and we would have the afternoon racing results in and hand stamp the end of play cricket scores on the back pages of the late papers we had left.

“When I first started at the Doncaster Chronicle in 1945 there were three weekly papers and two evenings in the town, all with their own staffs.

“I had no real desire to be a pioneering journalist, I just had a desire to know things about people and what’s going on in the world. I remember the Creswell pit disaster of 1950 where 80 men died, that was a huge story, a terrible accident, and we covered the Munich air disaster, general elections and major events but one sticks in my mind that was something and nothing really.

“We used to be very interested in the canal and I heard a story that some people were living in a sunken barge at Stainforth. So I went out to the canal basin there and there was this Sheffield-size, Humber-keel barge with one end sunk and the other up at an angle out of the water with a family living at the dry end!

“It had all been sunk but they’d raised part of it and were living in that half. Amazing.”

“Over 65 years there have been some great stories and good times, I’ve always loved the job whether as a reporter, feature writer or sub-editor. But you get to the point where you feel you have done your whack. When I look at the quality of news coverage we get now I think it’s awful. There are so few reporters now and so many stories are missed. They used to say that the Doncaster Chronicle office ran on fags, bad language and endless cups of tea. They were different days.

“I wouldn’t change a thing though. Journalism suited me, it’s been a great job. I have no regrets about my career or any other part of my life.”

WHEN history happens people’s lives don’t always go as they should.

It was the afternoon of February 6, 1958 and Alan Berry was in the Doncaster office of the Yorkshire Evening Post when news broke from Germany of a terrible tragedy.

Manchester United’s plane had crashed on the runway at Munich killing eight of the already legendary ‘Busby Babes’ football team including Doncaster boy David Pegg.

“He had gone to work as usual but he didn’t come home on time,” said Alan Berry’s wife Verna.

“We didn’t have a telephone then, not everyone did at the time and we couldn’t afford one.

“I was stuck in the house and didn’t know where he was, it was very worrying.”

But Alan was safe in his office working on a special Munich Air Crash edition of his newspaper.

“We were there late doing the special edition. I couldn’t phone home, it wasn’t like it is now where everyone has phones and mobiles and everything they have now.

“I just had to stay until the work was done.

“It was a terrible shock to everyone that plane crash. One of the players David Pegg was from Edlington as I remember but the crash was big news all over the world.”

Young Parky shouted the odds

IN A 65-year career in newspapers Alan Berry met his fair share of big characters.

None more so than a young reporter who turned up for work at the Doncaster office of the Yorkshire Evening Post one Monday morning. One Michael Parkinson.

“I was a sub-editor on the Chronicle when a young Michael Parkinson started work there,” said Alan at his home in the Nottinghamshire countryside. “We didn’t know much about him other than that he seemed to upset everybody and then disappear.

“He certainly livened the whole place up. He was a good reporter, that was the main thing about him. He came in and told some of the old boys how they should do the job and of course they didn’t like that. He was said to have had a row with the editor who was supposed to have thrown an diary at him - but I think it might have been the other way round. He was what every newspaper should have. He wanted to do things his way and he was proved to be right. He went on to be a captain in the army in Suez I think. His reputation went in front of him - or trailed behind him, I’m not sure which.”

 

From: http://www.thestar.co.uk/lifestyle/features/headline_act_alan_has_the_final_word_1_4040473

Article - Mystery motoring men (Finningley)

A sale notice in the Doncaster Chronicle of June 17, 1881, the Finningley Estate was described as “a most compact and important landed investment of Freehold tenure consisting of about 2, 418 acres.

“The land lies almost entirely in a ring fence, is fertile in its character, chiefly arable, with several closes of pasture, interspersed with thriving plantations affording excellent cover for game and recognised also as one of the best partridge manors in the district...The annual income amounts to about £2,277.”

On August 21, 1903 the Doncaster Gazette noted: “For sale by private contract (in consequence of the decease of George Spofforth Lister Esq JP the late owner) The Finningley Estate.”

Details were also given about the house: “The residence contains on the ground floor, entrance hallway, bay-windowed dining room, drawing room, with small recess leading into a small conservatory, morning room, billiard room, study, housekeper’s room, butler’s pantry, butler’s bedroom, servants’ hall, kitchen and scullery, store rooms, with dairy and boot house outside, etc. There are 20 bed and dressing rooms, stabling for 14 horses, coach houses and well appointed out-offices”.

Later the Estate was owned by the Parker Rhodes family until the death of John Parker Rhodes in 1943.

John Parker-Rhodes’ obituary in the Doncaster Chronicle of January 7, 1943 noted the following: “[He] died at Honeywick Hill,Castle Carey, Somerset last Friday. He was the only surviving son of the late Frederick Parker-Rhodes, at one time senior partner in the firm of Parker-Rhodes Cockburn and Co, solicitors of Rotherham, who lived for some years at Finningley Park. Mr Parker-Rhodes, who was educated at Uppingham and Penbroke College Cambridge, was a keen sportsman and a Fellow of the Royal Zoological Society.”

Two months later, the Finningley Park Estate, comprising over 1,505 acres, was sold for £45,000. Starting at £15,000 and rising in bids of £1,000 and later £500, the Estate was sold by auction as one lot, at the Woolpack Hotel, Doncaster to W Elmhirst of Rotherham for £45,000. The latter bought for a client. The 1,505 acres included three farms, Finningley Park Hall and other lots. Six hundred acres of the estate, sold in the previous July, had made £30,000.

Pevsner (1959) noted: “The Georgian house of three bays and two and a half storeys now overlooks a desert of sand and gravel digging.”

Finningley Hall was later demolished.

Hamilton Lodge, a villa-type residence set back from Carr House Road, was built by a Captain Robson c 1856, to the designs of BS Brundell and Tom Penrice, who were brothers-in-law. Later, Brundell was involved with the designs for the recently demolished General Infirmary & Dispensary/Education Offices in Princegate.

Perhaps the lodge’s most noted occupant was AO Edwards and it is tempting to suggest that he is one of the men pictured in the car outside the house in the photograph here. If any reader can confirm or deny this, I would love to hear from them.

AO Edwards developed the Wheatley Estate in the 1920s and later went to America where he was engaged upon the creation of a 220-acre estate at Palm Beach Shores, with the luxury Inlet Court Hotel as the centrepiece.

Hamilton Lodge was purchased by the Corporation in 1924 from AO Edwards, as noted in the Gazette of May 9, 1924: “The Doncaster Town Council on Wednesday confirmed minutes relating to the purchase of Hamilton Lodge near Race Common for use by the Public Health Department as a maternity home. These stated that Mr AO Edwards had accepted £4,500 for the house and grounds subject to the minerals of a lower depth than 700 yards being reserved. The Council agreed that a contract be entered into with Mr Edwards for the purchase of the premises on these terms.”

HR Wormald recorded: “[Hamilton Lodge was] developed by the corporation as a maternity home at a cost between 1925 and 1928 of £6,805, also taken over by the National Health Service, has become redundant to the service by the opening of the new maternity wing, in 1971, at the Royal Infirmary and is now used as a club for hospital service employees in all the Doncaster hospitals.”

Many Doncastrians, including myself, were born in Hamilton Lodge and the interior view here will bring fond memories for many readers.

Rossington Bridge House continued to be used as an inn until 1850 when the licence was not renewed.

Tom Bradley in The Old Coaching Days in Yorkshire (1889) gives some details about the house during the coaching era: “A few of the coaches were horsed from the Rossington Bridge Inn, and the stages they worked were from Rossington Bridge to Barnby Moor on the one hand and Red House on the other.”

From 1850, the property has remained primarily a private house. One of its noted tenants during the 20th century was PH Beales, consultant ear, nose and throat surgeon at Doncaster Infirmary. Just before the Second World War, brewers Whitworth, Son & Nephew proposed to return the site to a pub. On May 11, 1939 the Doncaster Chronicle reported: “Farm buildings at Rossington Bridge, at the junction of Sheep Bridge Lane and the Great North Road, are to be demolished and in their place is to be erected a new hotel.”

The pub was never built but during the 1990s, Rossington Bridge House became the Hare and Tortoise pub.

From: http://www.thestar.co.uk/community/nostalgia/mystery_motoring_men_1_3796634

Article - How coal was discovered underground despite war, delays and disappointments (South Yorks)

The Doncaster Gazette of June 2, 1922, reported that after many disappointments – including delays due to high wages, labour troubles and coal trade depression – sinking operations resumed at Markham Main Colliery, Armthorpe.

But it was still expected to take about three years to reach coal.

Fourteen years had passed since the development of the coal reserves under Armthorpe, the Fitzwilliam Cantley estates and the Doncaster Corporation Race Common property was mooted.

It was not until the lease passed to Sir AB Markham, who had extensive colliery interests in the Doncaster district, that practical steps were contemplated.

A bore hole was sunk in 1913 and a second one in 1914, when good workable coal measures were proved.

Sinking operations were postponed because of World War I and were not restarted until the early part of 1920 – and then faced more delays and disappointments.

Sinking operations were started in Askern’s No.1 shaft on December 5, 1911.

A powerful pumping plant was installed to deal with the tremendous influx of water – which sometimes reached 4,000 gallons per minute. On Saturday morning, September 14, 1912, the Barnsley seam was reached at Askern at a depth of 565 yards and the coal was found to be of excellent quality.

This made the fourth occasion on which the Barnsley seam had been tapped in the Doncaster district in little over two years – after Maltby in June 1910, Edlington in July 1911 and Bullcroft in December 1911.

The Doncaster Chronicle of September 6, 1912 mentioned that the whole of the work in the colliery shafts had been done in the most efficient manner (day work) under the superintendence of Sam Howard.

“He has employed the best men in the country he could lay his hands on... the surface work was carried out by Messrs Charles Baker and Sons of Chestefield...the pit is equipped with the latest and very best machinery.’

During 1910-1911 a reinforced concrete ‘heap stead’ was erected at Bentley Colliery over the No1 shaft due to the bad foundations upon which the pit was built.

The construction was about 45ft high up to the level to which the tubs would be raised and there was another 14ft of concrete above. Around 150 tons of steel bars were used.

The countryside was stirred on Saturday afternoon December 9, 1911 by the sound of half a dozen buzzers announcing that coal had at last been reached at the Bullcroft Colliery sinkings at a depth of 657 yards.

The Bullcroft enterprise was one of the Markham group of new collieries encircling Doncaster.

The coal was beneath the estates of Major Anne, Mr Cooke-Yarborough, and other local landowners. Sinking operations began in May, 1908, and water was soon encountered.

At a depth of 70 yards the rush of water was so great the work had to be stopped.

The strongest pumps seemed useless, so the freezing process worked by the Germans was given a trial.

The waterlogged ground was frozen to a great depth by means of chemicals and sinking then proceeded.

As soon as sinking had passed the danger zone the shaft was encircled by an iron casing, then the ground was thawed and the water held back by the casing.

This work took over a year, and it was not until November 1910 that the shafts were pumped dry and further sinking could be resumed.

At first progress was slow owing to the hardness of the frozen ground, but by March 1911, the workers had sunk beyond its range, and from that time everything had gone like clockwork.

The coal reached on that Saturday in December 1911 was the Barnsley Seam, and it was nine feet thick.

From: http://www.thestar.co.uk/community/nostalgia/how_coal_was_discovered_underground_despite_war_delays_and_disappointments_1_3552433