1907 - 1987
THE CHANGING FACE OF STAINTON

In 1907 the first shaft of Maltby Colliery was sunk. It was in fact in the parish of Stainton, although most of those who worked in this mine lived ultimately in Maltby.

The changes wrought by this event in Maltby were to transform it within a few years from a small agricultural community into a mining town with its own Urban District Council. Ironically, although the latter had all the expense of housing and caring for the miners, the increased rates arising from the coal mining activities were payable to the Doncaster Rural District Council. The injustice of the situation was soon recognised and the area of the colliery as designated as the "Stainton Urban" district and was joined to Maltby for local government purposes. For ecclesiastical purposes it remained part of Stainton Parish and, until nationalisation of the coal mines in 1948, the colliery owners were very helpful to the church in a number of ways.

It is clear from the parish registers that a few of the colliery workers were associated with the church in Stainton, in particular, those who lived in the row of cottages near to the colliery knows as Scotch Spring Villas - or more usually just as Scotch Springs. (One of these was the home of the Trueman family who produced the celebrated fast bowler, Fredrick Sewards Trueman, on February 6th, 1931).

Other colliery workers, however, lived in the village. There was a row of cottages running at a right angle from Stainton Lane and parallel to Raw Lane (Holme Hill) called New Cottages. These were not part of any particular farm and some were occupied by miners.

Both of the village blacksmiths, Messrs. Thomas and Barnes, were partly employed at the colliery, shoeing the ponies in addition to looking after the farm horses. Mr. Thomas used the small smithy attached to Manor Farm which was situated next to the pound or pinfold where the village hall now stands.

In spite of this connection with the new colliery and the gradual revival of quarrying at Holme Hall in the nineteen thirties and onwards, Stainton did not immediately lose its rural and essentially agricultural character. The roads in to the village were simple country lanes with mixed hedges separating them form the fields.

Each farmstead was a community in itself, because it required several men to do the work. Prior to the introduction of the self-baler between the wars, not only was all the traction carried out by horses, but all the binding of sheaves at harvest was done by hand. Ploughing was done one furrow at a time, and milking was by hand. Even after the end of the second world war, for a few years there was still some threshing until finally the combined harvester for cereals, and machinery for other crops, reduced the manpower required for running the farms.

By this time, horses had been replaced by tractors, ever increasing in size and pulling capacity, and from 1965 onwards there was a gradual abandonment of dairy farming as one farm after another changed over to meat production or even gave up their animals altogether. The last flock of sheep to graze in Stainton were those of Mr. Stanley King the butcher, in 1965.

The present public house, The Three Tuns, was built to serve the miners in the belief that Stainton would be the pit village. It replaced a small earlier inn built into the rock beneath. The first reference in the parish registers to a publican was in 1852 when the daughter of William Athey of that occupation was baptised. The only other reference is to Samuel Gorrill in 1930. This family lived in the village for a number of years and the name of one of them is included upon the war memorial in the church.

Between the wars and after the Second, Stainton had its own shop and post-office. Originally occupying Rose Cottage, it was owned by Mr. & Mrs. Wood and later by Mrs. Lawson. At about the beginning of the Second World War the post-office was taken over by Mr. & Mrs. Bert Smith and was situated at their Cottage in Holme Hall Lane, whilst Rose Cottage had become the residence of Mr. & Mrs. George Butterfield. Mrs. Butterfield was one of the daughters of Mr. & Mrs. Burden of Hall farm.

Until the coming of the motor car, the vicars of Stainton used to have a horse and trap as their means of transport and employed a groom. There were quite a few acres attached to the vicarage, and the glebe barn (where no doubt the fodder for the pony was stored) with its stable below is still standing, although partly converted to be used as garages.

It is impossible to say when Stainton School first came into existence but there was certainly a church school in 1905 under a Tickhill District Committee.

With the opening of the colliery in 1907 some sort of colliery school seems to have been opened by the vicar of the day, Rev. H. R. Owen. It was under the control of the local education authority and seems to have had a head teacher and two uncertificated teachers. These were young people who had served as pupil teachers for a period under the guidance of a head teacher and deemed to have been trained. Not having attended a formal training course at a college, they were referred to as uncertificated.

The association of the vicar with the school was a close one and he was responsible for the religious teaching. There was a custom on Shrove Tuesday for the school to have a half holiday and every child had a whip and top and went to the vicarage to receive an orange from the vicar. Even after the local authority took over the responsibility for education, the vicars continued to play their part and morning service at the school was regularly conducted by the vicar until the beginning of the Second World War.

Mains water supplies were not a feature for many years and within living memory every farm had its own separate supply. There was a village pump below Hall Farm, but Carr House, for example, had its own bore hole and it was only in the 19th century that a steam pump was introduced. Similarly, each farm had its own small quarry to supply stone for building, walling etc.

Holme Hall Quarry has survived as an independent venture whilst the smaller ones belonging to other farms have been filled in over the years, and top soil restored to them.

Today, it seems quite remarkable that for many years Stainton boasted not only a village church, but also two non-conformist chapels. One was situated in Stainton Lane just below the mouth of School Lane and facing Rock House, and the other was adjacent to the north-east wall of the vicarage in Holme Hall Lane.

At the time, and indeed until 1966, there was a row of cottages called Laburnum Cottages on the left in Holme Hall Lane just after the rear entrance of the vicarage (which is now The Orchard). The chapel was situated on the land behind these cottages, the last occupants of one of which were Mr. & Mrs. Leslie Cusworth. For many years, Mr. Cusworth was an ardent cricketer, in the days when Stainton had a presentable team, which played upon a field belonging to Hall Farm on the right side of Raw Lane as one leaves the centre of the village.

In addition to his cricketing activities, Mr. Cusworth was a Rural District Councillor and was very zealous in promoting the interests of the village in local government. It was said that for a time, when the two political parties were evenly matched, Mr. Cusworth as an independent had the fate of the district in his hands and was ardently wooed by both sides in their efforts to win his support on each issue as it arose.

Stainton did not finally lose its essentially agricultural way of life until about 1967 when two developments took place. In the first instance, a sloping rocky pasture in the centre of the village was sold for the building of new houses, after the death of the absentee tenant of Rock House, who had used the land for grazing sheep. The second important factor in bringing changes was the beginning of the rapid expansion of quarrying in the area in order to provide the aggregate for the construction of the two new motorways in the area - the M1 and M18.

To help this increased export of stone, the road from Stainton to Grange Lane (Stainton Lane) was straightened and widened to allow the use of much bigger lorries than formerly had been used. In addition, Holme Hall Quarries, owned by the Butler Family, bought as much of the available land as they could along the line of Stainton Lane, including all of that formerly farmed by Rock House and the relevant parts of Hall Farm, leasing it back temporarily to the farmers for agricultural purposes. At the same time, about a dozen new bungalows were erected on the former pasture and were gradually occupied by commuters from Sheffield, Rotherham and Doncaster. These joined the owners of the other new houses, which had been built sporadically during the preceding years, to form a substantial new population element who had very strong feelings about the impending destruction of the local countryside by quarrying.

It was quite understandable that the local government, in a predominantly agricultural area, should be in the hands of farmers and others whose livelihoods linked them more closely to the area than those of the commuters, many of whom felt that the investment in their new houses would be jeopardised by the quarry expansion. The new villagers therefore, finding themselves and their interests unrepresented in local government, formed a Residents' Association whose primary purpose was to lobby the authorities in order to oppose the rapid expansion of quarrying and to achieve political representation for the new element of the population on the Parish Council.

This new organisation was seen by some by some of the existing village community as a threat to them and some years of mild dissension followed, but the Residents' Association helped to bring together most of the new population and to ensure their participation in village affairs both political and social.

In 1975, the Parish Council pressed the new South Yorkshire County Council to ban heavy traffic in Lime Kiln Lane which had not been widened to take heavy traffic.

In 1978, it was clear that even more ambitious plans were being laid to extend quarrying on the pretext of creating a large hole near Maltby colliery into which mining waste could be deposited. Part of the inducement offered to the villagers in this project was the widening and diversion of Scotch Spring Lane. This was carried out in 1979-80, creating a traffic island at the junction with Stainton Lane. By this time, there had been a considerable change amongst the owners of the modern houses, old animosities had died down and the inevitable change from and essentially agricultural village to a dormitory suburb, albeit a small one, had taken place. In this respect, Stainton has not fared any worse than other comparable villages in South Yorkshire and indeed in England. One advantage of the quarrying, unforeseen earlier, has been to limit the size of the village so that it remains, in size at least, a village.