From Christine Bate’s document titled Rotherham.doc

ROTHERHAM

The nearest town to Brinsworth is Rotherham, about 2 1/2 miles from Whitehill,. Rotherham is a very old town, in fact it has more of a history than Sheffield, the big city of South Yorkshire. The name has Norse origins and means “the town on the river Rother”. As so often happened, the town came into being because it was at the confluence of two rivers, the Rother and the Don. Doncaster, meaning the castle on the Don, is a nearby town. 

When Father was able to rent a council house on Whitehill and so he and Mother married, the only public transportation to Rotherham was by tramcar from Canklow. This meant walking to Canklow, a distance of a little over a mile and waiting at the terminus. Mother talked about them having to make a decision whether to buy a pair of kippers and walk all the way home or spend the money on the tram fare. I can’t remember whether the fare was one penny or tuppence. Oddly, during WWII we generally had to walk to Canklow to board the bus into Rotherham on Saturday mornings when we went shopping for the weekend because all the buses that came over Whitehill from Catcliffe and Treeton were already full, with no standing room. 

Rotherham was centred on the Parish Church with streets radiating from All Saints Square, in front of the church. These old streets were still named for the town gates although the gates themselves were long gone. Doncaster Gate led towards Doncaster, then there was Wellgate, Westgate, Moorgate and Bridge Gate.  

I’ve just been watching the last part of the DVD of The Lord of the Rings and as I prepared to draw my evening activities to a close, I began to think of going to the pictures or the cinema as a child. Baby sitting or child minding had not been invented then and so where Mother went, Sheila and I went too. We had no extended family in Yorkshire. I don’t know whether I was born overly sensitive to the experience of being trapped in a cinema to watch a film or whether my early experiences caused my extreme dislike of being exposed to such visual and auditory “entertainment”.  In general I have not enjoyd going to the “pictures”. For many years I have coped with my problem by choosing not to go to see movies that I would find intolerable. A second method is to make sure I have read the story before I see the film, as I did with The Lord of the Rings.

Mostly, we were taken to the pictures when a supposedly appropriate feature was being shown. This led to seeing Shirley Temple pictures that generally had some terrible event happen early in the story so that in the end everything could turn out well. I hated them. Especially the day we went to see “Heidi”. Near the beginning, where Heidi goes to stay with her uncle in his cabin in the mountains, he was shown sharpening a large knife as she entered. That finished it for me. I think I hid my eyes for most of the rest of the time except when I was asking Mother, “Is it nearly over?”  The worst experience of all was when Mother really wanted to see “Lost Horizons”. It began with a plane crash in the mountains and that finished that movie for me too. 

However, all was not bad about going to the pictures, as we calld it. I enjoyed going to Rotherham on the bus, often late in the afternoon, and standing out on the street in front of the cinma in the queue that moved forwards as seats opened up.  There were always two pictures so you hoped that you would get in part of the way through the one you weren’t interested in seeing, although you always stayed until you had seen it round then left, remarking “This is where we came in”. We always sat in the front section in the cheap seats. There were two cinemas in Rotherham, the Regal down Westgate and the Empire half way up High Street. My favourite was the Regal that had been built as a cinema, was all 1930’s modern, with curved frontage, a gold fish pond in the foyer and a cinema organ. The organ was magnificent. As a picture ended the organ rose up from underground, brilliantly illuminated by multiple tubes of changing colours, with Dando seated at the keyboard playing the first melody of his selection. I wanted it to go on forever and do without the movie. Dando was my hero, he swayed on the organ seat and put on quite a show. It was more impressive to me because I had no idea that he swayed so much on his seat because he was playing foot pedals. I thought it was showmanship. 

When we came out at the end, it was dark and often raining. We splashed along the streets to All Saints Square, avoiding the puddles and hoped that we hadn’t just missed a bus. Crowded wet bodies crammed onto the bus, but as people got off, there was more room and we ground up Whitehill, which was a steep hill, and hurried home for tea. We mostly walked across “The Middle” but sometimes went along the road, moving from one pool of gaslight to another. By the time the war started they had clocks in the gas lamps so that they were wound once a week and lit up each evening. Before that the gas lighter came each evening with a ladder on his shoulder and lit each lamp. I often peeked through the curtains and watched him from our cozy living room.   

When we went shopping in Rotherham, we walked to the bus stop and rode the first bus that came. It was many years after I had left home that a bus to Sheffield also came over Whitehill and picked up passengers at the same stop. The buses were very primitive in the 1930’s and were like the ones seen on “All Creatures Great and Small” – noisy engine, very boxy, hard seats and a sign at the front behind the driver’s compartment saying “Spitting Prohibited”.   The bus went down the steep hill that we called the Main Road and picked up more passengers at Ellis Street in Brinsworth proper, then down to Bawtry Road where the stop sign said “Halt at Major Road Ahead.” There was a right turn under the railway bridge immediately and the bridge was so low that once the Corporation began to use double decker buses, they had to ignore the line in the middle of the road and drive through at the centre. Then came the bridge over the river Rother, a brown sluggish flow of water, shallow because of the accumulation of silt from the various industrial activities. The industrial revolution had changed a clear sparkling river full of trout into this weedy depressing and smelly body of water. There was a story that someone once tried to commit suicide in the Rother and Catcliffe but when he jumped, he landed waist deep in the muddy water, belying the measuring board at the side of the bridge that indicated a depth of over six feet. 

I have noticed that a perfume called Evening in Paris is sold in the Vermont Country Store catalog. Woolworth’s in Rotherham sold it and it was a staple present for Mother when Sheila and I were choosing her Christmas present. Sometimes we bought Pond’s cold cream instead. The cosmetics were displayed on a horizontal counter like everything else in the store and the various odours that emanated from the display were part of the excitement of making our choice. We called it scent and we were living in an era when flower perfumes were very popular. Most of them were sickly sweet, especially the cheap ones that working class people could afford. I always disliked carnation scent, it smelled too sharp. Those days are long gone and whereas I wore Chanel Number 5, Cabochard and Caleche, perfumes or fragrances as they are now called, today they are sharp and aggressive and marketed by naming them for celebrities.