From the Barnsley Independent on 16 November 1918, p.3.
Tankersley's Roll of Honour
An interesting function took place at the Wharncliffe Silkstone Club and Reading Room on Saturday, when Lieut.-Col. H. S. Walker unveiled a Roll of Honour of the members of the Club who have joined His Majesty's Forces. The list contains 66 names, four of whom have made the supreme sacrifice, one military medalist, two prisoners of war, one torpedoed, and 25 wounded. The Roll, which is a magnificent example of artistic work, was executed by Mr. Honey. The proceedings were preceded by a concert, given by the Imperial Entertainers from Barnsley, also cornet soles by Mr. Honey, of Sheffield. Mr. K. Kidson, F.R.C.O., officiated at the piano. Mr. T. Golding, of Tankersley, made the arrangements.
The above cutting refers to a war memorial previously unknown to me. I have no idea whether it still exists tucked away somewhere but would be very interested to hear if anyone has ever seen it or heard about it. Tankersley church's own memorial was unveiled by the same Lieut-Col Walker in 1921 and lists the names of 31 'soldiers of Tankersley who had fallen' (Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 28 June 1921, p.) and was accompanied by a book 'containing on parchment the complete history of the 31 men'.
As part of my PhD studies into Barnsley's war memorials I am collecting any mentions of rolls of honour, memorials and memorial or remembrance services in the Barnsley borough area during and immediately after the First World War. I have suggested a cut off date for myself of 1935 as that includes Darfield's rather tardy cenotaph (it was unveiled in 1930) and by that time it was becoming obvious we were heading towards another war with Germany, so feelings about commemoration and remembrance were changing.
Most of the Barnsley Chronicle cuttings I have on file are from the work I did whilst a volunteer for the Barnsley War Memorials Project (BWMP) between 2013 and 2016, and then as an individual after that as I worked towards my MA. I did a lot of work in Barnsley Archives just going through the digital newspapers on the dedicated laptop a month at a time, looking at the Barnsley Chronicle from 1914 to 1935. Other newspaper cuttings have been collected from online sources.
Later the Archives and Barnsley Chronicle provided the BWMP with a digital copy of the Chronicle covering the war-time years, August 1914 to the end of 1918, so that more volunteers, working in their own homes, could compile an index to all the servicemen and women mentioned in the newspapers. The final index also includes the first three months of 1919 thanks to a volunteer working in the Archives itself. It was printed and put on the shelves in the Archives, and they also have a full digital copy of the spreadsheets compiled by the volunteers. If, in the process of this indexing, anyone spotted a reference to a memorial or roll of honour it was added to the BWMP's list. By the close of the project there were 806 memorials on the list, of which 686 related to the First World War.
The Barnsley Independent and South Yorkshire Times (formerly Mexborough and Swinton Times) are available in Barnsley Archives too, but only on microfilm, which cannot be searched electronically, so the BWMP did not do a full search of those newspapers during the course of the project.
In the last few months the British Newspaper Archive have uploaded issues of the Barnsley Independent and the Mexborough and Swinton Times to their website, and these are also available via Find My Past. At the time of writing the war-time plus years covered are:
Barnsley Independent 1916, 1918, 1919, 1921, 1926, 1928
Mexborough and Swinton Times 1899-1931 (then the name changes to the South Yorkshire Times)
The Barnsley Chronicle online only goes up to 1912 and has been stuck at that for quite a while now.
Barnsley is often mentioned in the Sheffield newspapers and their coverage online is better.
Sheffield Daily Telegraph 1912-1920, 1939
Sheffield Evening Telegraph 1912-1920, 1939
Sheffield Independent 1914-1923, 1926-1938
Sheffield Weekly Telegraph 1893-1920
I tally the cuttings in a large spreadsheet with colour coding to indicate the stages of the planning of war memorial projects. Each area of Barnsley has its own line and the months from August 1914 to December 1933 run across the top.
Each of the coloured squares has a note attached with the date of the mention and which newspaper it was in. This enables me to see some patterns of high activity in unveiling ceremonies for example.
Methodically searching the newspapers has uncovered a number of war memorials that no longer appear to exist, and gave the BWMP leads to seek out memorials that were not obvious. There were 23 'lost' memorials on the BWMP list when the project closed, and I have since found reference to at least two more in the Barnsley Independent newspaper. One of these is the Tankersley Roll of Honour in the cutting at the head of this post.
The Wharncliffe Silkstone Club and Reading Room was at Pilley, in the vicinity of the colliery itself, and contained a concert room, bars and snooker facilities. There are apparently some records, photographs and ephemera connected to the club in Barnsley Archives (A/3664/G) - which will give me an excuse to visit now they have reopened after the Covid-19 lockdown. A search of the Old Maps website suggests that the Reading Room was in existence in 1893 and was lost between 1957 and 1963 - there is no building in the same place on the 1963/65 map. The area is now the Wentworth Industrial Park.
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| 1905 map of Wharncliffe Silkstone (aka Pilley) Colliery showing the Reading Room (from Old Maps) |
Note how there is housing right next to the colliery buildings - the reading room was in the centre of a busy residential area, something I hadn't realised based on the description noted above which I took from the Tankersley Parish Council website's page on the colliery. The maps show evidence that the building was doubled in size after 1894 and before 1905, at which point, as you can see, it was a very large building.
I did find an article referring to the proposed redevelopment of the site of the club in an online article (Barnsley Chronicle 19 Feb 2016) but the building in the photograph looks like it is from the 1950s/60s not something from the turn of the 19th/20th century. I think, based on the maps, that when the colliery site was redeveloped a replacement club was built on Chapel Road in the village of Pilley and that's the one shown in the Chronicle in 2016. On Google maps the newer building is shown at the junction of Chapel Road and Worsborough View and you can see the name plaque reads Wharncliffe Silkstone Club and Reading Room.
I would be very happy to hear from anyone who knows anything about the whereabouts of the Roll of Honour from the Wharncliffe Silkstone Reading Room and Club, or who can confirm my suggestion that the club moved from the colliery yard to the other side of the village in the 1960s.