South Yorkshire Times June 4, 1949

Round Your Way – Swinton

The countryside in May is like a housewife expecting visitors. She has spring cleaned her green carpets, hung out new tapestries and frills, set out her flowers and blossom. May is the best time of all the year to meet new friends and faces.

It is a mile and a half from the Woodman Inn to the Don Hotel, and I should imagine one of the most pleasant stretches you will find between Rotherham and Doncaster. If you are only passing through you will suddenly realise that mile and a half is Swinton. A Swintonian told me it was a mile and a half of “pubs and railwaymen “: but Swinton is much more than that. It is a town of pleasant surprises which insist on being discovered.

That pleasant green approach from Rotherham to the Woodman Inn, taking in Swinton’s newest-beauty spot, Creighton Woods, will put you into a happy frame of mind for the rich greenness of scenery and blossom you will find as you the grey Church of slip down past  St. Margaret. This picture of Swinton in May is one of those memories to be recalled at the end of your journey.

I don’t know whether anyone has ever bothered to count up the Inns in Swinton. My young Swintonian told me there were 22 on that mile and a half, but only managed to remember thirteen. But to return to his first impression, he added that you could never walk through Swinton, from one end to the other, at any time of the day or night, without seeing a railwayman coming or going. That, of course, is not unusual: Swinton is bounded and cut by railway lines.

I talked to an older Swintonian who told me the railway station by that hump -backed canal bridge used to be on the other side of the road. In the olden days there were travelling fairs, and the artists would give their performance in the open ground before the Station Hotel. If you search in the cellars at the Station Hotel you will find little glass lanterns in which night lights would burn and which would be strung around for the performances.

There are surprises at the Station Hotel which roll back the years on Swinton; old clocks, old plate, stables, with standing for four horses, and old roasting jacks which are still part of the valuation.

I saw two old plates, one bearing a portrait in colour of John Wesley, the other a portrait of Adam Clarke, L.Ld., F.SA. a Wesleyan Minister, and two brown bottles, decorated by hand and bearing the inscription; “A present from F. Bennett to John Nesbitt, Station Hotel, Swinton, 1897.”

There is an old wall clock bearing the name of the maker, J. W. Cooper, Swinton (Manchester, or Mexborough? No one seems to know). Older Swintonians will tell you as it was an heirloom seventy-five years ago.

At intervals each year a travelling fair will come to Swinton. It takes little imagination to see Swinton as It was many years ago. It seems rather a pity that it has not kept one link with its past in the market which used to flourish so lustily.

Swinton as a township is well appointed. Its civic and education authorities have found pleasant and dignified homes in the town’s old halls; the Carnegie Library is an imposing edifice that adds much to that mile and a half.

And to a casual eye, most of its industrial side is unobtrusive. If you are interested in flat racing there will be no need to tell you two Swinton-trained horses have won the Lincoln. Swinton’s old racecourse has been partly swallowed up in housing development, but even there, too, Swinton has parted reluctantly with the past. You can still see Billy Smallwood’s strings out at exercise on what remains.

Perhaps I am, the only South Yorkshireman who has ever been to Swinton to “find” it. But if, as a casual visitor, you like what you see of that mile and a half, slip away from it along Milton Street. turn into Fizwilliam Street and look on that tree-arched vista; find yourself an old Swintonian and talk of the past.

Swinton is a town of pleasant surprises.