Posts - Articles

Late in the afternoon of 9th December 1929 two canal barges belonging to Kempson and Co. of Pye Bridge, Somercotes were proceeding from Loughborough to Pye Bridge, laden with chemicals.  They were operated by William White (62) and his son Jack.  They were from a long-established family of bargemen and William’s grandfather had transported cannonballs from Alfreton Ironworks for use in the Crimean War. The lead boat, which had an engine, had towed the other one down the Soar.  After Red Hill lock, they lashed the boats together, ready to cross the Trent and enter the Erewash Canal at Trent Lock.  But the flow of the flooded Trent, plus the wind, was too strong for the engine and they were pulled towards the weir, stern first, in the gathering dark. A man called Herbert Rowley was on the bank nearby and threw them a rope which they tied to a pier of the railway bridge with the help of William Challis and other members of the Trent Valley Sailing Club.  But the 2nd boat became loose and was swept over the weir.  Although, with the river so high, the drop would have only been a few inches, William White is […]

Petition against Erewash Borough Council repurposing Manor Yard – the farmland across from the Nags Head. Follow this link to the petition on Change.org. Or this link to county councillor’s Facebook page for the latest updates. The image below shows a 19th century map superimposed over the latest Ordnance Survey map. ‘Smithy Row‘ opposite the Nags Head was lost to road widening a century ago. The Post Office is now ‘The Old Post Office’. The churchyard has been extended. Apart from that…. In 1936 ex prime minister David Lloyd George attended the centenary of John Clifford. Marquees holding a total of 2000 people were erected on Manor Yard. Thomas Bates of Netherfield Farm (brother in law of Russell Grammar) was thanked for use of the field. There were plans to extend the graveyard and land was purchased by the church for £1. Over the years several partial extension were made, but about 15 years ago, the final one was blocked by Erewash Borough Council, saying there had to be an archaeological investigation, at a cost of £50,000.

There have been many hard winters in the past, often followed by the Trent flooding at Sawley. In 1607 the Trent was frozen hard enough for a horse and rider to cross the ice. The Great Frost of 1683/84 saw temperatures in central England thought to have to dropped to -30deg C. After the winter of 1794/95, the floods and broken ice destroyed most of the bridges along the Trent. The winter of 1813/14 was also severe.  We have no records of the weather around Sawley, but in November 1813, Jane Davys, a 70-year old widow in Sawley was holding a candle in her hand when the flame set fire to her clothes.  She died from burns a few days later. In the winters around1880 Daniel Barkham operated a skating ring on the ballast hole known as Sawley Lake, until he fell through the ice and died. In 1893 the Trent was frozen over thick enough to bear the weight of a horse and cart.  When the ice broke up, it demolished the original Long Horse Bridge.  By the 1920s Long Eaton had taken over New Sawley, but not Old Sawley.  So, the council snowplough only cleared Tamworth Road as […]

This continues the story of the Sawley Memorial Hall from the earlier post – The Carnival is Over. In the early 1950s Cyril Reedman (1907-1998) was persuaded to become chairman of the Sawley Memorial Hall Committee. He was an experienced building contractor and negotiated a suitable site with the council.  The site was in fields next to Draycott Road, on what was to become a playing field, surrounded by a new 700-house estate.  It would be leased to the association for 30 years at a nominal rent of £1 a year. Originally the Committee envisaged a more ambitious building, estimated to cost £8,000 to build.  But when they applied for a grant, they were advised to try for something much more modest.  They opted for a pre-cast concrete building, with all-in cost, including heating and lighting of about £4,500. In 1955, at a public meeting in the Baptist Church Hall, the Memorial Hall Committee was renamed the Sawley Community Association.  The original constitution is here: Community Association Constitution. By August 1956 £2,600 had been raised, they had a provisional offer of £2,000 from the Ministry of Education and were seeking a loan of £1,500 from Long Eaton Council. In February 1958 […]

The First of Two Articles about Sawley Memorial Hall In October 1944 Clem Gregory from Old Sawley and Harry Kingscott from New Sawley were talking about Sawley having no war memorial, and came up with an idea of something practical to commemorate the Sawley men who had died in both world wars.  A meeting was called in the TOC-H room and Tony Marmont (who ran Carters) was elected as president of the provisional committee, with Cecil Kingscott as secretary.  It was decided to build a memorial hall, as the village did not have an all-purpose community building.                           A public meeting was held in the National School in January in 1945 and the committee of the Sawley Memorial Hall Committee was formally appointed.  The original members were: Tony Marmont, Arthur Stapleton, Cecil Kingscott, Clem and Doris Gregory, Harry and Annie Kingscott, Mr B Smith, George Smith, Mr F Reid, Mr F Gallager, Mr L Hogg, Mr W Linley, Mr J Pearson, Mr A Freeman, Rev R Gerald Harcombe, Mrs Simpson, Mrs Bosworth, Mrs Annie Merry, Mrs Lily Flint, Mrs Smedley, Mrs White and ‘Madam Rose Bates’. They paid 10/ […]

I was born in July 1939, just two months before England declared war on Germany.  Our home at that time was a rented wooden bungalow on Oakland Avenue.  It backed on to the Erewash Canal, and had a decent garden, so it was really a nice place to live.  It was my parents’ first proper home, having lived for some time in rented rooms in Long Eaton.        My parents decided that perhaps a wooden bungalow was not the best place for a young family to be once the air raids began.  Somewhat ironically, the bungalow in Oakland Avenue survived the war unscathed, but a solid brick house in Netherfield Avenue, less than a quarter of a mile from the property we moved to in Shaftesbury Avenue, was destroyed by a stray bomb and several people were killed. l was too young to remember much about our life then but my earliest memory of all is of waking up in the air raid shelter we shared with three neighbouring families. Although two large municipal shelters would eventually be built on the street, four families had clubbed together to build a small shelter in the garden of the family opposite to […]

Adapted from an article by Judy Kingscott in the Sawley and District Historical Society Newsletter, March 2008 By the start of the 20th century, New Sawley was growing quickly, with much of Victoria Street and Harrington Street being completed in the 1890s.  And over 1,100 people were living in Sawley parish, but beyond the railway line.  Money was raised to buy two substantial plots of land in New Sawley and set up two chapels made from corrugated iron sheets. The building erected in Wilsthorpe Lane – opposite Hill’s lace factory (later Concordia) – St Mary’s, was consecrated as a church in 1909 and services are still held there. A fund has been in existence for many years to raise money to improve the building; garden parties, Christmas bazars, and other events are regularly held to this end. Marjorie Bennet (1914-1995), who featured in last month’s blog ‘A Bridge Too Far’, grew up on Wilsthorpe Road, and remained faithful to St Marys, even after she’d moved to Long Eaton.  Other people have long and fond associations with St Mary’s and still worship there. St Marys is one of only six ‘tin tabernacles’ left in Derbyshire.  Three of these are in Long […]

By Geoffrey Kingscott I was only three years old when the war started, and so have no pre-war memories at all. My parents often recalled the fear of gas attacks which everyone had, so the day after war was declared my father picked all the pears from the large pear tree at the back of the house. My earliest memory is of standing at the front gate of the house watching a bricklayer laying the lower courses of what became the street air-raid shelter.  Another early memory is seeing workmen using an oxy-acetylene torch (an item of great wonder) to remove the railings from the front fence of Mrs Powdrill’s house (no. 17 Shaftesbury Avenue). We shared with four other families to have our own air-raid shelter, built in our garden. I cannot remember it being built. I have one memory of being picked up out of bed by my father to be taken down to the shelter, and another of looking down from the top bunk. The grown-ups were talking in low voices, and I think there was an electric fire with one bar, so there must have been electricity. I recall a snatch of adults’ conversation outside the […]

Narrow Bridge Cottages were on the bend in the road to Trent Lock, between the road and the footbridge over the Erewash Canal.  The cottages dated from the early 19th century, or earlier.  There seem to have been 2 large cottages by the bridge and another 6 cottages in a row by the bend road. Originally, they were mostly in Sawley Parish, but from 1921 they were taken over by Long Eaton, along with the rest of New Sawley. In 1900 there was a typhoid outbreak at the cottages.  It was attributed to drinking water, but the Sawley Parish Council was told that the property was ‘in a very insanitary condition’.  In 1901 the Council heard about an overflowing cesspit at Narrow Bridge Cottages.  Although the owner, Mr Tingle, replied that he had just spent £40 on improvements. The houses had been owned for many years by the Tingle family, who’d been boatbuilders.  Although in 1904 six houses (presumably the terrace) were advertised for sale as copyhold (a sort of freehold) but don’t seem to have sold. In May 1905 the body of a newborn baby was found in the canal nearby, wrapped in brown paper.  Twenty years earlier, the […]

Many local people will remember the Erewash Princess as a pleasure cruiser on local waterways in the late1960s and early 1970s.  But where did she come from, and what happened to her? In 1966 four members of the Inland Waterways Association were fighting to keep the Erewash Canal open.  They bought a 2nd hand 36ft boat and named her ‘Erewash Princess’.  They formed their own company and planned to run boat trips at weekends and most evenings. The Erewash Princess was 36ft long and constructed from wood, with a diesel engine.  She could carry up to 55 passengers.  She was built in 1927, and it seems she was operated on the River Severn, and then on the River Dee at Chester.  But the details of her early history (and her original name) are currently unknown. In May 1966, one of the new owners – Derrick Alsop, who lived in Toton – started operating a service every Saturday and Sunday between Sandiacre and Trent Lock.  It left Sandiacre at 2pm every Saturday and Sunday, stopping at Long Eaton (at the old coal wharf near the fire station) and on to Trent Lock.  It then made 3 more runs from Long Eaton […]

Tom Godfrey was born in 1928 and brought up in Long Eaton.  In 1939 his family lived in Manchester Street (between Nelson Street and Wyvern Avenue).  He retired from his position at Cambridge University in 1993.  In 2011 he sent the following letter to the Sawley & District Historical Society. Much has been written and said recently about the cold weather of the winter of 2010-2011, but the winter of 1946-1947 was much worse. Then there was virtually no home central heating and fuel was in very short supply. Creature comfort was a matter of how much clothing we wore. Outside workers called it two overcoat weather. We all had to accept it as a way of life. Now that I am well past eighty years old, I felt I should write down the memories of my personal experiences of that time before I become unable to pass them on. In the early part of 1947 I was an undergraduate at Cambridge University, living in a room in college.  The cold weather proved very unpleasant.  Though the cold was a real problem to many we were to a large extent indifferent.  Our life carried on as usual as far as […]

In 1900, apart from the Midland Bank at the corner of Tamworth Road, there were only two pairs of semi-detached houses on Wilsthorpe Lane (now 16-22, Wilsthorpe Road).  In 1900 Samuel Hill submitted his first plans for a single-storey lace factory opposite St Mary’s Church.  It was extended over the following 7 years, including a large house ‘The Limes’ separated from the factory by greenhouses.  By 1910 Birchwood Mills (1906) and Atlas Mills (1910) had been completed by other developers, along with Ruskin Avenue and Lime Grove and more houses along Wilsthorpe Lane.  The factory was sold to Concordia in about 1925, but the Hill family retained The Limes. *  *  The story of the Hill family and their factories will be covered in next blog post.  *  * In 1930 George Hill formed The New Sawley Club Limited at The Limes, with the directors being himself and W. Scott of Victoria Road.  Although the Club may have already been operating for a few years.  As well as a bar, the club had a bowling green and tennis courts. The club didn’t seem to thrive and by 1933 the tennis courts were being advertised for let.  The nearby pond (now […]

When the ‘London-Yorkshire Motorway’ (the M1) was being designed in the mid-1950s, the plan was for the whole stretch across the Trent near Sawley to be an elevated viaduct of 40ft high arches, – 20 arches north of the Trent and 20 to the south – so as not to block the flood plain. Then, in 1957, a scale model of the whole area was built at the Government Hydraulics Research Station at Wallingford, Berks.  The model represented about 5½ miles of the Trent and 1½ miles of the Derwent valleys, including bridges, flood banks etc.  The model covered 3,200ft2 (298m2); an area equivalent area to about 1.15 tennis courts, or (in old money) 14.5 London buses. Water was released across the model to represent a real-world flow of 35,000 cubic feet per second (991.09 m³/s) – the worst flood in recent history – which covered the valley to a depth of 3ft over a width of 8,000ft.   The object of the modelling was to ensure that building the motorway would not cause the flood level upstream to rise more than another 3 inches.   The scientists found that the arches would be far less effective south of the Trent […]

There was once a windmill in New Sawley.   The site is between Birchwood Ave and Hawthorne Ave, near the bends on the Twitchell. Sawley Windmill in 1835 – the miller’s cottage is by the road, further along the Twitchell, near the boundary with Long Eaton A later map showing the windmill between the railway (before Sawley Junction) and the canal bridge. It was a post mill – a relatively simple mechanism in which the whole wooden structure had to be moved around a central post to keep the sails facing the wind.  Though sometimes the structure would sit on a round brick-built base. The design had been used in England since the 12th century, though its not known when the mill in Sawley was built. Later tower windmills had a fixed structure with just a moveable top section, which meant they could be much taller, with larger sails. One of the few surviving post mills in England is the Cat and Fiddle Mill, near Dale Abbey (built in 1788). Cat and Fiddle © Copyright Garth Newton (Creative Commons Licence). The earliest newspaper reference to the Sawley windmill is 1794.  In 1799 the mill was put up for sale.  In 1801 […]

In the 1940s and 50s (and probably before) the railway ‘North Curve’ between Sawley Junction and Trent Station was used to accommodate the Royal Train overnight.  In August 1940, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, on their way from London to Derby, had their sleeping coach shunted on to the North Curve, with the local Home Guard providing the guard for the night. In June 1949 Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh were visiting Nottingham and spent the night on the Royal Train on the North Curve.  The (now) Queen Elizabeth and Duke of Edinburgh spent a night in the same place on 4-5 July 1955 when attending the Royal Show at Wollaton Hall. Royal Train between Trent and Nottingham in 1949 The Royal Train was there again in March 1957 and October 1958.  During one of these visits, Prince Philip wandered into Trent Station.  He was interested in the booking office ticket system, and was allowed to produce some tickets. The booking clerk was in trouble the next day when his books did not balance.  Prince Philip also decided to walk over to Trent North signalbox. The Trent staff telephoned to warn the signalman he was coming, but […]

Cobham Tiger Moth at Wilsthorpe In September 1937 an Air Display was held in New Sawley.  Sir Alan Cobham’s flying circus brought two airliners (including a prototype Handley Page Hinaidi), an autogyro and several light aircraft to a field off Wilsthorpe Lane.   Miss Joan Meakin performed aerobatics in a glider, whilst describing her actions over the radio.  In another event 3 aircraft with the wings joined together by ribbons, looped their aircraft in formation.  This event also saw the first public demonstration of the GQ parachute.  Local people were offered flights from 4/ each Handley Page airliner

For many years the wooden Riverside Café stood at Trent Lock, at the end of the footpath that runs from the back of the ‘Trent Lock’ pub, alongside the triangular pond, nearly opposite the Scout Activity Centre. It’s not clear when the Riverside Café was built, but the first café at Trent Lock was opened in 1894 by Jane Rice (1858-1948).  Her husband, Thomas Rice, was the ferryman at Trent Lock, whilst Thomas’s father had been running the Erewash Navigation Inn. Mrs Rice started the business at The Cottage/The White Cottage (perhaps the white cottage behind ‘The Cabin’ next to Trent Villa).  In 1895 she moved to the newly built Trent Villa (the large Victorian house just west of the ‘Trent Lock’ pub). Trent Villa 1896 1921 After Thomas Maltby drowned in 1900, Thomas Rice took over the Erewash Navigation, with Jane taking over after Thomas died.   At some point the wooden café was built beside the Trent on land rented from John Stevenson Grammar at Great Grounds Farm.  By 1921 Jane’s son William Henry Rice was running a cafe at ‘The Bungalow, Riverside’, having previously worked for the River section of the Nottingham Fire Brigade.  His brother, Tom Rice (1885-1970) […]

As early as 1889 there were discussions about whether Sawley should have gas or electric street lighting, as it had neither at the time.  This was rather ambitious, as small-scale electrical supplies were only just beginning to appear in Britain.  As it turned out, Sawley only received gas lighting in 1897, about the same time Long Eaton was converting to electricity.   The gas lights themselves were donated by Ernest Terah Hooley.  A large crowd gathered to see them first lit on 31st March 1897, which was followed by a dinner at the Harrington Arms.  The rector (Rev E A Clarke) lit the first lamp.  Sawley’s first employed gas lighter was Stephen Smith.  Harrington Mill (off Wilsthorpe Road) set up its own electric lighting system in the 1890s.  In 1899 Long Eaton council decided to install their own electric cables and lighting, powered by a coal-fired generating plant between Milner Road and the Erewash Canal.  This opened in 1903 using a 3-wire direct current system. Three years later it was converted to alternating current.  The system was a financial success for the council and mains electricity seems to have reached New Sawley about 1913.  In 1931, when the Wilsthorpe Road […]

Between 1934 and 2000 Sawley did not have its own council and the signs by the roads entering the village said LONG EATON. In 1981 two local lads decided to fix that. One of them now runs this website.

Here are some advertisements from the 1730s and 1750 found in the Derby Mercury newspaper.  Whilst its not (yet) possible to work out which houses are referred to; it’s worth looking at the meaning of some of the terms used. The Derby Mercury ran from 1732 to 1900.  From 1882 to 2008 Sawley’s local paper was the Long Eaton Advertiser. Messuage.  This means a house together with its outbuildings and adjacent land.  The legal definition is still current, but the term was often used in adverts for houses in the 18th and 19th century. Lady Day (the Feast of the Annunciation) is 25th March.  It is the first of the English quarter days (the others being Midsummer Day (24 June), Michaelmas (29 September) and Christmas (25 December). The cross-quarter days are Candlemas (2 February), May Day (1 May), Lammas (1 August), and All Hallows (1 November).  Until 1752 Lady Day was the first day of the civil year in England, Wales and the American colonies (from 1752 it became 1 January to harmonise with Scotland).  In the same year the Julian calendar was replaced by the Gregorian calendar, which meant dates advanced by 11 days.  So, the ‘old’ Lady Day […]