People today seem to be more familiar with the colonisation of the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand than they are with the population growth and decline that was fuelled by high levels of migration within the British Isles. As will become clear, migration levels were so high in the second half of the 19th century and the first 25 years of the 20th century in South Yorkshire that the concept of the ‘Yorkshireman’ (and woman) may need some reappraisal. In the period in question the South Yorkshire coalfield was like the Wild West. Migrants flocked in from every corner of the country and beyond. But it was not only the urban centres that grew and changed at a rapid rate. Agricultural villages were changed almost overnight into mining villages and completely new mining settlements also sprang up.

The impact on previously small rural villages was almost overwhelming. For example until 1905 Maltby was a small, sleepy estate village just inside the Magnesian limestone belt on the road between Rotherham and Tickhill. Most of the inhabitants were tenants and/or estate workers on the Sandbeck estate of the Earl of Scarbrough, who resided at the Palladian-style Sandbeck Hall surrounded by Sandbeck Park, a large landscaped park designed by Capability Brown between 1774 and 1777. In 1905 the park still contained deer. Apart from a few incomers the only strangers that the inhabitants of Maltby would have seen before 1905 would have been tourists in wagonnettes visiting the nearby ruins of Roche Abbey. But in 1905 everything was about to change. In that year the Earl of Scarbrough signed a 60-year agreement with the Sheepbridge (Chesterfield) Coal and Iron Company to mine the coal beneath the Sandbeck estate. In his autobiographical Brother to the Ox (1940), the Maltby writer Fred Kitchen described the upheaval caused by the building of a new railway and the sinking of the colliery: the inconvenience for farmers, the blasting and rumbling, the disturbance of wildlife, the building of a new temporary town (Tin Town) for the railway builders, the arrival of navvies and drunken brawls on Saturday night. “Not since the time of the Danes had our village suffered such an invasion,“ he wrote. But some villagers took advantage of the situation. Instead of having a card at their front door for tourists stating that tea was provided they replaced it with another one simply saying ‘Lodgings’. In 1901 the population of Maltby was 700. By 1921 it was 7, 657.

The new mining settlements were overwhelmingly populated by miners and their families who were not native to those settlements. Every mining village was teeming with migrants, short-distance and long-distance. If the census statistics are analysed what is revealed is how very mobile our mining ancestors were. Not only had they flocked in from neighbouring towns and villages across South Yorkshire but from every county in England and from Wales, Scotland, Ireland and beyond. In 1901 there were living in South Yorkshire mining villages migrants from as far away as Stornaway in the Outer Hebrides to Land’s End in Cornwall and from the Channel Islands to Galway on the west coast of Ireland. There were even migrants who had been born in Canada, the United States and South Africa.

How far did your ancestors travel to find work? Did they make one long journey or did they make a series of shorter moves? Three South Yorkshire mining settlements: Klondyke, Atlas Street and New Edlington illustrate the pull of a region that was being economically developed at a rapid rate pulling in migrants from far and wide.

The very small industrial colony colourfully called Klondyke was erected on Burton Lane between Monk Bretton and Cudworth to the east of Barnsley in the 1890s. At the beginning of the 20th century it consisted of two short rows of terraced houses on Burton Lane itself and three short terraces leading off to the north at right angles called Faith, Hope and Charity. So the settlement as a whole formed a small square surrounded on three sides by fields. Within walking distance lay Monk Bretton Colliery, a brick works, a bleach works and railways almost encircled it. There were, therefore, employment opportunities in almost every direction.

In 1901 the population of Klondyke was 253 living in 43 households. Household size varied from two to 14 and ten of the households contained boarders or visitors including a female evangelist preacher from Liverpool. There were 92 employed men and boys living in Klondyke in 1901. Of these 72 (78 per cent) worked in a colliery. Six men or boys worked on the railways, four at the brickworks and three at the bleach works. One person, an elderly man born in Ireland, worked as a farm labourer. Another two worked as grocers presumably from a small shop in a front parlour.

The birthplaces of these employed men and boys were as varied as in all the other mining villages in South Yorkshire at the time. Forty-one (45%) were from South Yorkshire but only five had been born in Monk Bretton parish and only one from neighbouring Cudworth. Nine had been born in other places in Yorkshire and nine had been born in Staffordshire. There were also small numbers from Derbyshire, Lancashire and Ireland. Among the other interesting birthplaces were four from the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire, which was also a coal mining area, and one each from Walsham in Suffolk and Rotherfield in Sussex, both distant rural villages. One man who worked as a colliery horsekeeper was born in Scotland and another who worked at the brick works was from Whitechapel in the East End of London. But perhaps the most surprising migrant living in Klondyke in 1901 was a 14-year-old collier who had been born in Iowa in the mid-west of the USA! His father, who had been born in Royston, just a few miles north of Klondyke, must have crossed the Atlantic in both directions. If the boy had been told the family was leaving the USA to go to Klondyke, he may have believed he was going to Klondyke in the Yukon in north-west Canada to mine gold not to a small settlement in South Yorkshire to mine coal!

Another small new mining settlement was simply called Atlas Street just a mile or two south of the town of Rotherham built to provide accommodation for miners working at Rotherham Main Colliery sunk in 1876. It was called Atlas Street after the name of the Sheffield steel works of the owners John Brown & Company Ltd. It was a perfectly straight street village. Apart from the co-operative stores, every building was residential. Beyond the southern end of the street stood the Atlas Hotel and St George’s church. Altogether 747 men, women and children lived on Atlas Street in 1901. In that year there were 242 employed men and boys living on the street, of whom 212 (87.6%) were colliery workers. Among the other workers there was a night soil man and a stick hawker. And most of these 242 men and boys were migrants. Only 40 (16.5%) were born within what is now the modern metropolitan borough of Rotherham. Forty-one (17%) were from the rest of South Yorkshire and another 24 (9.9%) were from other parts of Yorkshire. Other important sources of migrant workers were Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Staffordshire and Shropshire. Among surprising birthplaces of residents of Atlas Street were Maidstone in Kent, Dunstable in Hertfordshire and Saxmundham in Suffolk. And as usual there were a few miners from Wales, Scotland and Ireland.

The Compton family who lived on Atlas Street, was a typical migrant family. John Compton was a hewer (someone who actually got the coal with a pick), born in West Bromwich in the ‘Black Country’ of Staffordshire and his wife was from Donnington in Shropshire and must have been a short-distance a migrant to the Black Country. Their eldest two children, daughter Phyllis (15) and son Percy (13), were born in Hednesford in Staffordshire, but their two youngest children (aged seven and three) had been born in Hucknall and Bulwell in Nottinghamshire. The family were obviously very recent migrants to South Yorkshire. They were migrants who had taken part in what is called stepwise migration: not just one long-distance move but a series of medium and short-distance movements.

New Edlington was designed and built to accommodate the families of miners who worked at the nearby Yorkshire Main Colliery. The new village was laid out, entirely in brick, along both sides of Edlington Lane beside the colliery (which lay on the eastern side of the lane) between the tiny limestone-built villages of Old Edlington to the south and Warmsworth to the north. A detached house and two semi-detached houses were built just outside the pit yard to house the families of the senior officials in charge of the sinking. The Barnsley Seam was reached in the summer of 1911 and coal production began in 1913.

Meanwhile work had been progressing on designing and building a new mining village, New Edlington. At the time of the 1911 census, which took place on 2 April, the only buildings that had been erected and occupied in New Edlington were the five houses on Edlington Lane for the senior ‘sinking’ officials and 66 houses on Staveley Street. An analysis of the 1911 census returns allows us a glimpse of the structure of the ‘sinking community’ before mining proper began.

Collectively, the five houses built for the senior officials were called Yorkshire Main Colliery and contained a population of 28. At the detached house lived William Bunting who described himself as the colliery manager. In the first semi-detached house lived George White, master sinker, who also had living with his family a boarder who was described as a ‘stationary engine man sinking pit’. Staveley Street’s 66 houses contained a population of 373 with household size varying from two to 14. The 14-person household contained the occupant’s family together with six boarders, all described as labourers at the colliery, none of whom knew where they had been born. On Staveley Street lived 118 working men and boys of whom 116 worked either at the colliery (101) or constructing sidings and a branch railway (15). The two exceptions were a farm servant and a florist’s errand boy. Forty-one of the colliery workers described themselves as pit sinkers, sinkers or excavators. The others described themselves mainly as hewers or colliery labourers.

The places of birth of all these inhabitants of Staveley Street in 1911 are very revealing. Writers in the past have claimed that most pit sinkers were Irish immigrants. Not in this case. Only one pit sinker recorded that he was born in Ireland – in Kilkenny – and he was the only Irishman out of the 118 working men and boys living on the street in 1911. Twenty-three of the workers had been born in Yorkshire and most had been born in the East Midland counties of Nottinghamshire (14), Derbyshire (7) and Leicestershire (6), suggesting recruitment by the colliery company, Staveley Coal & Iron Company (hence the name of the first street in the colliery village). And as usual there were men and boys who had travelled very long distances from their original birthplaces to Staveley Street. There were migrants from Kent, Sussex and Somerset in southern England, from Clapham in London, Edinburgh in Scotland, from Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales and Gwynaesgor in Flintshire in North Wales.