Secret Rotherham

Explore Rotherham's secret history through a fascinating selection of stories, facts and photographs.
Secret Rotherham offers a unique insight into this bustling, modern South Yorkshire town through a series of little-known and forgotten stories, facts and anecdotes from its past. The town has an enviable industrial history: Nelson’s HMS Victory was armed with Walker’s cannons made at Masbrough, the iron plates for Isambard Brunel’s steamship the Great Eastern were manufactured at Parkgate Iron & Steel Works, and the firm of Guest and Chrimes invented the modern screw-down tap. Over the centuries the Rotherham area has also had its fair share of famous residents and visitors. In 1568 Mary Queen of Scots spent a night in Rotherham under close guard on her way from Bolton Castle to Tutbury Castle; it was the home of the Earl of Strafford who was beheaded in 1641; Ebenezer Elliott, the ‘Corn Law Rhymer’, was born and bought up in the town; and the composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams, spent many a summer in one of the outlying villages. More recently Tom Jones preformed to a full house at Rawmarsh Swimming Baths in 1965 and Jeremy Clarkson did his journalistic training on the Rotherham Advertiser. In Secret Rotherham Melvyn Jones and Tony Dodsworth pull back the curtains of history to peer into the borough’s distant and not so distant past to reveal the forgotten, the strange and the unlikely.