Main Street, looking from Miner's Welfare towards Pinfold Lane
Main Street, c.1920, looking down Main Street from the Miners' Welfare area
towards Pinfold Lane.
The Welfare is not on the photo. There is only one car, a Model T Ford. This
lone car and the rough road surface indicate how little traffic there was
at that time. On the right is wasteground and allotments from the Welfare
to Pinfold Lane.
On the left front are old cottages, demolished about 1960-63, and then the
entrance to a car repair workshop. Numbers 40 and 42 Main Street are just
off the photo.
The high-gabled house standing at the top of
Holmes' Yard was Misses S. and E. Radcliffe's Bakers and Confectioners, a
well-remembered village shop. The property was built in 1863 by Mr. John Holmes,
who lived at Holmville, Little Church Lane. On each side of the upper window
is a plaque, that on the left (as you face the building) bears the initials
J.I.H. and the right hand one has the date 1863. The two maiden Misses Radcliffe,
later joined and succeeded by their niece, Miss Edna Radcliffe,lived behind
and above the shop; the basement cellar was their bakehouse. The quite large
shop had a corner door facing down Main Street and a large shop window, shuttered
at night facing Main Street. Often children would sit on the wide wooden sill
of the window. Under the window was the bakehouse window and a metal grate
overing the 'well' of the window. Children's pennies often dropped down here,
much to their distress, when they were peering into the window. It was warm
above the cellar grate and the smell of newly baked bread and confectionary
was very attractive.
There were 14 houses in Holmes' Yard, the land being conveyed to John Holmes
on 20th August, 1862. The houses were sold to Mexborough's in 1891. The box-shaped
shop window of the property at the other side of Holmes' Yard was that of
Francis Crewe, Gents Outfitters, a small shop. People went down a step to
enter the side door. It was later Mr. Longbottom's and then Mr Fox's electrical
shop. The very old low cottage with its very low boundary wall was a private
residence (site shown on 1786 map). Older cottages stood behind here. There
were two shops in the taller building beyond, Mickletown Post Office (where
the over-hanging sun blinds protect the goods in the window), was managed
by Mrs. Dickinson (1898) and beyond was the Methley Branch of the Castleford
Co-operative Society, a large grocery store, well patronised by village housewives.
Land for this store was conveyed in 1898. (In 1875-76 the Co-operative Store
was here, house and shop - the proprietor and occupier was Michael Stephenson).
There is a tree, the stone wall of Hunt's Farm, small trees in front of Rose
Cottages, the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel, and the gable beyond of Mrs. Crewe's
draper's shop, mother of Francis Crewe.
The low building beyond, at the bottom of Pit Lane, was Braime's butcher's
shop and family house, then, at the rear of the picture is the gable of Red
House. Red House was Methley Urban District Council Offices and home of the
Council Surveyor, for many years Mr. Tommy Thompson
