South Yorkshire Times – Saturday 2 July 1949

Round Your Way – Thurnscoe

Mention Thurnscoe to a cricketer in Scarborough or a boxer in Liverpool and you’ll be immediately accepted. Mention ‘ Thurnscoe to  Thurnscovian and you’ll immediately hear him grouse. Said one, “Thurnscoe! Aye, I could tell thi a few things about Thurnscoe, but tha wouldn’t print ‘erm.” Somehow, I don’t think he meant me to believe things were quite so bad as that. I fancied I caught a twinkle in one eye corner. They’re proud of British Lightweight Boxing Champion Billy Thompson in Thurnscoe. Billy was born on the North East coast, but Thurnscoe has been the home of his adoption, and even though Thurnscoe doesn’t see quite so much of him these days he is still—Billy.

Thurnscoe as a township is as completely divided unto itself as if it were a community of rivals Thurnscoe East — and Thurnscoe West—and in keeping with accepted tradition, the West End is the more pleasant and residential half of this big corner of Dearne Urban District. The east is a town of concrete and industry, the west of open spaces and leaf greenery. The east is drab, and has grown up round Hickleton Main pit yard; the west is fresh, and expansion of once agricultural Thurnscoe,

Hence High Street, which is no longer High Street, a narrow pathway which meanders pleasantly through green hedges, stone walls and chestnut trees, past St. Helen’s Church, with its square stone tower, and the little smithy, tucked away on the corner, until at length it joins Thurnscoe’s modern High Street—the road to Barnsley a thoroughfare which echoes to concrete slabs the motif of the east.

In both halves of Thurnscoe you will find extensive Council housing estates. The houses are of one pattern. The east is busy bustling Thurnscoe, the west the leisurely Thurnscoe, where in summer you will find cricket and tennis, in winter football. On the dividing line, stand Thurnscoe baths, and a little higher up Station Road, to make the severance complete, the railway line. A coffee stall adjoining Thurnscoe Market completes the illusion of a miniature Charing Cross Road.

Thurnscoe’s green High Street is a miniature within a town complete with park and pleasant houses, police station, bank, set in what was once a private house, shops and church. And the agricultural keynote still lingers.

I watched a speckled thrush beneath a lilac tree, and heard from a housew ife how a tame, wild rabbit came daily to frolic there on the lawn among the sparrows. Less than two hundred yards away buses and lorries clattered by, linking Thurnscoe with the farthest corners of England, Thurnscoe—veritably a “tale of two cities.”