Mexborough & Swinton Times – Friday 25 September 1931

South Yorkshire Times and Mexborough and Swinton Times

First Issue

Friday Next, October 2nd

With our issue of Friday next October 2nd, this paper, now in its fifty-fourth year, will appear under a new title, The South Yorkshire Times.

The original title The Mexborough and Swinton Times under which it has grown and developed far beyond its original scope and plan, will be retained and incorporated.

The change has been made necessary by that growth. It has not been decided upon lightly, but after a good deal of thought and with a good deal of reluctance because of one’s attachment to old familiar things, but with a conviction that a newspaper circulating over a wide and important area like South Yorkshire should have a title more comprehensive and more appropriate to the district with which it was dealing.

When the Mexborough and Swinton Times was founded by the late Mr. Walter Turner in July, 1877, it was a local newspaper writ small, a publication intended to deal fully and in detail with the events and concerns of Mexborough and Swinton and a few villages around, and the title selected for it, the Mexborough and Swinton Times, was perfectly appropriate to that limited field.

At an early stage of the history of the paper its activities were carried further afield, and by degrees it brought within the purview of its news and comment the rising mining towns of Denaby and Wombwell (Wath was within its original field), and also reached out to Kilnhurst and Rawmarsh and the farming villages lying between Mexborough, Doncaster, and Barnsley. But for a great many years Mexborough and Swinton were the hub of its circulation field, and they remain to-day very important centres of its influence. The newspaper has been published throughout its career from its original headquarters in High Street, Mexborough, and will continue to be edited, printed, and published from there.

But in the last decade the growth of the paper’s circulation and influence has carried it so far afield that the original title conveys to the reader no idea of the real influence and importance of the paper. Through its various editions it is to-day circulated and read in almost every town and village of South Yorkshire, in the great towns—Sheffield, Rotherham, Barnsley and Doncaster but principally in the urban districts— Mexborough, Swinton, Conisborough, Wath, Rawmarsh, Wombwell, Hoyland, Goldthorpe, Bolton, Hemsworth, Thurnscoe, Darfield, Ardsley, Worsborough, Stocksbridge, Penistone—in the semi-urbanised areas and in the purely rural districts stretching away to the Pennines, as far north as Wakefield, over the Notts Lincolnshire borders, and eastward beyond Doncaster. In order to deal with this wide area it has been necessary to issue local editions of the paper, and for Rotherham a separate paper was founded. But the parent and fountain-head of the papers issued from this office, the Rotherham Express, the South Elmsall, Kirkby and Hemsworth Times, the Penistone, Stocksbridge, and Hoyland Express, and the Eckington, Woodhouse and Staveley Express is the Mexborough and Swinton Times, which has far outgrown that title and will appear from October onward under a title more accurately descriptive of its territorial scope.

We shall therefore present to you with our next issue of October 2nd., an old friend, unaltered save for natural progress and improvement, under a new name.

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