The Hope Family in Norton

My grandparents, John William and Margaret Hope, moved from Fairfields to Woodbine Cottage in 1917 with their five children: Eva (b.1908), Walter (b.1909), Elsie (b.1911), John (b.1913) and George (b.1914). Here, three more children were born; Douglas (b.1918), Margaret (b.1920) and Alfred (b.1922). Woodbine Cottage was a small holding located on the High Street just below the crossroads in the centre of the village [the Royal Corner].  Woodbine Cottage is the most probable location for the former George and Dragon Inn, which closed in 1878, and had then been occupied by a poultry farmer and a hirer of a pony and trap.  Here, they soon got to work erecting greenhouses on the attached land and created a market garden for the growing of vegetables, soft fruit and cut flowers.  According to the local press, my grandfather won the first of his many prizes at the local horticultural show in August 1920, the first in Norton following the First World War, where miners and farm hands competed against each other in 67 classes.  He won first prize in the horticultural section. According to the article: There were some remarkably fine potatoes, with peas and beans following close up.  Flowers were also good, especially the sweet peas and fruit was excellent in quality.

Finishing working at the pit following an accident at Askern Colliery, my grandfather built a shop next to the cottage, which soon became the most popular general store after the Co-op, which was further down High Street. Whilst he tended the market garden, my grandmother ran the grocers shop assisted by her eldest daughter, Eva, who would marry Arthur Heseltine, a bricklayer, in 1931 and live in Carleton, near Pontefract.  Their daughter, Margaret, would also help in the shop before her marriage to Lawrence [Laurie] Wild, Edmund Wild’s son, in 1942.  Laurie and Margaret would live first of all at Ryder’s Farm, at the bottom end of the village and then move to Schoolboy Farm, on the death of his father, Edmund Wild, who had acquired both farms in 1938 William Carter, who had purchased the properties from Campsmount Estate in 1919.  By the mid-1930s, their daughter, Elsie, was a bus conductress living in Bentley Road, Doncaster and would marry David Maclean, a Scotsman, in 1941, also employed with Doncaster Corporation.  They would move to Scotland later in the 1940s and live in Kennoway, Fife, where David would become a bus inspector with bus operator, W. Alexander & Sons Ltd.

Unlike my grandfather, and John, his father, none of my grandfather and grandmother’s five sons would work down the pit.  My father’s brother, John (Jack) would train as a butcher and marry Evelyn Bird, a miner’s daughter from Adwick-le-Street in 1941.  After the Second World War, Jack would take over Hall Farm, a dairy farm, from Arthur Sanderson and build a butcher’s shop on West End Road.  My father’s youngest brother, Alfred, would follow a career with British Railways as a carriage builder (joiner) at the carriage works in Doncaster. Their eldest son, Walter trained as a blacksmith and married to a local girl, Evelyn Hickman, lived in the row of semi-detached houses called ‘Mount Pleasant’ built by Hemsworth Rural District Council at Little Smeaton over the river Went.  In July 1929, at the age of 20 years, Walter went to work at the newly opened Coalite Plant next to the pit in Askern.  Until he left school, my father (George) would help in the market garden and cycle to the railway station at Little Smeaton to collect fish from the daily fish train that ran from Hull to Barnsley.  At the age of 14, in December 1929, he joined Walter at the Coalite Plant as a trainee draughtsman. He would take evening classes in engineering drawing at Doncaster Technical College and become the head draughtsman responsible for producing the plans for the expansion of the works and its maintenance. He would work at the ‘Plant’ until his death in December 1975 and eventually rise to become the General Manager of the works, knowledgeable in every respect of its operation, responsible to Mr. Flack, the managing director.

My father’s brother, Douglas (b.1918), followed in the footsteps of his uncles Robert and George and joined up as a professional soldier in 1937.  By the beginning of the Second World War (aged 21), he was a sergeant in the Royal Scots Greys (2^nd Dragoons), which was amalgamated with other battalions to form the Royal Armoured Corps in 1939.  I don’t know how or why Douglas came to join the Royal Scots Greys but, in the 1930s, the Scots Greys were in much the same position as the rest of the British Army with a depleted strength and they commenced a vigorous recruiting drive.  Perhaps it was his experience of horses either on the small-holding or delivering goods from the shop that led him to choose a cavalry regiment; the Scots Greys were still mounted on horses at the outbreak of the Second World War.

The Scots Greys were in Palestine from October 1938 until 1942, policing the Palestine Mandate and operating in the vicinity of Jerusalem.  Throughout 1941, horses were gradually replaced by tanks and men who had spent their careers on horseback were retrained as drivers, loaders and gunners for tanks.  At the end of 1941, the regiment was transferred to the Eighth Army in Egypt.  They were held back from the battle for Tobruk in the Spring and Summer of 1942 because it was thought that they were still not fully combat ready, but they were finally committed to the fighting at the First Battle of El Alamein in September 1942.  A month later, they were in action at the Second Battle of El Alamein, which turned the tide in the North African Campaign and ended the Axis (Germany & Italy) threat to Egypt, the Suez Canal, and the Middle East and Persian oil fields.  It was the first big success against the Axis and revived the morale of the Allies and marked the start of the recapture of North Africa.

Unfortunately, Douglas was killed in the opening skirmishes on the first day of the battle (24 October 1942).  His body was never recovered and he has no known grave.  His name is recorded on the Alamein Memorial which forms the entrance to the Alamein Cemetery in Egypt.  It is also recorded in the roll of honour in the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards Regimental Museum in Edinburgh Castle and on the war memorial in Campsall Cemetery.  Although Douglas died before I was born, I have a close connection with him. 

My father married my mother, Priscilla Ellis, in 1938 at Campsall Church; the reception was held in the Mission Room in Norton.  My Mother was from a long-standing Yorkshire family, the Ellis’s.  She was born in Thorne but at the time of their marriage, she lived in Bentley, her parents running a grocer’s shop at 43 High Street. My mother was “in service” for Mr. & Mrs. Warriner, proprietors of Warriner’s Garage located at the junction of the Great North Road (A1) and Bentley Road (A19) close to the bridge over the river Don. On their marriage, they bought one of the new semi-detached houses in Rycroft Avenue at the west end [top] of Norton where I was born in 1942, three weeks after the battle of El Alamein.  My mother and father had decided that, if their new baby was a boy, I was to be christened Paul but when news of the death of my father’s brother Douglas reached home, my grandmother pleaded with my mother to have me christened Douglas, in memory of him, and so I was christened Douglas George Hope (George after my father).  I never knew my Uncle Douglas nor my paternal grandfather, John William Hope, who also died before my birth, in June 1941.