Stan Penn spent many years at Water Haigh working as a fitter both in the fitting shops on the pit top and underground in the haulage roads and at the coal faces. The job entailed installing and repairing all types of machinery including coal cutters and conveyor belts as well as the maintaining steam winding engines and locomotives on the surface.
When the colliery was closed down in 1970 Stan moved to Glasshoughton near Castleford from where he retired as an assistant engineer in 1986. As a fitter he had to work many unsocial shifts at Christmas and in the summer when the rest of the workforce were on holiday. During strikes he and his colleagues were given dispensation to cross picket lines as their maintenance work was crucial to keeping the coal seams open.
Stan Penn was from a mining family and grew up living on First Avenue on the John o’ Gaunt’s estate built by the Rothwell Urban District Council in the 1920s and dubbed New City by locals. It was close to J. & J. Charlesworth’s Fanny pit where his father, Willie, was a blacksmith. With other boys Stan played regularly on the large slag heap close to the estate which is now part of the Rothwell Country Park.
Willie Penn was born at Sharlston in 1885 but his father, Stan’s grandfather, hewer Benjamin Penn, had migrated to Yorkshire with his family from Brierley Hill near Dudley in Staffordshire during the early 1880s. By 1901 Benjamin had moved to Eshald View in Woodlesford and was probably employed at one of the pits on the Swillington side of the River Aire. At the age of 15 Willie was an apprentice mechanic at Bentley’s brewery. His oldest brother Thomas was a railway platelayer whilst his brother Benjamin worked with their father.
In 1908 Willie married Rothwell miner’s daughter Sarah Elizabeth Fox and by 1921 they had two daughters and two sons. Another daughter had died in 1918. Stan was born in 1924 and after leaving school he spent a year or so as an errand boy for greengrocers Len Taylor and Teddy Butterfield.
Not long after the start of the Second World War Stan was taken on as an apprentice at the engineering department of J. & J. Charlesworth Limited’s Rothwell Haigh collieries. It was located at Low Shops, the site of an old shaft, not far from the junction of Wood Lane and Wakefield Road. Under the management of engineer George William Binks it maintained all the equipment for the Rothwell Haigh pits. He too had started as an apprentice mechanic there in 1902 under the tutelage of his father Charles Binks. After becoming foreman in 1919 he became the engineer in 1940 and retired in 1952 with 50 years service.
After moving to Water Haigh, in 1954 Stan married Elsie Mary Robinson from Swillington. They met at a dance hall in Castleford but she knew the pit well as she passed by regularly on her way to work in the offices at the Regent oil company at the end of Fleet Lane.
Elsie’s family too were in the coal industry and her grandfather had also migrated to the area from another part of the country. Born at Workington in Cumberland, in about 1905 Ismay Robinson had moved from Ashton in Makerfield on the Lancashire coalfield to become an undermanager at the T. & R. W. Bower pits near Swillington. Initially his family lived in a colliery owned house called Aire Villas at Astley not far from Victoria and Albert pits. Outside work he was a leading member of the local chapel, sat on the Kippax area education committee and was secretary of the committee which raised money to build the Bowers Allerton memorial after the First World War.
Like her husband, Elsie’s father, Ernest Ismay Robinson, was also a colliery fitter working on the steam locomotives for Bowers’ Allerton Main Collieries Ltd. In the 1930s Elsie grew up living at School Street in the now demolished mining village called Bowers Row.
Stan Penn died in 2013. Elsie Penn passed away in 2025.
Click on the links below to listen to Stan and Elsie talking about their lives in interviews recorded at their home in Rothwell.
