A canteen was formally opened at Water Haigh on Wednesday 3 September 1941. 1,200 miners and surface workers were employed at the colliery and the location for the canteen was in a building previously used as a storage facility.
The kitchen had been a shower room before pit head baths were built in 1935 and the walls were already covered with glazed bricks. It contained cooking ranges and hot plates and was also the location of the service counter shown in the photograph below.
A separate room was redecorated and converted into a dining area. It could seat about 125 men at one time. Ten canteens were created at pits on the West Yorkshire coalfield in the same period with Allerton Bywater, employing 1,500 men, opening theirs the previous week.
The idea for onsite colliery canteens appears to have started towards the end of the First World War after similar facilities had been introduced at arms and munitions factories. With food rationing introduced at the start of the Second World War more opened with grants to the colliery owners coming from the Miners’ Welfare Fund. The government’s Secretary for Mines told the House of Commons that by March 1941 220 out of about a thousand collieries employing more than 50 workers had canteens serving light refreshments.
The Water Haigh catering was managed by John Carr Smith from Garforth with a staff of six women. The menu consisted of roast beef, roast ham, steak and kidney pie, potatoes, cabbage. carrots, jam roll, rice pudding, and tea, with a slice of bread.
The food wasn’t free and books of tickets to the value of 5 shillings were supplied by the attendants. The Wakefield Express reported that many of the workmen were asked their opinion of the meals and all said they were satisfied.
Several top officials from the Henry Briggs company were present at the opening ceremony. Amongst them was the chairman of the board Walter Hargreaves, deputy chairman Major Donald Henry Currer Briggs, and director George Appleby who’d joined the board when Briggs acquired the Micklefield Coal and Lime Company’s colliery at Peckfield in 1937.
Also there was commercial manager Leonard Armitage, company secretary Milton Haworth, the general manager of Micklefield and Syndale collieries Henry Alfred Longden, and Water Haigh’s general manager Dennis Walter Hargreaves. They were served with the same meals as those given to the workers.
Other names mentioned in the Express were the Miners’ Welfare Regional Organiser Peel Gallimore, Deputy Regional Commissioner Octavius George Willey, Ministry of Food Catering Officer Miss Mackie, a Mr. A. C. Purdy, and the secretary of the colliery’s branch of the miners’ union Albert Roberts. He started work at the pit as a school leaver and in 1951 became the area’s member of parliament.
The photograph at the top of this page was taken in the messroom in the 1940s. The man with dark hair sitting in the middle of the table at the front is George Banister Jones who worked on haulage and then as a “‘ripper” on nights mostly, from the 1930s. He was born in 1912 and married Millie Bell in 1936. In 1939 they were living on Basford Street in Hunslet. They later moved to Wordsworth Drive on the NCB estate in Oulton around the time it was built in about 1953. George died at the age of 50 in 1962.
The man second from the left at the back wearing overalls and a black beret is Harry Tate, one of the pit’s enginewrights. His full name was Tom Henry Bowes Tate and he was born in Rothwell in 1909. His father, William Tate, born in 1883, was also an enginewright at Water Haigh after working as a bricklayer at one of the Rothwell pits. During the Second World War Harry was the chief organiser and instructor of the Air Raid Precautions unit at the pit. His father was also involved with the ARP. Bill Tate lived with his wife Annie, nee Bowes, at Rosedene on Holmsley Lane whilst Harry lived with his family on Aberford Road in Woodlesford in one of the colliery owned houses opposite the cinema.
Dennis Walter Hargreaves is also in the photo. He’s the older man standing just to the left of the right hand door and came from a family which had a long involvement with coal mining engineering and public life in the Rothwell area. Born in 1881 he was agent or manager at Water Haigh from just after it opened in 1911 until it was nationalised in 1947. Apart from serving on the local council he appeared to be content with his role there. He lived with his wife Gertrude and daughter Vera at Eshald House which was owned by the Briggs company. Dennis’s son, Gerald Walter Hargreaves, born in 1908, qualified with a first class certificate as a mining engineer in 1938. He then became an assistant manager working underground at Water Haigh.