Secret Rotherham

Secret Rotherham offers a unique insight into this bustling, modern South Yorkshire town through a series of little-known and forgotten stories, facts and anecdotes from its past. The town has an enviable industrial history: Nelsons HMS Victory was armed with Walker cannons made at Masbrough, the iron plates for Isambard Brunels steamship the Great Eastern were manufactured at Parkgate Iron & Steel Works, and the firm of Guest & Chrimes invented the modern screw-down tap. Over the centuries the Rotherham area has also had its fair share of famous residents and visitors. It was the home of the Earl of Strafford, who was beheaded in 1641; John Wesley, the Father of Methodism, was a fairly frequent (if not always welcome) visitor to the area; Ebenezer Elliott, the Corn Law Rhymer, was born and bought up in the town; and the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams spent many a summer in one of the outlying villages. In Secret Rotherham Melvyn Jones and Anthony Dodsworth pull back the curtains of history to peer into the boroughs distant and not so distant past to reveal the forgotten, the strange and the unlikely.