VERY RECENTLY, TWO ORIGINAL ADVERTISEMENTS FROM THE PAGES OF THE FEBRUARY & JULY 1952 EDITIONS OF COUNTRY LIFE MAGAZINE CAME INTO OUR HANDS, MAINLY BECAUSE THEY WERE HEAVING WITH DARK GREEN PAINTED EUCLID R-15`S !!
ONE FEATURED WILSON LOVAT & SONS LTD, OF WOLVERHAMPTON, AND THE OTHER WAS JAMES MILLER & HARLOW LTD.
Now our immediate thoughts on the Miller advert was that the company must be a predecessor of Miller Mining, a company well known to any UK Hodgite, and as the Miller advert mentions an opencast around the Barnsley area, View Tree OCCS, that served to harden our opinion.
So how better to try to confirm these thoughts than to make contact firstly with the son of one of the most famous Miller directors, Roland Taylor, but sorry to say, David couldnt add anything to what we had already, so we went off to Barnsley Depot, to have words with the "oracle" himself, Fred Harston, now 83 years young, but as sharp as ever he was back in the glory days.
The task now centered on the opencast site itself, so Fred went off in certain directions, coming back to us initially with the following comments, as succinct as ever as you would expect…….
…..so we went back to the drawing board, but no sooner than that happened, in came number 2 message from Fred…..
"Hot off the press
There's current information still coming in, an old miner has just messaged me saying his dad worked at an open cast in Worsborough near Barnsley in the 50's but he can't remember what they called it, but he has got relatives still living in Worsborough and he's going to make further enquiries, will let you know of any new development.
Fred"
…..then quiet again until a few more days later, we received the final note……
Hi Editors, maybe something relevant, recently I was searching for a shed for the daughters allotment, I came across an housing estate & noticed a street name which was "View Tree close".
It was near a village called Wentworth just south of Barnsley, it's right in the area where we thought it would be, you can bet your bottom dollar that's it.
It's very close to Worsborough where the other guy mentioned his dad used to work.
Hope it makes a teaser for the website & creates a bit more speculation.
Cheers, Fred.
So there you have it, we have probably found out where this site was, so there remains nothing else other than to show you the marvellous page itself.
Cant quite suss what excavators are being used, especially those on the top of the cut, but who cares when a fleet of Eucs are barrelling around…as you know, they were one of the biggest trucks in the world at that time, in 1952.
The second advert was Wilson Lovatt, showing even more Eucs at work than the Miller one. BH were certainly pushing that model hard at the time.
We have not been able to make any location progress with this one unfortunately, but it was probably one in the West Midlands, that being the homeland of Wilson Lovatt, so it just remains to show you the image, and give many thanks to Fred Harston for his efforts on the background of this article.
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