Lives in Cricket No 40 - Edwin Smith

7 Chapter One Early days The long-established village of Grassmoor is three miles to the south of Chesterfield, in north-east Derbyshire. Sixteenth century parish records refer to it as Gresmore and perhaps its best-known resident was the former butler to Princess Diana, Paul Burrell, who grew up in the village. But that is only if you are not a cricket fan. Like so many villages throughout Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, it was for many years home to coal miners and in its heyday around 90 per cent of the male population worked at the colliery. In the early 19th century, there was evidence that rich seams of coal lay in the ground beneath the village and a number of entrepreneurs and industrialists made preliminary investigations into the viability of its extraction. One such businessman, Alfred Barnes, took the plunge to excavate the first mine shaft at Grassmoor, and got a team of miners working on it. They found rich seams of coal, and a colliery was built and fitted out with the necessary equipment, officially opening in 1880. Accommodation was built for the colliery workers and their families in two rows of terraced houses. One of these rows was called East Street, just a short walk from the colliery, but the locals called it ‘Sluggards Row’. The miners living in East Street tended to be the ones who arrived at work last and so a name was born. The second row was named Grasshill Street. These houses were built in the late 19th century, on a site that was a little further away from the colliery than East Street. It was more commonly the home of colliery officials and was nicknamed ‘Four Bob Row’ because, as the name suggests, the rent for each house was four shillings each week. The rows provided basic but dry accommodation for the workers and their families and the community grew as the colliery prospered. It was a successful enterprise, regarded as one of the best in the county and made Mr Barnes a very wealthy man. He later became Liberal MP for Chesterfield and also president of the Mining Association of Great Britain. He died in 1901, but his family were keen to give something back to the people of Grassmoor and invested in the land that later became Barnes Park, which opened in 1920. It originally had fields for playing football and cricket, swings for small children, a bowling green and tennis courts. The last two of these are long since gone, but the others survive and continue to do well. On 19 November 1933, an explosion occurred at the colliery, caused by