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Thurcroft (Thurs croft=Thori's enclosure?), population c 6,200 (1991 census) |
The name Thurcroft has Norse (Viking) roots as 'thorr' means thunder in old Norse, so could be 1,200 plus years old.
However, until the 20th century Thurcroft consisted of Thurcroft Hall and three farms and was nothing like its present incarnation (see the 1905 map). It was 20th century coal mining that has shaped Thurcroft.
The land on which the village would one day stand was bought in the 1800s (along with the Hall) by a Sheffield brewer (Thomas Marrian), whose son, Thomas Marrian Jr, leased the coal mining rights to Rothervale collieries in 1902. Modern Thurcroft only really came into being with the sinking of the coal mine in around 1909 which is when many of the terraced houses so characteristic of coal mining the last quarter of the 19th century and first quarter of the 20th century on the area of this site. The population grew from next to nothing in 1900 to around 2,000 in 1923: Shortly after which the village saw hard times in the 1926 coal strike, when 250,000 free meals were given out between May and September. By 1947 the mine employed over 2,000 men, and in the 1984/85 miners strike was once again in the thick of the action.
The coal mine was closed in Thurcroft in 1991 despite attempts by the workforce to buy it out.
Before 1995 Thurcroft was within the parish of Laughton-en-Le Morthen and a permanent stone church was only built in 1937, making it one of the newest on this website (although there was a Methodist chapel built in 1917, and a village cemetery was established in the 1920s). Thurcroft parish became separate from Laughton in 1995.
Thurcroft still feels a little like a company mining village, albeit one who's mining heart has been removed. The old colliery site and the pit tips still remain though, as they do in Dinnington and Kiveton, although time and landscaping is starting to erase traces of the once large coalmine.
