South Yorkshire Times – December 6, 1929

Mrs E.Wood
Wombwell’s Oldest Inhabitant
Link with the Oaks Disaster

Wombwell lost its oldest inhabitant on Saturday, when the death occurred of Mrs. Elizabeth Wood, of 91, East View, New Scarboro’. Mrs. Wood had attained the age of 94, and was a remarkable woman in many ways. She retained her faculties to the last, and beyond feeling an occasional twinge of rheumatism she had no bodily ailment to speak of.

She died practically without illness and passed peacefully away at the home  of her daughter, Mrs. Martha Jennings, in whose affectionate care she had remained for the past thirteen or fourteen years. In spite of her great age Mrs. Wood had all her wits about her, and was possessed of a keen sense of humour. A few hours before her death she was chatting good humouredly with her grandchildren, whose affection for her was one of the joys of the old lady’s declining years.

Mrs. Wood had quite a number of friends who out of reverence for her age and genial disposition used to call to enquire after her health. All such she used to treat with good-natured impartiality, and was accustomed to use the terms “lass” or “lad” when addressing her most distinguished visitors. Advancing years effected little change in the old lady’s outlook on life, so that to anyone with a gift for poetic contemplation she might have occurred as a faded but sweetly perfumed flower from the early Victorian garden. Though there was nothing about her death to excite regret, her passing will leave a void in the lives of the neighbourly folk by whom she has been surrounded at New Scarborough. Mrs. Wood has been regarded as something of an institution in that neighbourhood.

Mrs. Wood was born in Baker    Street, Barnsley. She was born into a collier’s home, and her whole life has been bound up with the mining industry. Her husband, Mr. Jonas Wood, who died fifteen years ago at the age of 83, was one of the earliest members of the Yorkshire Miners’  Association, on the books of which he remained up to remained his death. Afterwards Mrs. Wood continued to pay her contributions in order that she would be qualified for death benefit. When Mr. Wood retired from colliery work he took on the job of “knocker-up” in the Scarborough district, a function he continued to discharge unfailingly until his death.

Mrs. Wood vas destined to become acquainted with the arches and grim associations of the mining in industry, at an early age. When she was nine her father and also her brother lost their lives in  an explosion at the Oaks Colliery, near Barnsley. This reduced the family to such an extremity that, young as she was, Mrs. Wood had to go out to earn her own living. Before she was ten she obtained work at a Barnsley shirt factory, where she remained throughout her married life with very few “idIe  intervals ‘until she was 70. Mrs. Wood has seen many changes in the physical ‘features of Barnsley as a town. She used to recall that in her younger days the top side of Barnsley was a veritable warren of small pits, and that running down the middle of New Street, now one of Barnsley’s most pretentious thoroughfares, there ran a rail track for the conveyance of small coal wagons. The early part of her married life was spent at Gawber, from which place she moved to Wombwell some thirty years ago, and has since lived in the same house at New Scarborough.

Mrs. Wood has cause to be proud of her family. She herself had seventeen children of whom seven are now living. The “Wood clan” embraced 50 grandchildren and more great-great grandchildren than Mrs. Wood could count. Two or three of her children, whom she had not seen for thirty years, and numerous offspring are spread over the American continent. Her eldest daughter Jemimah, is 76, and her “baby,” Herbert, 50.

While Mrs. Wood lived, Mrs. Handley, of 17, Roebuck Street, Wombwell, was at the same time a grandchild and a grandmother. Mrs. Handley had five grandchildren, of whom Mrs. Wood was the great-great-grandmother. Until recently Mrs. Wood was a very active woman. She found great joy in life, was always thankful for small kjndnesses, and appreciated little acts of thoughtfulness shown toward her. In her old age she was never so happy as when puffing away at her old clay pipe, “twist” being her favourite brand of tobacco. Prescient of a waning spirit, however, was the fact that she recently put aside her pipe and showed no further inclination for eight. Mrs Wood used to look forward with great eagerness to the annual outings of the Wombwell Old People’s Treat Committee, and it was a great disappointment when indisposition prevented her taking part in the last outing.

There was a large following of relatives at the funeral at Wombwell Cemetery on Tuesday. Mr. A. Whitehead was the undertaker.