Mexborough and Swinton Times July 5, 1929

Bliss in Caravan.

Wombwell Couple’s 50 Years Married Life.

Australian Adventure.

In a little caravan that stands on a patch of ground adjoining the canal at Wombwell Junction there will shortly occur a romantic happening. The occupants of the caravan, Mr. Tom Adams and his Wife Martha, are looking forward to the celebration of their “golden wedding.” The were married at Batley in 1879. Mr. Adams will be 70 years of age in August of this year, and Mrs. Adams will attain the “allotted span” in October. Both enjoy excellent health, and their little home on wheels is a shrine of contentment and a picture of domestic] comfort. “Two happier people never breathed,” as Mrs. Adorns told our reporter who had an interesting chat with her on her caravan steps this week.

An Englishman’s Caravan His Castle.

It will be noted that the interview took place on the caravan steps. This is signicant. Mrs. Adams believes that a home should be private, and, that neighbouring and gossiping are the ruination of domestic life. In her good natured way sire will chat freely with enyone, but there is just one limit to her affability.

As she rests with her elbows on the lower half of her caravan door there seems to be Impelling challenging in her attitude. “`I like you very much where you are,” she seems to say, “but come any nearer and we may fall out.” If you get u glimpse inside the caravan you are lucky. Our reporter was permitted that privilege, but nothing more. However, that is a personal rule with Mrs. Adams, and surely at her time of life she is entitled to her idiosyncrasies.

Travelled Round The World.

Now a word about Mr. Adams. A man of short stature with a strong and well-knit frame, he has had a remarkable career. He began work at eight years of age, and did not “clocking” until he was about 65. He has worked in “practically every pit in South Yorkshire.” He can name at least 50 collieries which has been employed, but, as he said, “there are others too numerous to mention.”

Nor does that cover the whole span of Mr. Adams’s working career.

He has worked in the ironstone mines, has travelled round the world, as worked on the railways in Australia, has helped in the boring of artesian wells in Queensland, has roughed it on a sheep farm, and has tried his hand as a navvy. Probably, if he followed his own inclinations he would be working now, for while the reporter was chatting with Mrs. Adams at the caravan door Mr. Adams arrived on the scene with a heavy sack slung loosely over an old push bicycle. He had spent the better part of the day picking coal, and was just reaching home with his spoils.

A Frugal Life.

The old couple lead a very frugal life, as needs they must, for beyond their pensions they have little to subsist on. As Mrs. Adams said “These are very hard days with the cost of living so high savings do not last very long.” She flourished a rate demand note, and remarked, “We have to find a bit to meet these when they come along.”

She thinks a home on wheels ought not to be rated “by rights,’ but hasn’t the money to fight with. She added, “Luckily we have two sons to help us out, they are good lads, and I don’t know what we should do without them.” These two sons live at Attercliffe. They are their only children.

Born At Kimberworth,

Mr. Adams was born at Kimberworth, but his parents moved into the Huddersfield district when he was a baby. He began his working life at an ironstone mine at Digby near Huddersfield, being first employed as a trammer. The corves carried two and a half hundredweight, and for each one there were two boy trammers. But it was never his disposition to stay in one spot long. From Digby he went to work at a day hole at New Mill, then to the Sinking a Wood pit, New Mill, and then to “Asquith s pit” at Howden Clough, so called because it was owned by the family of the late Lord Asquith. Some 30 or 40 years ago the couple moved into the Sheffield district, where at one time or another Mr. Adams was employed at practically all the pits in the locality, including Nunnery, Orgreave, Waverlery and Treeton.

“As for the collieries this district,” he said, “there is not one in which I have not worked.” His longest working spells were spent at Darfield Main, Cortonwood, and. Wombwell Main. He worked with the sinkers at Wombwell Main Colliery over forty years ago.

But Mr. Adorns was ever a roamer. He could not stick to one job long, nor to the country for that matter. Some twenty years ago, despite the fact that he was well on in middle life, he decided to try his luck in Australia. Accordingly he left England on the understanding that if he made good Mrs. Adams was to follow him. The children had then grown up, and the couple had only themselves to think about.

So Mr. Adams arrived in the Commonwealth, with till the buoyancy and hope that a young man might display, and, anxious for something new with a spice of adventure in it, he struck out for the interior.

His first job was in a coal mine in New South Wales, where he remained no longer than was necessary to get rid of a bad dose of sea sickness and to find his bearings. As a matter of fact, it was the sea sickness that caused him to have to return to England earlier than was intended. The sickness brought on some physical derangement, and be bad to come back to this country for an operation. But in the meantime he had a good look round the southernmost continent.

In The Bush.

From New South Wales Mr. Adams struck off into Queensland, where engineers were boring artesian wells in connection with a scheme of irrigation. In this work he took a very great interest, and followed closely the system by which enormous tracks of parched and barren land were made fertile. He explained how two men operating a delver with eight bullocks could make 2 miles of “perfect trench” in a single day, the line having first been set for them by surveyors and engineers. But for the sheep farmer lack of water was still the bugbear, and when Mr Adams changed his occupation to that of a sheep tender he was often in desperate straits through thirst.

He relates how on one occasion he was making his way to the seaboard and had to rush in order to catch the boat. Over the route of 130 miles to the nearest rail head station there was nothing to mark the road for the wayfarer but the rough tracks of bullock carts.

The hot season was on, and it was necessary to shelter in the middle of the day and to walk far on into the night. Mr. Adams had “hiked” what he thought was about half the distance when, to his dismay, he discovered that he had taken the wrong track and was lost! His water supply having run out, his position was desperate. Water courses were very rarely met with in those parts, and sheep farming stations were few and far between. The only course open to him was to strike out in the hope that by a lucky chance he would find relief for his thirst somewhere. Two days elapsed, and then on the verge of madness he struck a river. He was conscious of only one action, and that was that he waded knee deep into the river and drank his fill. The next thing he remembered was that he was under the care of a party of men who had come up the river to shoot opossum. The men happened to arrive on the scene at the very moment in which he collapsed in the stream.

His Best Day’s Work.

Returning to En-gland, Mr. Adams underwent an operation for rupture at the Beckett Hospital, Barnsley. He describes this as the best day’s work he ever did in his life. “At fifty-five,” he said, “I was a broken man. Now I am as fit as ever I have been.”

Mrs. Adams says she has never felt better in her life. “We have been in this caravan seventeen years,” she said, “and we have, never spent a penny on doctoring.” Her only regret is that “people are inclined to look down on caravan dwellers and class them all alike.”