This fascinating book is the culmination of more than a year's research by Anthony Dodsworth helped by members of the Rawmarsh and Parkgate Local History Group and some of the students from St Pius X Catholic High School, Wath-upon-Dearne. The area's unique heritage is captured here with stories of schooldays, the Whit parades, working lives in the coal mines and steelworks, the Second World War, and, of course, some of Rawmarsh's well-known and shops and businesses, including Schonhut's Butchers and Robbie's Picture House. Filled with tales that will move, remind and delight the reader, this nostalgic volume will engage and entrance all who know the area.

Secret Rotherham offers a unique insight into this bustling, modern South Yorkshire town through a series of little-known and forgotten stories, facts and anecdotes from its past. The town has an enviable industrial history: Nelson's HMS Victory was armed with Walker cannons made at Masbrough, the iron plates for Isambard Brunel's steamship the Great Eastern were manufactured at Parkgate Iron & Steel Works, and the firm of Guest & Chrimes invented the modern screw-down tap. Over the centuries the Rotherham area has also had its fair share of famous residents and visitors. It was the home of the Earl of Strafford, who was beheaded in 1641; John Wesley, the 'Father of Methodism', was a fairly frequent (if not always welcome) visitor to the area; Ebenezer Elliott, the 'Corn Law Rhymer', was born and bought up in the town; and the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams spent many a summer in one of the outlying villages. In Secret Rotherham Melvyn Jones and Anthony Dodsworth pull back the curtains of history to peer into the borough's distant and not so distant past to reveal the forgotten, the strange and the unlikely.