H ELM VILLA

Elm Villa Farm was situated opposite the top of Grandstand Road
The story of Arundels and Elm Villa Farm starts with Thomas Arundel who was born in 1840 and passed away 1923. His resulting marriage to Catherine (Kate) Maran from Newry Co. Down Ireland in 1860 would no doubt have been the reason for their family of 10 children being brought up in the Catholic faith. Most of the Arundels in the area had no strong religious leanings, in fact. quite a few in earlier years had been Dissenters, Thomas Arundel was always known locally as ‘Bull Tom’ owing to his large stature and booming voice.
In1890 he commenced buying land in the Grandstand Road and Lawns area with the intention of stepping out into the Market Gardening and Rhubarb growing business, 'Bull Tom' at this period lived in one of a row of houses known as Springfield Terrace situated at the Outwood end of Grandstand Road, He eventually purchased a few of these houses as an investment and later on his Grandson Joseph would marry and raise most of his family in one of these cottages As 'Bull Tom' grew older he brought his third son, Walter who was born in 1869 into the market gardening business, Tom by this time had bought Elm Villa Farm and was the owner of about 70 acres of land and numerous rhubarb forcing sheds in the area. 'Bull Tom' never left Springfield cottages, however; he established his son Walter with his wife Ann and their young family in Elm Villa Farm.
Walter's wife Ann Williams was born 1870 in Alfreton Derbyshire and came to Outwood when she was 11 years old. Her father would no doubt have brought his wife and family to Yorkshire in search of work in one of the many coal mines in the area, Walter and Ann were married in 1889, she was 19 and Walter was 20. 'Bull Tom' passed away in 1923, ten years after his wife Catherine, by this time his son Walter had taken over the market garden and rhubarb growing business and had become well established with his wife and family in Elm Villa Farm.
In 1926 there was a General Workers Strike in England and the coal miners stayed out for some 26 weeks thus coal became in very short supply and at a premium. On one of the fields Walter owned near the top of Grandstand Road there was a large crater overgrown with bushes and weeds always known locally as the 'Dump', probably due to the fact that people would use it for dumping their unwanted rubbish, apparantly in the 1700s and possibly long before that coal had been outcropped from a seam which surfaced at the ‘Dump’.
Walter decided to open this out there being such a big demand for coal. He soon had some willing workers in the local miners, who being on strike were glad to come and work for a shilling or two.
However his bonanza was not as good as he thought it was going to be, he was visited by the local Lofthouse Colliery agent, a Mr Silas Tuffley, Silas was a bachelor living in Outwood and a local Sunday School teacher, in fact he taught at the Lawns Mission which was situated only a matter of a hundred yards from where Walter was extracting coal.
He informed Walter there would have to be royalties paid on every ton of coal mined, this was a tax which was due to the people who owned the mineral rights to the land, from which the coal was mined, which I am almost sure was Lofthouse Colliery.
Even though the news deflated Walter he paid the tax because as some might say he had a 'Good little draw' out of the venture.
Walter passed away in 1942 and the business passed into the hands of his wife Ann, who together with the help of her eldest living son Joseph and daughters Catherine and Alice ran the farm for the next 16 years until she herself passed away in 1958 at the ripe old age of 88.
Ann was a very capable business woman and had always looked after the financial side of things.
The farm then passed into the hands of son Joseph and eventually after his retirement in the mid 1960s, Elm Villa Farm was sold to Mr Hayden Hargreaves a produce merchant of Wakefield He soon had the house pulled down and used the stone to build a new bungalow which stands on the site today.

A CASE OF BEING FORGETFUL. Walter and Ann had a large family. I well remember a time in the early 1970s when Ann would be well into her eighties, and not being able to walk very far, was being pushed up Grandstand Road in a wheelchair by her daughter Catherine who herself would be over 60. To make conversation, I casually asked Ann how many children had she had. Imagine my surprise when she replied 'I don't really know' Then she turned to Catherine and said 'Was it 15 or 16 Cathy?', We do know she reared 8 to adulthood so she must either have lost the others in childbirth or at a very young age, which was not unusual in those days. Even though she had all those children she still went out and worked on the land. They don't make them like that these days.