Mexborough and Swinton Times, May 27th, 1932
Ol’ Man River has been in the news this week. It is not often that the Don forces itself on our notice. Anciently it was far more unruly but the working of coal eastward of Conisbrough has given it a more rapid flow and a freer outlet. The inundations in the Doncaster district to-day are the sort of thing which Mexborough once suffered, from slighter causes.
The flood of July 1875, recorded on the slipway of the ferry was eighteen inches above the highest mark reached last Monday. We have no record of the rainfall which produced that flood but it was probably less than the four inches we got between midnight on Friday and midnight on Sunday. Subsidence over a wide area above and below Mexborough has greatly eased the pressure of storm water and yet the Don on Sunday and Monday was an impressive sight as it tore past the town early twelve feet above its normal level. Long after the rain has ceased it rose at the rate of an inch an hour and at the “top of the tide” about three o’clock on Monday afternoon it was lapping the underside of the railway bridge at the eastern approach to Mexborough station. A few inches more and serious damage would have been suffered by the railway.
The unfortunate tenants of allotment gardens between river and railway and river and canal had to stand by and see them, for the second time within a year, laid waste. When they suffered disaster last September, they reflected philosophically that it was the sort of calamity that happens once in a lifetime and they went to digging and planting again in something of the fatalistic spirit of the dwellers upon Vesuvius, though they did not really expect another visitation in their time.