Mexborough & Swinton Times – Saturday 29 April 1922
A Denaby Nuisance
You may become acclimatised to the sights, sounds, and smells of a district like this, even to the point of missing them and craving them when you are exiledf a fortnight in some Lakeland village or among the Welsh hills.
So that the nuisance said to be rife at Denaby must be more than ordinarily pungent. According to Councillor Hardy, that Eden, whose primeval purity and innocence was first sullied by socialist, is now vexed with a very much worse evil. Stentorian hawkers make day hideous and all devastating the district with neurasthenia. All day long the air quivers with the row and racket of their commerce, and miners, spent with toil, toss restlessly in their cribs. woo sleep as vainly as Harry Bolingbroke did, and entertain dark thoughts of dope.
The Council are powerless, for these tormentors are legion and you cannot go seeking injunctions against hawkers in general. So perversely are the affairs of this world ordered that our town cries are all soft spoken men touched with asthma, while our pedlars and night-rakes are fitted with lungs of leather.
The evil is not peculiar to Denaby, though it pronounced there and I agree that it is hard that Denaby people, to whom sleep is it valuable privilege, should he denied it.