Mexborough & Swinton Times, November 24
Mr. W. H. Chambers
Mr. W. H. Chambers has retired from the position of managing director of the Denaby and Cadeby Collieries, and is succeeded by Major J. Leslie, a prominent member of the firm of France, Fenwick and Company, who as we announced last week, have acquired the controlling interest.
Mr Chambers is well advanced in years, though time has dealt gently with him, and he prepared for his retirement a year or so ago when he settled at Clayworth Hall, near Retford, and relinquished his many public and social positions in this district, retaining only the chief direction of the collieries.
His retirement even now is not complete. But we lose intimate touch at length with a man who for nearly half-a-century has stood head and shoulders above his contemporaries in the industrial life of this district. He has won a national reputation as a mining engineer, and has built up by his genius and indomitable industry one of the finest and most efficient organisms that the British coal industry has to show.
On the industrial side his work has been completely successful, and if you seek his monument by a captain of industry you have only to look around those splendid pits. To the welfare of the population around the collieries he devoted the same earnest and painstaking diligence.
He was not perhaps so profound a psychologist as he was a brilliant engineer and organiser, but he was continually striving to brighten and improve the life and time of the village in which he did his life´s work, and with a high proportion of success.
He was intensely well meaning and underlying is sterner qualities of courage, strength, firmness, and authority, so necessary for the conduct of the large interests entrusted to him was a fund of kindliness and sociability which instantly responded where it met its like.
He will always be held in high admiration and respect by those who understood him and were able to appreciate the special difficulties of his position.
If for nothing else, he will long be remembered as the founder of the ambulance movement in this district and the creator of an organization, now spread all over the South Yorkshire coalfield, which has probably saved many lives, and has certainly minimised much injury and suffering.