All history is local, as someone once said. Or if they didn’t, they should have.

Every great event that has shaped the world over thousands of years happened where somebody lived, or where somebody worked, or where somebody just happened to be walking past.

So often these people are ignored because they’re ordinary, like you and me.

But they are a huge part of history and sometimes, just sometimes, we get a chance to hear their stories.

Those huge and cataclysmic shifts in the way the world worked usually happened where somebody was taking no gorm (as they say round here) of what was going on in that unimpressive building where somebody was signing a treaty or inventing something astonishing.

They might have looked up and shrugged or they might just have carried on walking to the shop, or the mill, or the pit, or the field.

Local historians dig into the world around us and find those people who were more or less like us; those historians tell the stories of the forgotten men and women around whom history usually swirls, taking no notice of them.

One of our best local historians is the brilliant Brian Elliott, who has been illuminating neglected areas of local history for many years now, and who has just published, with Pen and Sword Books of Barnsley, what I consider to be his masterpiece: Miners and the Great War.

It’s a book that does what it says on the (snap) tin: it’s a history of the involvement of British miners in the First World War and as you turn the pages you can hear the voices of these people loud and clear, from all corners of the map but with many of them from Barnsley and the surrounding villages.

Voices belonging to men like Cliff Tyas of Fitzwilliam Street in Barnsley who joined up on the 25th of September 1914 at the Harvey Institute, and Gilbert Hall who worked at Elsecar Main and who joined up a few hours after Cliff Tyas.

Amazingly, they both survived the war and lived to tell the tale. Tales like that of Harry Glover from Stairfoot who survived the butchery of The Somme but was killed a few months later, or of the ‘reliant, persistent and popular’ Frank Ashton from Wombwell who was buried in France, and Sam Scargill from Houghton Main who won the Military Medal.

Brian tells the story of incidents near to home too: of the Goldthorpe Riots following the sinking of the Lusitania, where a ‘large and hostile crowd’ attacked Schonhuf’s pork butchers as well as the premises of another shopkeeper who was rumoured to be related to him; of the Bell family of Barnsley who found out at Christmas 1917 of their son who had been killed on the Western Front and of the poverty and near starvation that faced the miners and their families in the years immediately after the war.

Brian’s writing is powerful and well-researched, and always holds your attention; I’ve read lots of history books where the research takes over from the craft of writing and the book begins to totter under the weight of all that learning and the burning desire to get the facts in order and not to miss any detail out.

Brian doesn’t write like that: his sentences and paragraphs and chapters shine with humanity and love for his fellow human beings who had the bad luck to be thrust from the pit into a war that wasn’t of their choosing but which many willingly volunteered for.

And, as ever, the most moving parts of this kind of history are the official and unofficial writings and memories of those who took part. There are dry official letters like the one from the manager at Silverwood Colliery to the secretary at The War Office, asking that Ernest Rollett be released from duty to come back to work at the pit.

There are heartbreaking letters like the one from ‘a comrade’ to the mother of the aforementioned Harry Glover: ‘He was one of our best pals, and we are very sorry to lose him. He was struck by a piece of shrapnel whilst doing his duty near the German lines. We are pleased to see that he did not suffer any pain.’

Brian Elliott is to be congratulated for writing such a brilliant book and for keeping the stories of these times alive as they fade from memory into history. I urge you to read it.