Are there any existing buildings that still show the damage of the sheffield blitz?

wasn't sheffield only bombed once? and they missed and bombed some bit of woodland? This is just what my grandparents have told me.

No it was more than once.

If you look through the threads ther are mentions of several different raids.

As a major industrial town we were of key stratigic importance to the war effort. This in turn made us a target for the Nazis.

It was similar during the cold war. I heard that the Russians had 5 ICBM's Directed at Sheffield alone.

Cheers

The best example I know of is the City hall. If you look at the steps and the big pillars at the front. There are some squares. These are repairs from where fragments of a bomb which went of in the square damaged the building lightly.

Large swathes of the centre of sheffield were damaged with bombs, much of the Moor was flattened. Many of the local theatres and cinemas were damaged. 77 people died in the old Marples pub in 1940, when it got a direct hit. Only 14 bodies could be identified.

just look at picture sheffield
http://www.picturesheffield.com

there are hundreds of pics of bomb damage from the war. I know of several places where houses are missing all over sheffield. Hillsborough, Meersbrook, Woodseats etc..

Uea i've seen a house at Heeley that made me post this topic. It's got a chimney breast on the side of it and the old fire places are blocked up.

Can you still see the city hall damage with the current repairs in progress?

Bottom of the Wicker look up at the inside of the Wicker Arches you will see a large hole covered in concrete that is where a German bomb was dropped through the bridge but did not explode. 8)

Fowler, I don't think you can see the city hall bomb repairs at the moment due to scaffolding. Went past at lunchtime.

The Cossack Pub was originally taller than it is now, it lost it's top half due to bomb damage in the war.

Achtung !

Wicker Arches unexploded bomb was found and removed in the late 70's - remember the scaffolding going up at the time - must have cut a hole underneath it to remove it.

Damned good shot by the Jerrys !

A whole third of the city centre was destroyed in one night in 1940.
During WWII sheffield had 130 air raid alerts
The one in 12 December 1940 was called the sheffield blitz. the bombs dropped for NINE HOURS!!!! in 16 air raids.
30,000 incendiary bombs, 50 parachute mines and 1,200 high explosive bombs fell on sheffield that night. Afterwards it was impossible to travel through the city centre as most main roads were blocked with huge piles of smouldering rubble.
Fourteen trams were destroyed.

There's a book you should still be able to get hold of called "Then and now, the Sheffield Blitz, Operation Crucible" by Alistair Lofthouse, ISBN 190158709-6. It's full of anecdotes about the blitz with photos of the damage with a photo of each place as it is today. There's also a map at the end showing where many of the bombs landed. If you go to the Local Studies Library, they also have a captured German Luftwaffe target map used by the bombers showing the areas they were aiming for. It's interesting to compare the target map with the one of where the bombs actually landed!

I have a book showing pictures loads of places hit by bombs in sheffield and it also contains a map of where all the known bombs landed. It is 78 pages long so and full of stories so you can imagine the damage that was caused.

It is called 1939 - 1945 Sheffield at war. It was published in 1948.

Just as a matter of interest between 1940 and 1942 there were 631 Dead, 589 seriously injured and 1228 slighltly injured.

I also worked at the Jessop Hospital and a bomh hit that. Don't know much detail but I was in the roof space and you could see all that the place had been burnt out.


As I kid I lived at tinsley and played hookey from school a few times and used to go by the canal behind the steel works. There were loads of old bomb craters there we used to play in.

I used to go to school from Pond St to Solly St during the war and made my way through the bombed buildings.
Fiifzallen Square with Marples, they say the bodies are still there in the footings. Up to Walshes which was a pile of rubble, where Hughes is today.
Cross the rd and C and A was bombed, the top of Angel st had disappeared. I walked on thro the rubble towards the back of the Cathedral, down St Pauls Cose and thro Paradise Square. At the bottom of the Square was what I think had been a Synogoge. There was a crazy balcony hanging from the half demolished walls and we used to dare each other to walk it.
Glass crunched as we walked, on and up Solly St whose buildings were flattened on each side, Croft School no longer existed just broken walls with debris hanging off.
My school St Vincents was next door and had taken the blast and was slightly damaged, as I remember there were no toilet doors, must have blown off in the blast !!

Hazel

I heard that the bombing of the Marples and along the Moor
occured on half day closing or the casualties would have been much higher.
I also heard the bombers missed their target so they dropped them anywhere which happened to be uptown

Originally posted by Cyclone
wasn't sheffield only bombed once? and they missed and bombed some bit of woodland? This is just what my grandparents have told me.

Cyclone, what are you talking about. read the posts. Go to waterstones and look at the local history books. :huh:

Originally posted by sweetdexter
I heard that the bombing of the Marples and along the Moor
occured on half day closing or the casualties would have been much higher.
I also heard the bombers missed their target so they dropped t
hem anywhere which happened to be uptown

My dad said that the bombers wanted the steel works. Made their starting point the Wicker Arches saw the shine of the tram lines, thought it was the river and went the wrong way, dropping bombs up High St and the Moor, Thus saving the Steel works and prob the war

Hazel

Originally posted by SnookerJohn
I have a book showing pictures loads of places hit by bombs in sheffield and it also contains a map of where all the known bombs landed. It is 78 pages long so and full of stories so you can imagine the damage that was caused.

It is called 1939 - 1945 Sheffield at war. It was published in 1948.

Just as a matter of interest between 1040 and 1942 there were 631 Dead, 589 seriously injured and 1228 slighltly injured.

I also worked at the Jessop Hospital and a bomh hit that. Don't know much detail but I was in the roof space and you could see all that the place had been burnt out.


As I kid I lived at tinsley and played hookey from school a few times and used to go by the canal behind the steel works.

There were loads of old bomb craters there we used to play in.

I also have a copy of this book although it came with a pull out map, quite large, showing where every bomb fell on Sheffield.

As a pointer, if you walk into Broomhill from Crookes, just before the lights on your left are two prefab garages. According to this map, a bomb fell here! Obviously, the houses were never rebuilt. There are numerous examples like this but I'm afraid I haven't looked at the book in years. (Infact, I don't even know where it is!)

And some of the bombs fell miles away from the city centre.

Nether Edge got quite a battering

Originally posted by Bikertec
Bottom of the Wicker look up at the inside of the Wicker Arches you will see a large hole covered in concrete that is where a German bomb was dropped through the bridge but did not explode. 8) Hi I used to have a garage in the wicker arches ,the top garage with the big red doors,inside arches were used as holding areas for elephants during the war,to move stuff damaged by the bombs,also a pub at the top of the pond street stationon the left corner,cannot recall the name but ,my fatherinlaw said a bomb hit it & all the bodies they could not get out,were left & lime was put down to destroy the remains.Do not know if this is a true fact.

Originally posted by tosh13
Hi I used to have a garage in the wicker arches ,the top garage with the big red doors,inside arches were used as holding areas for elephants during the war,to move stuff damaged by the bombs,also a pub at the top of the pond street stationon the left corner,cannot recall the name but ,my fatherinlaw said a bomb hit it & all the bodies they could not get out,were left & lime was put down to destroy the remains.Do not know if this is a true fact.
That was the Marples on the corner of Fitzalan Square. They had a big cellar so a lot of people took refuge there, and it received a direct hit.

marples has a plaque on the wall inside to comemorate the people who died in there,they sheltered in the cellar and when it was hit the building collapsed on top of them,i think they left the bodies there but cant be sure as every one had to be accounted for

Originally posted by muddycoffee
Cyclone, what are you talking about. read the posts. Go to waterstones and look at the local history books. :huh:

would that be the posts that were made after mine? I haven't mastered time travel yet. And it was an idle question, I'm not interested enough to bother reading up or i'd have already done it.
Apart from your response all the others have filled me in quite a lot.

Originally posted by algy
That was the Marples on the corner of Fitzalan Square. They had a big cellar so a lot of people took refuge there, and it received a direct hit. That's it I recall the name,my fatherinlaw used to go in there & thanks for the info

About ten years ago a large semi detached house in Netheredge was having the entire gable wall rebuilt. I know that the wall was distinctly bowed caused by a bomb explosion.
My sister had looked at buying the house twenty years ago and had been told by her surveyor that it was either going to need rebuilding or it was going to fall down.

Originally posted by Cyclone
would that be the posts that were made after mine? I haven't mastered time travel yet.

I'm sorry for being short with you Cyclone. I've no excuse.
:sad:

[QUOTE]Originally posted by hazel
[B]I used to go to school from Pond St to Solly St during the war and made my way through the bombed buildings.
Fiifzallen Square with Marples, they say the bodies are still there in the footings.

Did they not pour quicklime into the basements of the buildings to deal with the bodies? I remember my grandmother speaking about this when I was little, I remember being horrified when she told me what the quicklime did

My mum was a conductress on the trams during the war and one particular night, her driver said I've had enough for today Mary, shall we call and have a pint before we finish, and she said no I'm getting of home, so he went and unfortunatly it was that night the bomb was dropped, and it was the Marples he had chosen to have his last pint, and of course he died when the bomb hit, I'm glad my mum didn't drink much She also told me that during a black out she was still working on the trams and she could hardly see anything, well as she was clipping tickets, instead of half pence tickets she was punching away at two pence tickets, and obviously she was short of cash when she went back to the depot, and she had to repay all the money.

Is the Plaque still there in "Marples" as it is now a shop for motorcycle clobber i think???

I heard the same story, about the quicklime, and that there were bodies still left down there.

I don't know if this was a true fact, or not. Maybe, because the place was so crowded that night, there were too many bodies to retrieve. I was not around, then, so I can't say.

Something that makes me think that this is not entirely true, (perhaps it's one of those urban legends...?) is the following....

My grandma told me about going past the Marples, in the aftermath of the bombing.

She watched the workers retrieving bodies of people killed in the incident.

She said that she recalled seeing them retrieving the body of an incredibly handsome young man from the debris. She said he loked like an adonis, so beautiful, and that she was struck by the fact that there was not a mark on him.

He must've been killed by the shockwave, rather than a direct injury. She always sounded so sad when she told that story.

The fact that my grandma saw, with her own eyes, bodies being retrieved, makes me think that the story about the bodies being left there may not be right.

Re :- the damage in the Nether Edge area: my old school, Sharrow Lane School, was hit by a bomb, and a section of it was rebuilt.

You could see the newer sections abutted against the older architecture. (I heard tell, but I don't know how accurate this is, that one of the teachers there was killed when the bomb hit the school, however itf this were true, surely there would have been some memorial to him/her at the school?)

The house I lived in, when I was newly married, was directly opposite the school. The chimney suffered some structural damage, at the time of the blast, and was not repaired entirely correctly. There were problems with it, even fifty years on.

PT

I heard the quicklime stiry too. I understand that some bodies were retrieved, but that the rescuers were pulled out because there was no sign of life and the structure was on the point of collapse, hence the quicklime.

hmmm (*thinks*)

that *is* a logical explanation.

The theory that

"they got *some* of the bodies out, therefore they got *all* of the bodies out"

is a flawed premise on my part. (a bit like "all dogs have four legs, therefore everything with four legs is a dog")

PT

Behind Meadowhall Retail Park there is a series of locks on the canal this is also accessible from Shepcote Lane. at the side of these locks are a series of hugh stones. Carved in the wall of one of the locks is 'Blitzed and the date, I was told that one lock was destroyed by a bomb and was replaced differently, hence the huge stones which used to be part of the original lock.
Just as a matter of interest on the 5 weirs walk Newhall Road to Stevenson Road section heading towards town is a brick pillbox complete with gunslits. This is just at the bottom of Attercliffe cemetary opposite the junction of Worksop Road.. This was apparantly there to protect Sanderson Kaysers on Newhall Road who were involved in top secret work from German paratroops.