can you rember the weather being really bad
would love to here your storys for our history group

It depends what you mean by bad. I can remember a couple of times in the early/mid 1950's going home from school in the dark when it should have been light. It was before Sheffield's clean air policy, and the smoke got trapped under the clouds that were low on the surrounding hills and it was almost pitch dark at 3.30. I can also remember at the end of the 50's walking to school with visibility reduced to about 4 yards by a thick yellow smog.
Then we had the great gale (hurricane) in 1962, when a lot of damage was done to buildings. I remember walking to Firth Park School across Longley Park and to make any progress leaning at 45 degrees into the wind without falling over!

My mum who sadly is no longer with us, used to talk about the great storm..can't remember when it was exactly but she said it was gale force winds so strong that she say people be lifted off the ground!

I was about 12 in 1962 when the great storm hot the houses were empty down Portland Street which later became Kelvin flats. I had to walk down the centre of the road. This was due to the still high winds in the mornoing and the slates being blown of the roofs of the empty houses. I went to Myers Grove and some of the prefabs were flattened. Of a school that was abot 300+ only. Only about 20 kids turned up, we stayed there for safety until it was safe to return home.:clap:

The big Storm :-- As far as I remember , 4 people were killed in the storm and the damage to property was so widespread that the government declared a State of Emergency. That seems pretty dramatic but I think it just meant that it gave the government powers to get the mess cleared up quickly.
We were lucky that we lived in a fairly sheltered spot , just off Sharrowvale Road at the time but even so , there was damage------I remember Hickmott Road being littered with bricks and debris.
About the worst affected area was the East Bank road area of the Arbourthorne. There were some prefabs there that just got , "picked up" , and hurled about.
I remember the Smogs of Sheffield too----there was a particularly bad one in Dec.1962. I remember it because I was hitch-hiking from London to Sheffield at the time and it was a nightmare.
When people moan about pollution today , I don't think they've any conception of what Sheffield was like , pre-1960. The pollution we've got today is Social pollution-----even worse in my opinion.

I know it wasn't caused by weather but still a great story rarely discussed The Sheffield Flood (http://www.shef.ac.uk/misc/personal/cs1ma/flood/flood.html)

:)

The great gale of '62. I remember the evening before the sky turned a very unusual pink colour. During the night the storm hit hard, many houses damaged, and some demolished. Just about all the Tv aerials were blown down, I subcontracted to Wigfall's to help put them back up again. My pal and I were re-erecting 10 a day, six days a week, along with many other crews. This schedule lasted for 6 weeks.

Here is an earlier thread about the Sheffiled Gales:

http://www.sheffieldforum.co.uk/showthread.php?s=&threadid=9475

My dad slept right through the gale in 1962 whilst everyone else watched chimney pots, roof slates and whole prefabs fly past their windows (allegedly).

Winter 1947 the snow was so deep in concord park that only the top 12 inches of the park swings could be seen..The sun had caused the top of the snow to form a crust strong enough for a 7 year old (Me) to walk on top of the snow and sit down on top of the swings.

jan 1987 saw the lowest day time temp ever recorded, the temp on the 7th till the 10th never got above minus 6 deg c and on one day stayed at minus 8. altho 1963 and 1947 were longer and more severe 87 day time temp may never be beaten.

I vividly recall storms here in Sheffield being alot more dramatic than the ones in Hampshire. I assume it's because of the topography.

On more than occasion in the 1970's, I remember sitting in the living room on Lowedges estate just after midday, and all of a sudden, it'd start getting dark. It would get so dark that we couldn't see across the room and we had to put the lights on.

It was an almighty thunderstorm, with very heavy cloudbursts of rain and hail which turned the streets and pavements into fast flowing rivers, and back gardens into lakes. It felt each time that the storm passed directly over head, with the crashes of thunder coinciding with the lightning and so loud that you couldn't hear what the person sat next to you was saying. The windows would actually buzz with the volume, and the floorboards would vibrate.

Those storms were terrifying, and I've never experienced any as extreme (except the "hurricane" of 1987 in Hampshire, but that was wind, not what I'd class as a storm per se).

Approximately the summer of 2004, I witnessed a funnel cloud forming as it passed over Dronfield from Holmesfield direction. I don't believed it touched down (which would have caused horrific damage), but it was both fascinating and chilling to watch.

The Big Freeze February 1963.

http://i168.photobucket.com/albums/u179/hunnybunch37/23Feb17th1963TheBigFreeze.jpg

Our daughter was 10 weeks old here.

During one bad bout of smog I was on the buses. We were coming from Shiregreen and halfway between the bottom of Bellhouse Road and Barnsley Road we couldn't see but a few inches in front of us. I, the conductor, had to walk in front of the bus until we reached higher ground and it had lifted a bit. I thank God I had a good bus driver, Alex Jaffrays, for at times I could feel the bus touching the back of me.

Its interesting reading about adverse weather, I remember the summer of 76 as it was the year I left school but isn’t it strange that al this happened before anybody had even thought about Global Warming.

:huh:

In the gale of '62 I was on the top floor of Regent Court flats. Apparently they swayed violently in the wind (designed to do so).
I slept through it, lol.

I was only 11, but remember seeing the devastation the following day. My uncles car was flattened by a falling tree.

In the gale of '62 I was on the top floor of Regent Court flats. Apparently they swayed violently in the wind (designed to do so).
I slept through it, lol.

I was only 11, but remember seeing the devastation the following day. My uncles car was flattened by a falling tree.

I was catching the bus to go to work about 5.30 in the morning. I was having to cling to the bus stop, the wind was so strong and there was debris flying about all over the place. I decided it was a bit stupid to stand there and went back home.:rolleyes:

I've already related, elsewhere on here, the story of the gale of 62, where my uncle wore his motorbike-helmet to go outside to the lavatory across the yard,, at my grandparents' home in attercliffe. He was mocked, and jeered at, but the mocking stopped when he came back in, as white as a sheet, with a slate, from the roof, embedded into the helmet.

djelibabi, I wonder if that storm you are mentioning from the 70s was the same one that damaged my family's littel terraced house in sharrow? My sister and I were sat in our doorway, watching this wonderful storm, in the summer of about 1975, and my mother gave a start at a particularly massive bang from the thunder and lightning. she made me go into the living room to unplug the TV.

when I got to the tv, i found the floor was sodden, absolutely drenched, when I looked up, I saw the bay-window in the living room had been struck by the lightning, and had come-away from the wall, letting the rain in. that was scary.

I was working at Smiths dry cleaners in the summer of '76. It was normally a very hot place to work in but this day we had to switch all the machines off it was too hot to work. The operaters were wearing just an overall with nothing underneath and it was still unbearable.

Plain Talker

It could well have been! I just have vivid recollections of a fight between me, my nan and her lightweight alsation all trying to hide under the dining table! At the time, I was terrified of thunder storms, but now I'm fascinated by positive streamers, stepped leaders etc etc.

In fact, once thunder storm within the past 3 years springs to mind.....

We have a shelter built over our rear patio, and during one storm, I was stood on the patio in bare feet (the ground was dry) watching the storm, and I swear I saw a positive streamer go up from a bush in our backgarden not 10 feet away from me, and the lightning touched down in a garden across the back of ours. I felt my feet tingling, and decided discretion was the better part of valour, and ended up sat cross legged just inside the back door!

For those who don't know, a positive streamer is what objects on the ground send up when the lightning's looking for a way to connect from the clouds (that's the stepped leader). Luckily the one in our garden didn't connect, or I may have been killed!

I vividly recall the summer of 76.....being bitten to shreds by ladybirds cos their food supply (aphids) had exploded that summer. I still recall seeing the ruins of Derwent village exposed in Ladybower reservoir too (but that's covered in another thread somewhere on here).

I remember the winter of 47/8.
I was 10 and it was my scholarship year at school.
It snowed and snowed and the snow remained on the ground for months. I spent 6 wks off school because we were snowed in and my Mom needed help cos I had a small brother. Our front door was unusable as it opened out into a rectangle of snow, it was so deep. All the houses had gennels made of snow leading to the road and the snow was so high I could not be seen when walking down the path. We had great fun walking on top of it because it was hard and compact. Was like living in a different world almost at bedroom height everybody in separate dwelings isolated from each other, I suppose I saw it from a worms eye view because when I walked on the cleared road I could not see over the piled snow.The milkman could not get up the road to deliver so we used to fetch it ourselves from where he was parked.
I went back to school eventually.
hazel

I remember once in the 70's, coming up to Lowedges for the Easter holidays, and waking up one morning to find snow drifts up to the ground floor windowsills.

Where we lived darn Sarf, we didn't see snow due to living so close to the sea, so this was amazing for us nippers! As soon as we could badger our parents, we donned our waterproofs and wellies, and leapt outside, chucking ourselves about in it!

I also recall we couldn't find our car parked on the kerb. We had to go along to each "lump", clear a bit of snow off the side to check the colour, and go along to the next one til we found one we recognised before digging it out!

nobody but a real slob would go out without white collar &tie,just walking downtown would turn your neck and collar dirty black fm the smog ,at 73 i,m still coughing it up.