Harleyman

One of my co-workers committed suicide. He was a quiet, pleasant guy by nature and popular with his fellow employees. Apparently he had wife trouble. Another man involved. He hung himself in a loft above the shower room and was only found by accident on Monday morning when an electrician went up there to check a fuse box. He had come in the previous day and told the security guard that he had been called in to work. Obviously a very tragic occurence but very bizarre in the sense of his choice of place to do it.

Hi jomarch, Yes, the school was opposite the barracks. Forgot to mention that. I was threatened with a caning on my first day there because one of the nuns said I had damaged one of the bars of a fire guard. There used to be a store across the street (long gone I'm sure) that used to use those metal cylinders to send paperwork through tubes around the store. I can still remember the sound they made. I saw my first jet plane from the school yard. It was a Gloster Meteor and the noise and speed were unbelievable.

Harpenden just north of London. Lovely town in the stockbroker belt but don't ask about house prices. I couldn't even afford a dog kennel in that town.

Any of the older members went to the Sacred Heart School? I went there near the end of world war 2. The school was located on a side road off I believe Penistone Road and not far from the Wednesday ground. Correct me if I'm wrong. The teachers were all nuns and a terrifying bunch they were to a five year old. Cant remember any of their names but there was a canon Dunsford and there was a church right next door to the school. The school itself was a little old red brick single storey building with steps leading up to the entrance. There was a head teacher, a mr. Slaven who died of jaundice. I remember my mother telling me this. The school was still there in 1983 when I took my daughter to see it while on a visit to England and I remember telling her how I managed to get my head stuck between the iron railings one day which understandably she found vert amusing.

I had an aunt Beatrice who worked in the war but not in the steelworks. She used to walk around in the blackout wearing a tin hat and an ARP armband. She also used to blow a whistle and yell "Put that bloody light out!" in a voice that sounded like a fog horn.

Bit hard on the Yanks ain't you mate? Next thing you'll be saying is that we could have won WW2 without them and stopped the Chinese dead in Korea. Well fact is we could have done neither and that's a no brainer. Not only were the Yanks a big part in pushing Hitlers army (which was one of, if not the best army of it's time} all the way back to Berlin they kept the Soviet Army locked in the east for over 60 years otherwise the Russkies would have been waving at us from the cliffs of Calais. No one else could have stopped them and that's another no brainer. I was with the Royal Artillery and we went on field exercise with the Yanks in Thailand. They were every bit as competent as we were. Another thing that was noticeable was that they could lift heavier loads than us but I'll put that down to the fact that we Brits were the war baby generation and as a result of poor wartime nutrition and lack of any real sunshine looked pale and scrawny beside them.

There used to be a little rhyme doing the rounds when I was in. Don't know if it was written by someone in our unit or otherwise. It made fun of the army recruiting slogan at the time. It went something like this: Join the army, learn a trade, find adventure and get paid, these are the lies you are fed upon, and like an idiot you sign on. And when they've got you in their grip, where are those smiles of comradeship? Where are those friendly helpful types? Whose that b****rd with three stripes? Can't remember if there was any more to it but it was a popular little "ditty" at the time. One of my mates worked his ticket I know. This happened after I had left Malaya but another of my mates told me about it later on. This chap took to sitting in the camp latrine cubicles for hours at a time and constantly complained of headaches. Usually gunners with non serious medical problems were tranferred to the RASC or the Catering Corps but apparently this fellow managed to convinced them he was becoming a bit of a nutter so they packed him off back to Blighty and civvy street. Two years later some of us got together for a reunion and he was one of them. He was in great shape, perfectly normal and as happy as a lark as he had just recently got married.

I went to Colley Road school 1951- 1952 and remember the woodwork teacher, a Mr Lindley or Lynley. He was a big ignorant buffalo and had a habit of going around and smacking pupils on the ear from behind. He had a thing going for a gym teacher who was a stone fox if I remember. Another at the same school was an American or a Canadian or at least talked like one or the other. Used to give us propaganda lessons on the atrocities committed by American soldiers in Korea. Political indoctrination wasn't on the school curriculum either.

Does anyone know what they did with the bodies in the St Phillips churchyard on Penistone Road. The church was bombed in the blitz and left as a ruin for many years afterwards. As a young kid I used to wander round the cemetery to kill time while my mum shopped at George Weeds grocery shop near by. It was an old cemetery because one dude buried there was a veteran of the battle of Waterloo. I still remember that headstone for some reason. When I revisited Sheffield in the late 90s after many years absence the church had finally been demolished and the cemetery gone. Or maybe they just pulled up the headstones and left the bodies there? Or more likely moved to a common grave.

I read the book "The Virgin Soldiers" that Sweetdexter mentions. Did not see the movie. Whoever wrote the book was writing from personal experience. That's very obvious. Unlike the soldiers in the book we were not there during the Emergency. It had ended just over a year before I got there although as I mentioned there were still a few die hards hiding out in the jungles. The army was a huge bureaucracy back in those days. Most of us thought the drill sergeants and corporals to be graduates of the Marquis de Sade Academy for Sadistic Practices but looking back on it all after so many years the fact is that they had a rotten job to do. They had to try and turn thousands upon thousands of unwilling national servicemen into something resembling professional soldiers. Young men who wanted to be anywhere else but in an Army recruit training camp. At the time though I firmly believed that they were in fact a bunch of sadists. In training camp I was detailed to be ablution orderly (latrine cleaner) on my 21st birthday of all days. A few days later my sister came all the way up from London to Oswestry, Shropshire to visit me. Back then that was almost a full days journey and she had to hitch a ride from the train station to the camp. When she arrived at the guardhouse the duty NCO told her she could not see me because of "Army Regulations" I did not know she was coming. This was before most people had home phones and eons before mobile phones. She was only eighteen then and was quite shattered at this refusal and broke down into tears. Later that day the NCO informed me of her attempt to see me and I wondered why he had bothered to tell me about this after the fact. Defintely an act of sheer sadism I thought. The army had some tricks up their sleeves when it came to postings. While at the RA Depot I took a course in firing range practices and tecniques. We were all bound for West Germany then but we were told that the top seven scoreres in the class would get a choice of posting. Soldiers returning from Germany told us to avoid at all costs a posting there due to the amount of BS they had experienced. Soldiers coming back from Hong Kong all said it was a great place to be posted to. I and my two mates came in the top seven and all put in for Hong Kong. The sergeant told us not to put Hong Kong on the form but instead FARELF (Far East Land Forces). Same thing as putting in for Hong Kong he assured us. Having written the fateful FARELF word the next thing we knew was that we were all off to Malaya. A posting that was known to be even worse than west Germany. Now so many years later I have come to the conclusion that like all great big bureaucracies the army back then was not intentionaklly sadistic. Just merely insensitive.

I did two years in the Rotyal Artillery a year and a half of which was spent in Malaysia (then Malaya). Not only did we spend time without end on the gunnery ranges we also had to do patrols with the Aussies in the stinking fetid jungles like the infantry mob do. It rained every morning around 2 AM and there were snakes, leeches, millions of mosquitos and scorpions all around us. There were also some communist guerrilas still operating in small scattered groups but we never met any. I loathed every day I spent in that country. The only girls who would have anything to do with us were the whores and bar tarts and the British civilians who managed the rubber plantations ignored us completely. Once we went up to the Cameron Highlands for a change of climate and there was a beautiful British style pub there owned by some English people Right away our officers made it quite clear that it was for officers only. No "enlisted riff raff please" When the troopship arrived in Singapore to take us home I must have felt like some newly liberated world war 2 prisoner of war. Did two years of this do me any good? Yes it did - in a way. When I came out I could stand on my own two feet, support myself and not take crap from anybody. National Service made boys into men but it could also be a school of hard knocks too.

Someone posted a message saying that it's a burned out ruin now. Pretty sad. I saw a lot of great movies there with mom and dad. I remember the manager was a little bald headed guy with a moustache and wore a dickie bow tie. He used to climb up on the stage before the Saturday matinee shows started and ask if anyone wanted to come up and sing a song. Kids would come up and bawl out some tune or other which nobody could hear above the roaring and shouting of all the other kids. One popular song was an old wartime carryover called "Run Rabbit Run" This was in the late 1940s. I used to like the Don Winslow adventure films.

If you lived in the Margetson road/ Wordsworth Avenue neighborhood of Parson Cross estate in the years 1950/53 you may remember or have seen this unfortunate lad. He was about 16 or 17 years old back then and severely retarded with mogoloid features and teeth and gums that protruded outwards beyond his lips. I dont know what his real name was but all the kids called him Mad Johnny and he always wore a Britsh navy seaman's hat. He liked to chase kids on bikes, trying to catch hold of the backs of the saddles and yelling his head off. To us youngsters he was pretty scary looking. I heard later on whether true or false that he became a bit violent and they put him away.

Reply to Smary, yes I remember him very well. I used to go the Saturday sixpenny matinees way back and can remember him sitting outside in his wheel chair. Those matinees were crazy. Kids running around and shouting throughout the show. The usherette had just given up I guess. still those matinees were my first introdution to the Three Stooges, The Bowery Boys and Hopalong Cassidy. Your dad will remeber them I'm sure.

The bombed out buildings in the city center Truck loads of German prisoners of war going through the city on their way to a prison camp somewhere outside Sheffield and my mother telling me not to wave back at them Walking down Montgomery Terrace Road with my mother on my way to the Sacred Heart School. Being scared stiff of the nuns The sound of air raid sirens My uncle who was a pilot in the RAF sitting in an armchair in his uniform one dark snowy Christmas morning Moving to our new council house on Milne Row Road Parson Cross in the winter of 47/48 and jumping out of the moving van and ending up waist high in snow Going with the kids next door to the Saturday afternoon sixpenny matinees at the Ritz Cinema on Wordsworth Avenue. Going to Chapeltown Lound school on the buses that picked us up on Wordsworth Avenue Going into town on the number 49 bus that used to go along Wordsworth Avenue My friends the Gill brothers who lived on Wordsworth Avenue The Five Arches bridge Hillsboro Barracks - I think it was a Bassetts Allsorts sweets factory then The sounds from the factories along Penistone Road Saturday football matches at Hillsboro Derek Dooley charging down the field and everyone singing "Dooley Dooley Fair" Moving to Rokeby Road Parson Cross and my first female crush. A little girl who lived around the corner on Wheata Road My friend Len Darwent who also lived on Wheata road Moving down to Sussex in 1955 Wishing we could move back to Sheffield after we got there.

Colley Road school Parson Cross 1951 to 1952. Mr Birch was headmaster then. Always addressed us boys as "sonny" Gregg School, Broomhill 1952- to 1955. Mr Arnold was headmaster. Some teachers names I can remember - Mr Rankin, Mr Sutherland, Miss Watson

Ada Gillett (the name may not be spelled right) was my piano teacher and lived on Wheel Lane, Ecclesfield. I was one of her pupils from 1953-1954. I left Sheffield in 1955 but I heard that she married later on and was the organist at Ecclesfield parish church.(St Marys?). Would like to hear from anyone who also knew her.