It will soon be 75 years since the Sheffield blitz

[westmoors 11]

The Christmas after this one at the end of 2015 will be the 75th anniversary of the Sheffield Blitz, few if any will remember it and very few will be alive that lived through it, as a young boy I saw all this and can remember many things as though it was only last week !

 

The event’s have all been well recorded and I just wanted to take this opportunity to mention that if anyone can spare the time to watch the short films of http://www.yorkshirefilmarchive.com they may find many of them interesting as it does show Sheffield as a busy city with their bright cream/white with blue band trams and busses, but also some of the devastation. You have to make a selective search as there are a lot of films but if you select on the map South Yorkshire then the selection - WAR – 1940 it reduces the number to wade through. Also look in categories link for ‘Feeding the Nation’ which is about the Land Girls but contains bits of other subjects and part of Sheffield at War. There is also one about the Hunslet Gun Site which was just outside Sheffield.

 

The Sheffield at War film shows clips of the devastation which were never allowed to be shown at the time in the newsreels, in fact the Government very often even banned reporting the names of the towns raided to avoid panic and depression of the public ! “A town was raided in the North of England last night” was all you heard on the radio.

 

But to get back to Sheffield and the film, in those days on the corner of Fitzallen Square and the High street was the very large Marples hotel, again this is well documented if you Google it, next door in the high street was John Walsh a huge department store, and opposite the square and across the road from John Walsh in the high street was C & A Modes with Burton’ the tailors on the corner of Angel street, all were completely demolished. In the film http://www.chrishobbs.com/marples1940.htm which is all about Marples there are shots of the C&A building, it’s easy to spot as that block comprised all white Portland stone faced buildings from Angel street down to the Haymarket corner there were very few buildings in the city that I remember that had such a facing , and there is just a quick glimpse of a John Walsh signboard in the rubble by the still standing girder framework of the multi level store. Incidentally even today I believe the original end of the building standing on the Haymarket corner is the last original bit of the C & A block, I think was the Fifty Shilling Tailors as far as I can remember ( look on Google Earth to see the detail). C&A had a very distinctive row of round decorative portholes with laurel leaves around them all along the top of their building, you can still see the odd one in all the damage. http://www.sfbhistory.org.uk also has some good information.

 

Odd things still come to mind, terraced houses where there was no room for an Anderson air raid shelter in their garden, if they even had a garden, were given the option of having an interconnecting double door between their cellar and the neighbour’s cellars on both sides, this was to give some extra protection, the idea being that should you get trapped in your cellar you could escape to next door and of course right down the street if need be.

 

Of course the cellars were mostly under the front room as this was the nearest place for a coal chute for deliveries but the floor of the room above was obviously all timber and it offered little protection from nearby bomb blast and non at all from a direct hit or the collapse of the building, they did put a couple of roof props under the floor but I think this was only a token gesture . When hit by the bomb Marples hotel fell in on itself and buried about 70 in the cellar only a few survived ,and that building should have been more substantial than a row of terrace houses I am sure, so what chance did you have in an ordinary cellar?

 

A friend of mine’s father finished his shift in the steel works and although the raid had started he slowly made his way home to his family making dashes in the intervals between the waves of bombers, it took him several hours due to forced diversions while also taking shelter in several street shelters and also in Marples en route with long waits between dashes to make sure he could hear no sound of approaching bombers before moving on ,he found out later that even one of the street shelters he had used got hit, the first raid as I recall started around tea time and went on until dawn the following morning, following raid on the 15th Dec was much shorter and aimed at the works area, rumour has it there was too much fog or smog for them to target the works.

 

The street shelters were put up almost anywhere there was a space on the surface in the city, about 3 or 4 times larger that a normal garage and with a capacity at least 30, sometimes 60 people, they looked to be brick construction with a concrete slab roof and I think as far as I know were designed for emergency if people were caught out in a sudden raid. I think designed as blast shelters a few got a sandbag cover around the doorway but often little else.

 

Naturally rumors abounded after the first raid, a plane had crashed on C & A, that’s why there was such an explosion, one reputedly fell on R J Stokes the paint makers causing a huge fire, more than likely it was the gas main going off, a bomb had dropped alongside a street shelter and the blast had gone away from the building but had sucked most of the cement from between the brickwork, probably the story was attached to the next rumour in which a shelter was found full of bodies with not a mark on them , presumably killed by blast, and a bomb that penetrated between pavement and house into the cellar, exploded and killed all the occupants while there was not even a pane of glass broken in the building above, of course kids passed all this on and the stories grew more incredulous with each repeating, nothing was ever confirmed !

 

Of course I had my little bit to recount as we had 4 near hits on each corner of our 3 house per side road, after the raid we could not open or close if already open any door and had to keep climbing in and out through the frame less and glassless windows as the whole building had shifted somewhat..

 

The film does show a ME 109 being unloaded from the back of a lorry with it’s wings detached, these trophies were brought round many towns to show the public we could shoot them down and to boost morale and encourage donations , however I doubt a 109 could make it to Sheffield and certainly could not make a return journey , they could hardly get back across the channel if they spent too much time in the home counties.

 

But the efforts made by everyone were impressive, boy scouts were always looking for scrap, particullarly aluminium saucepans and there was always a collecting drive of some sort from rags, bones, old iron, in the country the children picked the harvest of potatoes, apples etc. even rose hips in Autumn and they were awarded badges (cardboard disks ) of various ranks depending on how much they collected. There were also direct appeals to save by buying war bonds or saving stamps which when you had bought enough converted into a 15 shilling savings certificate, this was redeemable on demand, I believe the Bonds were considered a long term loan only repaid after the war, (providing we won it !) and also there was always somewhere the appeal to collect enough to pay for a Spitfire, villages usually had to club together to raise such an amount .

 

Queues everywhere, it’s hard to believe these days but you did have to queue for everything, and everyone took their turn not like today, if there was even a sniff that a shop had taken delivery of something a queue would form often well before the shop (or pub )opening time. If you were fortunate to be able to get away for a holiday you had to queue it seemed for hours to obtain an emergency ration card from the Food Office, all householders had to be registered with a grocery shop of their choice but could not buy the essential rationed goods from anywhere else. The days you were away would be covered by the card while the amount would be cut out or deleted from your normal ration book so you did not get double rations ! The queues were exasperated by the fact that there was also a man/woman power shortage so there would often be a long long queue and only one person dealing with it.

 

It’s hard to believe these days that sort of life existed.

 

Lots and lots more but not of interest unless you are a Sheffield history buff

[bullerboY 10]

Too early ? yes I suppose so, but I did start the post saying in a year's time it will be 75 years since the blitz because I have no idea if I will survive another year, most men get to their sell by date in their 70's I've managed to get past that and I see so many dropping off the twig round 82,83, 84 and as I am 83 this Christmas I thought it better to get in early as a precaution.!

Once we all go all the memories go as well.

Westmoors.you keep writing and we will keep reading,I remember the many things you have said in your post and have read many books on the war in Sheffield.

[JFKvsNixon 11]

After WW2 rationing continued to 1954, so it was certainly austere times. I am very thankful that I'm lucky enough not to live through such difficult times, and I'll always remember and be thankful to those that did.

[Boginspro 10]

Thank you westmoors , please keep it up and tell us as much as you can of those times.

I was born after the war and knew a lot of people affected by it but not many would talk about it much.

As a bus conductor in the 60's early 70's I worked with a driver we called Silver, ex tram driver, and he told me many tales (true) of the war, what bravery and stubbornness the Sheffield people showed. I doubt the modern generation would cope.

[buck 11]

Too early ? yes I suppose so, but I did start the post saying in a year's time it will be 75 years since the blitz because I have no idea if I will survive another year, most men get to their sell by date in their 70's I've managed to get past that and I see so many dropping off the twig round 82,83, 84 and as I am 83 this Christmas I thought it better to get in early as a precaution.!

Once we all go all the memories go as well.

December 10th 1940, I was 9 years old watching " The Broadway Melodies" featuring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers at the Pavilion Cinema in Attercliffe when the sirens went. Most people just went on watching till the guns began firing. Then we all took a quick dash to a underground shelter across the street. Standing at the top of the stairs was a big cop with an Irish accent giving a running commentary on what was happening outside. My older brother was a boy scout helping the ARP wardens in the city centre as a messenger and was in the middle of the action. Sunday the 15th, we were sitting in our kitchen in Tinsley when my brother said he could hear aeroplanes. Just after that the sirens went off, followed almost immediately by bombs falling'We took cover inside the pantry under the stairs , the blast blew out all the candles we ha.when a bomb exploded almost on top of us . My Dad called out all our names because we had friends in there with us, and I didn't answer from shock. When we tried to get out the door was jammed with debris, but we got out in the end. The house was on fire because the blast had blown the curtained windows into the open fireplace. We ran across the street to Tinsley school which was the hit by incendury bombs and caught fire. We finished up inan above ground shelter till the all clear. The house was almost totally destroyed Edited December 6, 2014 by buck

[PeterR 10]

Thankyou westmoors for taking the time to compile your post and also other contributors. I too am of an age when I think ''do it now before it's too late''.

 

My parents married in 1938 and lived at Grimesthorpe near the steelworks. I was born in 1943 and missed all the bombing of course and am thankful for that. However, the war was always in peoples vocabulary in my early days and I do recall feeling close to it whenever I heard the very occasional lazy drone of piston engines overhead. Mother told me about the interlinking cellars when I asked about the bricked up doorways. She said our cellar had been strengthened. Maybe this was just a couple of extra joists, but I got the feeling that she thought she was safe. I do remember vividly the bombed out buildings on High Street etc. as of course I recall they remained that way well into the fifties. Still remember ration books, sugar in blue recycled paper bags which looked as though they had been made of school excercise book covers and butter sliced off a big slab with a wooden spatula, the Coop divi number and rehearsing it on my way to the shop. Didn't know life was any different anywhere else then, only at some fictional places I saw at the Vic. Picture Palace.

 

I'm looking forward to other posts on this thread.

 

Regards to all, Peter.

Edited December 6, 2014 by PeterR

[Kidorry 189]

We got bombed out of our house on Saville street so we went to live with our grandmother on the Arbourthorne until we got a house in the Wicker and that had a hole knocked through the cellar into the next door.We were also lucky in that the house was a beer house before and it had one of those big wooden grates and steps with slides at either side going down to lower the beer barrels into the cellar. So we had 2 ways of getting out.When we went to the shelter it was below the Harlequin on Johnson street and a little later on were told to go to the shelter that was under the Red lion/Grosvenor on Nursery street.

[IRONMONGER 10]

Thank you westmoors for a brilliant and thought provoking post.

[cat631 10]

Well done Westmoors. Thanks for an interesting post and hope you can find us some more tales of The Sheffield Blitz.

Don't be put off by negative replies, there's always somebody ready to shoot you down, just like your old Me 109.

[Jim Hardie 536]

Great post Westmoors, I really enjoyed reading it and will show it to my 90 year old Dad who was around at the time. If I can just correct one error, the Gun Site was at Hunshelf. Hunslet of course is in that other place.

[Nigel Womersle 10]

Jim is correct. It was Hunshelf which is between Ecclesfield and Chapeltown. We lived just below it on The Common at Ecclesfield, near the old cinema. My parents told me that one night one of the 'shells' hit our back door and took it straight off its hinges. My cousin managed the cinema, and each time there was a raid in progress, he flashed a message on the screen saying there was a raid on. For those who wished to stay, the programme would continue. On one of the blitz nights films were shown until 7am. This would have been the Thursday night as the cinema did not open on Sundays.

[astrols 10]

The Christmas after this one at the end of 2015 will be the 75th anniversary of the Sheffield Blitz, few if any will remember it and very few will be alive that lived through it, as a young boy I saw all this and can remember many things as though it was only last week !

 

The event’s have all been well recorded and I just wanted to take this opportunity to mention that if anyone can spare the time to watch the short films of http://www.yorkshirefilmarchive.com they may find many of them interesting as it does show Sheffield as a busy city with their bright cream/white with blue band trams and busses, but also some of the devastation. You have to make a selective search as there are a lot of films but if you select on the map South Yorkshire then the selection - WAR – 1940 it reduces the number to wade through. Also look in categories link for ‘Feeding the Nation’ which is about the Land Girls but contains bits of other subjects and part of Sheffield at War. There is also one about the Hunslet Gun Site which was just outside Sheffield.

 

The Sheffield at War film shows clips of the devastation which were never allowed to be shown at the time in the newsreels, in fact the Government very often even banned reporting the names of the towns raided to avoid panic and depression of the public ! “A town was raided in the North of England last night” was all you heard on the radio.

 

But to get back to Sheffield and the film, in those days on the corner of Fitzallen Square and the High street was the very large Marples hotel, again this is well documented if you Google it, next door in the high street was John Walsh a huge department store, and opposite the square and across the road from John Walsh in the high street was C & A Modes with Burton’ the tailors on the corner of Angel street, all were completely demolished. In the film http://www.chrishobbs.com/marples1940.htm which is all about Marples there are shots of the C&A building, it’s easy to spot as that block comprised all white Portland stone faced buildings from Angel street down to the Haymarket corner there were very few buildings in the city that I remember that had such a facing , and there is just a quick glimpse of a John Walsh signboard in the rubble by the still standing girder framework of the multi level store. Incidentally even today I believe the original end of the building standing on the Haymarket corner is the last original bit of the C & A block, I think was the Fifty Shilling Tailors as far as I can remember ( look on Google Earth to see the detail). C&A had a very distinctive row of round decorative portholes with laurel leaves around them all along the top of their building, you can still see the odd one in all the damage. http://www.sfbhistory.org.uk also has some good information.

 

Odd things still come to mind, terraced houses where there was no room for an Anderson air raid shelter in their garden, if they even had a garden, were given the option of having an interconnecting double door between their cellar and the neighbour’s cellars on both sides, this was to give some extra protection, the idea being that should you get trapped in your cellar you could escape to next door and of course right down the street if need be.

 

Of course the cellars were mostly under the front room as this was the nearest place for a coal chute for deliveries but the floor of the room above was obviously all timber and it offered little protection from nearby bomb blast and non at all from a direct hit or the collapse of the building, they did put a couple of roof props under the floor but I think this was only a token gesture . When hit by the bomb Marples hotel fell in on itself and buried about 70 in the cellar only a few survived ,and that building should have been more substantial than a row of terrace houses I am sure, so what chance did you have in an ordinary cellar?

 

A friend of mine’s father finished his shift in the steel works and although the raid had started he slowly made his way home to his family making dashes in the intervals between the waves of bombers, it took him several hours due to forced diversions while also taking shelter in several street shelters and also in Marples en route with long waits between dashes to make sure he could hear no sound of approaching bombers before moving on ,he found out later that even one of the street shelters he had used got hit, the first raid as I recall started around tea time and went on until dawn the following morning, following raid on the 15th Dec was much shorter and aimed at the works area, rumour has it there was too much fog or smog for them to target the works.

 

The street shelters were put up almost anywhere there was a space on the surface in the city, about 3 or 4 times larger that a normal garage and with a capacity at least 30, sometimes 60 people, they looked to be brick construction with a concrete slab roof and I think as far as I know were designed for emergency if people were caught out in a sudden raid. I think designed as blast shelters a few got a sandbag cover around the doorway but often little else.

 

Naturally rumors abounded after the first raid, a plane had crashed on C & A, that’s why there was such an explosion, one reputedly fell on R J Stokes the paint makers causing a huge fire, more than likely it was the gas main going off, a bomb had dropped alongside a street shelter and the blast had gone away from the building but had sucked most of the cement from between the brickwork, probably the story was attached to the next rumour in which a shelter was found full of bodies with not a mark on them , presumably killed by blast, and a bomb that penetrated between pavement and house into the cellar, exploded and killed all the occupants while there was not even a pane of glass broken in the building above, of course kids passed all this on and the stories grew more incredulous with each repeating, nothing was ever confirmed !

 

Of course I had my little bit to recount as we had 4 near hits on each corner of our 3 house per side road, after the raid we could not open or close if already open any door and had to keep climbing in and out through the frame less and glassless windows as the whole building had shifted somewhat..

 

The film does show a ME 109 being unloaded from the back of a lorry with it’s wings detached, these trophies were brought round many towns to show the public we could shoot them down and to boost morale and encourage donations , however I doubt a 109 could make it to Sheffield and certainly could not make a return journey , they could hardly get back across the channel if they spent too much time in the home counties.

 

But the efforts made by everyone were impressive, boy scouts were always looking for scrap, particullarly aluminium saucepans and there was always a collecting drive of some sort from rags, bones, old iron, in the country the children picked the harvest of potatoes, apples etc. even rose hips in Autumn and they were awarded badges (cardboard disks ) of various ranks depending on how much they collected. There were also direct appeals to save by buying war bonds or saving stamps which when you had bought enough converted into a 15 shilling savings certificate, this was redeemable on demand, I believe the Bonds were considered a long term loan only repaid after the war, (providing we won it !) and also there was always somewhere the appeal to collect enough to pay for a Spitfire, villages usually had to club together to raise such an amount .

 

Queues everywhere, it’s hard to believe these days but you did have to queue for everything, and everyone took their turn not like today, if there was even a sniff that a shop had taken delivery of something a queue would form often well before the shop (or pub )opening time. If you were fortunate to be able to get away for a holiday you had to queue it seemed for hours to obtain an emergency ration card from the Food Office, all householders had to be registered with a grocery shop of their choice but could not buy the essential rationed goods from anywhere else. The days you were away would be covered by the card while the amount would be cut out or deleted from your normal ration book so you did not get double rations ! The queues were exasperated by the fact that there was also a man/woman power shortage so there would often be a long long queue and only one person dealing with it.

 

It’s hard to believe these days that sort of life existed.

 

Lots and lots more but not of interest unless you are a Sheffield history buff

 

So sad to see no more from you on what should have been a wonderful thread!

Having said that, the ignorant, and to my mind vicious, comments from the oil man would have put me off too.

I do hope you've continued recording your memories in a more appreciative arena.