Can anyone remember the Don Bakery

[PopT 10]

Can anyone remember the Don Bakery in Hillsborough and the cobbled alley which we always used as a shortcut?

 

 

Happy Days

[sweetdexter 10]

hi PopT, wasn't there a derelict bomb site next to it, fronting on Middlewood Rd?

I remember the cobblestone alleyway.

Wasn't an I beam crane used to unload sacks of flour in the alleyway?

[PopT 10]

Yes you are right Sweetdexter.

 

The bombed site was the site of the Church of England School I believe, now Woolworth's

 

Happy Days!

[Falls 10]

Hi,

 

We used to get Don bread years ago but I had no idea where the bakery was located. So now I know.

 

There was also another bakery, somewhere along the Don Valley called "Crickes" (not sure about the spelling). Their bread was also popular, but there again, I had no idea where it was made.

[Wadsleyite 10]

PopT is quite right - my grandmother (Ida Betts, 1900-65) attended Hillsborough National School, adjacent to the Don Bakery. I remember the area in the 1950s as a bombed site with lots of puddles for making mud pies. Woolworths opened on the site in c. 1958. The cobbled alley at the right-hand side led past the goods entrance for the Don Bakery, and there were always sour-smelling milk churns there. A door in a wall led to the Blue Ball Inn, and a sign on the door stated that it would be locked on Good Friday - which it always was, this apparently being a legal move to prevent the alley becoming a public right of way. My father worked at the Don Bakery in the 1930s and it was still producing sliced bread into maybe the early 1960s. The waxed paper wrappers had a blue and red diamond design.

[HPSec 10]

PopT is quite right - my grandmother (Ida Betts, 1900-65) attended Hillsborough National School, adjacent to the Don Bakery. I remember the area in the 1950s as a bombed site with lots of puddles for making mud pies. Woolworths opened on the site in c. 1958. The cobbled alley at the right-hand side led past the goods entrance for the Don Bakery, and there were always sour-smelling milk churns there. A door in a wall led to the Blue Ball Inn, and a sign on the door stated that it would be locked on Good Friday - which it always was, this apparently being a legal move to prevent the alley becoming a public right of way. My father worked at the Don Bakery in the 1930s and it was still producing sliced bread into maybe the early 1960s. The waxed paper wrappers had a blue and red diamond design.

 

Yesterday, elsewhere on this forum, I got to reminiscing about Hillsborough, winding up at the Old Blue Ball (of my late teens). Doing more research today I happened on this 'post' of yours and was so pleased to see your description of the cobbled passageway and the annual closure, because I was beginning to think those were a figment of my imagination. People I've mentioned them to, lately, don't recall.

 

As I continued to surf, the phone rang and it was my 98 year-old mother checking up on my welfare. I'd heard all the tales before, especially when my dad was alive, but hadn't paid much attention until today. Continuing yesterday's theme of investigation and exploration with her today reveals the following.

 

She was married in July 1938 and went to live at Worral (somewhat reluctantly being from Netherthorpe which was rather more lively). My dad worked at Don Bakery and cycled to work until about February 1939 when an accident put him in the Royal Infirmary. After that, they never went back to Worral, but moved in with my grandparents in a terraced house in Loxley Road where I was born quite a few years later. I keep expecting the blue plaque to appear, but it hasn't done yet. The small amount of furniture that my parents had accumulated was transported on an open lorry, courtesy of Mum's sister-in-law's uncle who lived down the Rudyard. Bear in mind the common practice of renting a house back then. It is not as if anybody in the family had a second home or holiday home or the extraordinary and undeserved luxury of today, and my grandparents moved out to another rented terraced house at Thornwell Bank, higher up Loxley. It was a tiny place (that still stands) in a row in which the famed survivor, Binks, of the R101 disaster lived or had lived (Dad knew him and his sons). It had an apology for a kitchen, with a stone sink; a tight and winding stair, and a small second 'bedroom' (the landing really, open to the stair). Dad and family (four in all) had lived there previously (in his childhood and adolescence) and I guess it was handy for my grandad who drove the Sentinel for Kenyons.

 

The houses I mention here each had an outside loo (each shared with another household) for years and years after 1945. A galvanised metal bath hung on the cellar door if you had the luxury of a cellar. My grandparents' house didn't, which begs a question.

 

Dad had left school at an early age. He had a job sweeping up in a barber's shop and at another time he was a stable hand for Mrs Wilson of the snuff-making family, sleeping in the loft above the horses at what, in time, became known as the Abbeydale Industrial Hamlet where years later my brother-in-law made surgical instruments, very much in a continuation into the leisure and spectator age of the tradition of Sheffield's little mesters of an earlier age.

 

Dad started at Don Bakery in the garage. Though there exists a pamphlet he acquired, of about that time, about how to drive a car, he never did, but breaking an arm led him to greasing tins, a common task in the progress of a career to be a baker, which he was for a number of years. He never would eat bought sweet confections and seemed to have an aversion to any thought of powdered eggs, but there was a developing career path about to be changed by events.

 

There were air raids, many, many times my mother says.

 

Thursday and Friday nights were 6 o'clock starts for the night shift at Don Bakery, 9 o'clock other nights. On the particular Thursday, it was a bright moonlit night and my dad and uncle were on the night shift there, between Proctor Place and Hawksley Avenue. It was 12 December 1940 (the first of the four nights of the Sheffield Blitz, according to Mum). Don Bakery suffered a hit or near hit and my uncle suffered an injury, not especially serious but serious enough to warrant attention. Sent or not, I don't know, but my dad took him to a centre at Burton Street (the school probably) for some first aid. Somewhere on route, Dad's hard hat, slung over his shoulder, rattled on a railing alerting an air raid warden to bark, "Silly 'billy' (or something like that), get that on your head!" I think the hard hat had come with a spare-time fire watch job Dad had had hitherto. After the war he remained a volunteer in the military reserve and was a volunteer in Sheffield's civil defence force (before Sheffield became a Nuclear Free Zone or perhaps in spite of that).

 

Mum says the siren sounded the "All Clear" at about 4 a.m. Looking at photos of the devastation of Hawksley Avenue that occurred in the few hours and in the following days, I speculate that my uncle's injury had saved his life and my dad's.

 

On one occasion an incendiary fell in the backyard at home or nearby, but on the evening of the Sunday (15th), my mother recalls visiting my grandparents, and a loud explosion rattled their door. Mum believes that was "our" gun across the valley from my grandparents' house, in action in fields off Myers Grove Lane. Kenyons' mills and Johnny Wood's mill (not much beyond my parents' back yard wall) were fairly close by in the Loxley valley and I expect the gun was there to offer some small protection of vital industry in the war effort. I have especially good reason to remember Johnny Wood's mill because, in the ensuing peacetime, the steam hammer banged away, night and day, all through my childhood except on Sundays. The unusual silence on the Day of Rest was known to disturb people's sleep.

 

On 19 December 1940, Dad left Mum and my eleven month-old sister behind for the army and basic training at the Blue Coat School, Nether Edge. I remember him telling of picking his way through the city in its brokenness. For all our troubles with Europe, thank God that we have not yet had the sufferings of our parents' generation. Happy Christmas.

[old tup 30]

Can anyone remember the Don Bakery in Hillsborough and the cobbled alley which we always used as a shortcut?

 

 

Happy Days

Hi PopT I remember it very well,I posted recently about the Don Bakery W A Brooms!.I started as a van boy in 1959 after which they paid for driving lessons

and trained me as a wholesale driver salesman which I continued as for 40yrs with different bakeries ending up at Fletchers!.I enjoyed the 4 years with them ending when Newboulds part of Sunblest bought them out,the Don was a family business everyone got on well together and I made a lot of friends there especially some attractive females both in the office and the confectionary department but that's another story!.We finished every day at lunch time which the salesmen spent in the Old Blue Ball or the Shaky,then up to the snooker hall in the White Buildings at Hillsborough Corner!.In the summer every Wednesday a crowd of 10 or so of us took off to Hathersage open air swimming baths which was full of yummy mummies we stayed until teatime then back home!,we never had a care in those days most of us were single and enjoyed every day at work and play!.

[jack watson 10]

The don Bakery was on Proctor Place.the main entrance etc. I was brought up in Proctor Place in the sixties,and remember Woolworths being built,and the CO-OP.

i have a book out,recently published telling stories of the fiftiesand sixties in the area. It,s title is A NICE TAILEND FROM MR. BURROWS. I have a limited number remaining which i can sign and address to you(£9.95)..photos of the area and my family also.I can be contacted on jackw@dacooper.co.uk.

[loneranger46 10]

my sister worked at don bakery for a number of years surname CHISELL

[broncolives 10]

A bomb dropped on the Tabernacle church on Proctor Place and totaly destroyed it along with some houses in Hawkesly Avenue. The Don bakery suffered some damage too.

[arrodbo 10]

Hi PopT I remember it very well,I posted recently about the Don Bakery W A Brooms!.I started as a van boy in 1959 after which they paid for driving lessons

and trained me as a wholesale driver salesman which I continued as for 40yrs with different bakeries ending up at Fletchers!.I enjoyed the 4 years with them ending when Newboulds part of Sunblest bought them out,the Don was a family business everyone got on well together and I made a lot of friends there especially some attractive females both in the office and the confectionary department but that's another story!.We finished every day at lunch time which the salesmen spent in the Old Blue Ball or the Shaky,then up to the snooker hall in the White Buildings at Hillsborough Corner!.In the summer every Wednesday a crowd of 10 or so of us took off to Hathersage open air swimming baths which was full of yummy mummies we stayed until teatime then back home!,we never had a care in those days most of us were single and enjoyed every day at work and play!.

 

Do you remember Myrna Loy?

[old tup 30]

Do you remember Myrna Loy?

The name rings a bell but truthfully no,some names I do remember-Sales Manager Kirk Jennings,supervisers Roy Morrell,Harry Williams,Arnold Taylor ,Salesmen-Jeff Shaw,Paul Patchet,Grahmn Nuttal,Harry Marshall,Arthur Henderson,lots more faces I remember but not the names!,it was nearly sixty years ago!.Despatch foreman Len Wade who thought the firm belonged to him personaly,Garage boss Mr Skinner who told his secretary Vicky Burgin that I was a wrong un and not to bother with me,well he failed on that one!.Another salesman Tommy Magolrick just remembered!.In the confectionary despatch one of the workman there was a Scotchman who was of the other persuasion vanboys hadto becareful,he was always creepy offering fags and trying to butter the lads up,some played him along for free cigs then scarpered before he could get his mitts on them!.Another salesman recalled Derek Sarson he was a bit of a lad who one day without a word to anyone took his two sons and disappeard,I remember his wife crying to Kirk in the office asking where he was but he didn,t know he had just took off,we heard a couple of years later he was running a market stall with his lads somewhere in Lancashire!.Thats all I can think of at the moment,maybe more will come to mind later!.

 

---------- Post added 18-12-2017 at 10:12 ----------

 

Another salesman remembered Dennis Earnshaw,he was the double of Charles Degaule the old French President,I remember one morning him knocking down a lady at the bottom of Hawksley Avenue in his car going to work,luckily she survived unhurt!.Funny how things you had long forgotten come back out of the blue!.