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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Roger Marsh of the ‘Action Desk — Sheffield’ Team on behalf of Roger Marsh and has been added to the site with the author’s permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

Pre-school memories of WWII in the East End of Sheffield - Part 3
By
Roger Marsh

Station Road in Darnall, Sheffield was a cobbled street, the cobbles were fixed in placed by tar, on hot summer days the sun would melt the tar and we would collect the wet tar on a stick and see who could collect the most.

We played marbles using the gaps between the stone paving stones that the pavements on either side of the road were made from.

Although we had moved to Darnall we were still registered for or rations at the shops that my mother and grandmother had used in Attercliffe. So every Friday my mother and I would catch the tramcar in Darnall and go to Attercliffe shopping.
At the bottom of Staniforth Road in Attercliffe was a large derelict piece of land known locally as ‘The Brickfield’, that was later to become the British Road Service depot, that we would pass on the tram. One of my memories was seeing the giant Barrage Balloon flying overhead above ‘The Brickfield’, they were tethered to the ground by strong wire ropes, and I was told that it was there to stop the German airplanes landing there.

‘The Brickfield’ was the location of an incident that could have had devastating consequences for our family. As I have mentioned previously my father did not serve in the armed forces because he had a reserved occupation. After he had finished work he took part in fire-watching and other activities that I am not to sure about. I do know that one day he together with some other men saw what they thought was a German parachutist about to land on ‘The Brickfield’. They set of to take the German parachutist prisoner but it was only when the parachute got lower that they realized that it was in fact a parachute mine. They did a quick about turn and set of at a run in the opposite direction and were lucky to only be blown off their feet and not be badly injured or worst.

The shops that I can remember visiting are North’s butchers, Hurst’s pork butchers, and the tobacconist from which we would buy my father’s weekly ration of 100 cigarettes. The smell of tobacco in the shop, where pipe tobacco would be cut from solid slabs with a small guillotine, was wonderful far better than when it was being burned. My father’s favorite cigarettes were Woodbines, but to get 50 Woodbines we would also have to buy 50 Turf. My father would smoke his Woodbines during the first part of the week and then would only have the Turf, which he disliked intensely, to smoke for the rest of the week and resulted in him being irritable. I put up with his irritability because whilst not being as good as the pre-war cigarette cards, a cigarette card of a type could be cut from the tray of a ten packet Turf cigarettes.

The last air raid, of the Second World War, on Sheffield took place on July 28, 1942; incendiary bombs were dropped on Hunter’s Bar slightly injuring one person.

Cloths rationing had been introduced in June 1941 and a Clothing Book was issued to each person. Adults were allowed 66 coupons per year, which was sufficient to enable them to purchase one complete new outfit. Growing children were allowed 10 extra coupons and smaller sized clothing had lower coupon values than adult size garments.

However, in addition to this the Women’s Volunteer Service (W.V.S.) provided a service of garment exchange for Sheffield children when they had grown out of their clothes. It was conducted from 47, Arundel Street, and proved a great boon to mothers, particularly as coupons were not required. I remember my mother taking advantage of this service that was provided from a mobile van, which parked in the space front of the Darnall Cinema known locally as “The Little Dick”. My mother was very pleased with the quality of the clothes that were provided. I can remember her being particularly pleased when I was provided with a dark blue fisherman style pullover. She would use for exchange clothing that she had knitted for me and that I had grown out of.

Another economic measure was that my father had the skill to repair the family’s shoes. He had a cast iron hobbing foot that had three legs; two with different size soles and the other one had a heel. My mother would purchase sheets of leather, steel ‘segs’ and rubber heels from the local cobbler’s shop. He would draw around the sole of the shoe to be repaired on to the sheet of leather and then cut it out with the knifes that he had made from broken hacksaw blades. The old sole would be pulled from the shoe and the new sole nailed in place. The edge of the new sole would be finally shaped and smoothed with a rasp and finished off with a type of black wax.

My boots would be fitted with steel ‘segs’ to make the soles and heels last longer. When wearing these boots my approach could be heard at quite a distance. The other fun thing about them was that if you took a good run you could then ‘slair’ over the stone pathing slabs the challenge being who could make the most impressive sparks.

Toys were also home made; one Christmas I received a wooden machine gun with a ratchet and spring that when the handle was turned made a noise like a football rattle. I was very proud of this weapon with which I won many a battle. I later found out that it had been made in the pattern shop of Davy United Engineering Company.

As well as attacking the steel and engineering companies during the Blitz the main Sheffield shopping centre ‘The Moor’ had suffered major bomb damage and during any visit to the city centre we would be confronted by a jumble of shattered masonry and tangled steel that had once been a bustling shopping centre.

There were two schools of thought regarding the bombing of the shopping centre. The first view being that the Lufwafer had made a mistake and had bombed the shopping centre in error missing their targets of the steel and engineering companies. This is unlikely since there was a full moon during the Main Blitz and it was said that the River Don had shone like a ribbon of silver, reflecting the moonlight of the ‘Bomber’s Moon’, and giving an excellent navigation aid to the Germans. The other and most likely viewpoint was that the bombing of the shopping centre was intended to terrorize the population and reinforce the effort to blockade Britain by destroying food and other supplies for which there were shortages.

As a child I associated the derelict bombsites of Sheffield City Centre with the weed Rosebay Willow Herb. It is a perennial and flowers from July to August, the shapely purple sprays would rise from between the broken brickwork of the bomb sites to a height of between two and four feet. These wild specimens of Rosebay are to be regarded as escapes from cultivation. It looks well in the garden but the vigorous creeping roots make it a nuisance in a confined space. This weed prefers a moist and light soil and the conditions on the bombsites must have suited it very well for it was invasive and was the first plant to take hold in these derelict areas. Looking back it always seemed that the summers were hot and the small parachute like seeds of the Rosebay would blow on the hot summer breeze. When walking through the town centre my mother would keep a tight hold of my hand and with my other hand I would have to ward off these seeds. Inevitably I would get one in my eye and I would try to remove it with my free hand. My mother preoccupied with her shopping would say “stop rubbing your eyes, you will make them sore”. I hated those derelict scars of land that cut through the centre of my home city and the Rosebay Willow Herb that lurked there.

I remember the shock of seeing at the local cinema the documentary film, which was shown in newsreels in theaters around the world, of the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp by British troops in April 15, 1945. This camp was located near Celle, Lower Saxony, Germany and is the camp where Ann Frank and her sister Margot died of typhus in March 1945. The film showed the survivors of the camp men, women and children in indescribably shocking condition and the burring in mass graves of the 15,000 bodies that had remained unburied at the time of liberation. The British soldiers forced the German camp guards, both men and women, to handle the corpses with their bare hands throwing them on to carts for transportation to the large pits or directly into the pits where they were buried. The black and white film showed the naked broken white skeletal bodies being bulldozed into the large pits, the bulldozers being driven by British soldiers. Some bodies that were clothed were prisoners that could not be saved and had died after the liberation.
This film was so shocking for anyone to watch, let alone a four year old, sandwiched as the newsreel was between the cartoons and the main feature it left a deep impression on me for the rest of my life. I have seen the same film many times since, and more recently it being shown on television to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation, it still has the same effect on me I will never forget the haunting faces of both the living and the dead staring from the screen.

This was in stark contrast to the way in which I saw the treatment of Italian and German prisoners, from the prisoner of war camp at Lodge Moor, walking round Sheffield City Centre in their uniforms with the yellow patch on their backs.

On May 7, 1945 Germany surrendered, and May 8, 1945 was declared VE day but I couldn’t remember anything of these celebrations.

But on August 15, 1945 Japan surrendered and this was declared victory over Japan day.
The neighbours in Station Road decided to through a large VJ day party to celebrate the victory over Japan that had resulted in the end of the Second World War.
A large bonfire was built in the middle of the street towards the top of Station Road at the railway station end. When the bonfire was lit the heat from the fire was so intense that as a result the cobblestones cracked and the tar between them was burned.

An effigy of Tōjō was to be burned on the bonfire in the style of Guy Falks. General Hideri Tōjō had been the Prime Minister of Japan during World War II and at the end of the war he was indicted as a class ‘A’ war criminal. He was tried for his crimes and hanged in 1948.
The effigy of Tōjō was slid on a clothesline from the upstairs bedroom window of an adjacent house in the direction of the bonfire, however the rope was too slack so that the effigy got stuck halfway down. One of the men fetched their clothes prop and used it to take the sag out of the rope and the effigy continued its journey into the bonfire to great cheering.

A large quantity of alcohol had been consumed and some time later an argument broke out between the man who had brought the cloths prop and this wife. The cause of the argument was that someone had used the prop as a poker for the fire; the prop was now only half its original length.

As a very young child of per-school age the enormity of the seriousness of the war was lost on me, after all I had not known anything other than wartime. What I remember for the most part was people trying to carry on with their lives as best they could and trying to create normality out of what was, to say the least, a very difficult situation.

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