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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 Muriel Brown and has been added to the site with the author’s permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

The Morning After — Part 1
By
Muriel Brown

The morning after the first Sheffield 'blitz' on the night of 12/13th December 1940, my father, after a sleepless night putting out the small fires which sprang up down the street where incendiary bombs had hit the ground, drove off to work in Sheffield as usual from our home in Chesterfield. He must have been apprehensive, as he had watched the red sky reflected from the burning buildings in Sheffield throughout the night.

At the edge of the city, he was stopped by the police who were only letting through the essential services. He had to leave his car and walk the remainder of the way to his factory which was in a street near St. Phillips road in the centre of the city. By the time he got near, it was lunch time and he was so tired that he went into a small cafe where he often had lunch. At the next table were two workmen and he could overhear their conversation.
"Aye, it's a pity. We could ha’ saved it if there 'ad been watter". The other agreed, “Three int' morning and t'firemen could do nowt." From the subsequent chatter, my father realised that they were talking about his cutlery factory. He knew what he would see when he turned the corner, and, sure enough, the site was devastated.

Part of the U shaped brick building had received a direct hit from an incendiary bomb on the cellulose store. Situated in the middle of the yard, away from the main buildings as it was highly flammable, cellulose was used for making knife handles and had, by law, to be kept in a separate compound. Flaming pieces had been flung across the yard and the buildings on three sides had been set alight. The fire service was stretched to its limit all over the city and were unable to find any more water, especially as a nearby hospital was on fire.

The office clock, later found in the rubble of the smoking ruins, had stopped at 3.08a.m. and there seemed to be nothing else at all left. He had no time to think, as his workforce were straggling in, having walked from their homes. They offered to help but nothing could be done, so my father had to dismiss them there and then, as, at that moment, he could not foresee any future for them.

Dazed and depressed, he was told by people in the street that they believed that there was still an airspace in the basement, but as the fallen timbers were too hot to approach, he decided to walk back to his car.

His route took him through the city centre, and there he could not believe his eyes. The familiar streets were blocked and fire hoses snaked everywhere. Most of the fires were still burning and there were unexploded time bombs which people had to walk over. Rubble, bricks and glass were everywhere and one nurse, on her way to day-duty at the Children’s Hospital, said she had to pick her way between what she thought were bundles of burned carpet, but then discovered were unrecognisable bodies.

In High Street, the biggest store in Sheffield was a ruin. Walsh's had been dressed for Christmas, and the remaining luxuries from before the war had been on display. Two of the show windows were filled with huge giant pandas, the theme that year, and, only a few weeks before, we children had been for tea in the smart restaurant where a trio of ladies in long black dresses had played the latest musical comedy hits, surrounded by ornamental pots of palms.

Apparently, Walshs had survived until 4.30 in the morning when sparks from nearby buildings flew through the shattered windows and set the flimsy goods inside alight.

My grandmother always bemoaned the fact that she had taken a set of silver-backed hairbrushes to be repaired by Walshs and they had perished along with much more valuable items. My father told her she was lucky, and compared with the losses of others, she was.

Some streets were completely wiped out, and in the Moor, another main shopping street, there was a holocaust. The long straight road was a mass of flames on either side, and at intervals, where there was some big store such as Atkinsons or Roberts Brothers, the bigger, brighter glow of a greater individual fire could be picked out.

Walking down High Street and seeing trams which had been blown on top of each other, opposite the white hot twisted girders, which had once been Burton's store, my father came across a desperate crowd of men trying to locate and save the many people trapped in the ruins of Marples Hotel, which had received a direct hit from a high explosive bomb. One person was brought out headless while he was there and very few people survived. My father was affected very much by this and at times cried in his sleep for months. Counselling was unheard of and people had to get over the sights they had seen and the losses they had endured as best they could.

So, very weary by now, my father joined the dazed people wandering, about, and eventually got back to his car some miles away. He was then allowed to drive back to the factory to see whether there was anything he could salvage.

It was pure chance that the steel safe was still there, fallen into the basement, but it could eventually be opened, and the badly charred papers inside retrieved. These were the firm's accounts and addresses of customers and some cash.

Arriving home in the evening, he came into the kitchen. One look at his face told my mother that something was very wrong. He sat on green kitchen stool and drank a cup of tea and told what he could, although he was still in shock. We two children were too young to understand the full importance of that day, but, when we were told that there would not be many presents for Christmas, twelve days away, we realised that we too were involved in a family crisis.

For months after the first Sheffield blitz, the once-familiar shops and factories were heaps of rubble and no one could quite keep track of where these firms had been relocated. Cockaynes, Coles, and Atkinsons, the best-known of the Sheffield stores, had divided their departments in small locations around the city, in cinemas, office blocks, in basements or wherever space was available, but their stock was depleted, so they needed less space than formerly. Walsh's took over The Mount in Broomhill, a splendid looking building a bus ride from the city centre, but inconvenient and badly cramped for space inside, so that one had to go from one small room to another in search of an item.

At home, we were also short of space, and gave up the dining room for an office to be set up as the firm's temporary address, with my mother as secretary. The recovered safe was forced open and found to be full of half singed papers, and books containing the names of customers. It says much for the honesty of people all over the country, that, even though they themselves were struggling with financial difficulties because of the war, every pre blitz customer paid his accounts. One shopkeeper, from the Elephant and Castle area of London had himself been bombed out, but somehow managed to send small parcels and letters of support. He never knew what a magnificent morale booster they were to the family, though we wrote to thank him. He was himself killed in a later attack on London.

My father, undecided as to how to carry on business, volunteered for the Air Sea Rescue Service which manned launches in the English Channel. They were fast craft designed to race to where an Allied airman had baled out of his plane and landed in the sea, hoping to pick him up before the Germans realised that he was there. Father was disappointed when he was turned down as being too old at forty, so he turned his whole attention and time to building up his business contacts again.

On the 'Home Front', people gradually adapted to shortages and rationing, and ingenuity began to show itself in the way women 'made do and mended'. Sheets were turned sides to middle, cuffs were turned inside out, children’s clothes were washed and pressed, and a full box was sent round the neighbourhood for each family with children to take out what they wanted and put in something that they had outgrown.

My sister was at a great advantage as she was sent American dresses by the family of an American airman, stationed at the huge U.S.A. airbase at Burtonwood, near Liverpool, who married a friend's daughter and eventually took her back to the States as a G.I. bride. The clothes were so glamorous compared with our utility outfits which were allowed no pockets, no deep hems, only the minimum number of buttons and no trimming. Men’s trousers were to be made without turn-ups.

From the same source, we received copies of the 'Saturday Evening Post' with Norman Rockwell's amusing paintings on the front page. As all British magazines were thin, and on poor quality paper, printed in black and white only, the coloured advertisements were something to be wondered at, and we could only imagine what it was like to own washing machines and refrigerators, and have the choice of rich food. Newspapers were smaller than pre-war ones and some articles were printed in the spine area, where the paper was folded, to use every inch of space.

Rationing was beginning to take its toll, but school children had plentiful meals at school, even if they were dull and uninspired. There are only so many ways to cook rabbit! Puddings were invariably baked jam roll (known as 'Dead baby'), rice, or semolina ('Frog Spawn'). We-were seated at long tables in the school dining room, each with a prefect at the head, and Grace was said before the meal. We had to eat up and be out of the room again in half an hour for the next sitting to begin.

In spite of all the air-raid precautions in place in the school buildings, the war itself was hardly mentioned in lessons. It may have been a deliberate attempt to keep our young lives as normal as possible in a shifting situation, but even school reports of the time do not reflect the far from normal home life we were living with little sleep sometimes, and with parents under stress and working very long hours. Many friends had relatives in the Forces and some fathers were Prisoners of War. A close friend had two brothers who had been shot down on separate bombing raids over Germany and whose bodies were never found. All the same, the stern headmistress expected, and got, good examination results.

It might have been thought that the war situation would have been used in Geography or History to learn about the unfamiliar places we heard about daily, but we stuck rigidly to the syllabus, and the problems of King Charles and Ship Money were just as real as the Siege of Leningrad.

It is difficult now to convey the intense patriotism that most people felt, and the close community spirit which had grown among a people with one purpose - to defeat Hitler. The British Navy was invincible in most people's eyes, even after it became clear that, without air superiority, ships were as vulnerable as any other target.

The British, who had been supported by men from the colonies and from all the areas coloured pink on the map of the world, could never have believed that there would come a day when such countries would want independence and that British rule, which we thought to be benevolent, would be considered as oppression and exploitation. We believed that we were in a partnership that was beneficial to all.

Part 2 of this story can be viewed at www.bbc.co.uk/dna/ww2/A7240862

Pr-BR

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