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This story has been submitted by Alison Tebbutt, Derby CSV Action Desk, on behalf of Tom Nunn. The author has given his permission and understands the site's terms and conditions.

It was 7pm on Thursday December 12, 1940 when Uncle Gordon and I walked from home to the College of Engineering Technology to Leopold Street to attend our weekly course on engineering drawing. We had just settled with our evening studies, drawing boards and instruments on our desks, when there was a shrill screaming whistle and a crash. We all knew instantly it was a high-explosive bomb from a German Luftwaffe bomber.

Almost every night we experienced one or two bombs dropping around the city, but usually they were ‘stragglers’ dropped by the bombers, either going to, or returning from, raids on cities like Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, or Coventry and so our lecturer calmly said ‘Carry on chaps, it’s just a stray one.’.

About five minutes later there was a second shrill whistle and a crash and this time the building shook. Again the lecturer suggested we carried on with our work and so we did until, seconds later, the air raid sirens sounded, and yet another bomb came down, shaking the whole building and obviously too close for comfort.

At this point the headmaster came up (we were on the top floor) and asked us all, in an orderly fashion, to proceed down to the basement air raid shelter (shades of Corporal Jones ‘Don’t panic! Don’t panic! In Dad’s Army)

I don’t know to this day why we did it, but we all proceeded down four flights of stairs to the shelters with our drawing boards over our heads.

By the time, bombs were dropping almost by the second and we realised after many previous false alarms that tonight it was Sheffield’s turn to receive the wrath of Hitler’s bombers.

It was a perfect night for the raid: clear skies, full moon and to make it worse the silvery steel of the tram lines guided the bombers onto their targets. They were meticulous in their approach to the city, one wave after another (there were 300 aircraft involved in the raid) machine-gunning (aided by our own ack-ack guns) almost the total fleet of barrage balloons down to the ground, leaving a free run to blitz the centre of the city.

One of the first landmarks to become a casualty was the Sheffield Empire Theatre, where Henry Hall and his orchestra were playing to a capacity audience. A bomb wrecked the rear of the theatre causing it to catch fire, but amazingly in this instance, everyone managed to vacate the theatre and find their way to the nearby air raid shelters. Ironically, the evening before, Wednesday, great-grandma Nunn and myself had attended the same evening performance.

For many months afterwards, it was rumoured that Henry Hall had been killed in the raid and to convince the public that he was still alive, Henry Hall, used to commence his evening radio concerts with the remark ‘This is Henry Hall speaking!’

Back at the college, everyone was huddled in their respective class groups as bomb after bomb rained down on the city, the whole building shaking time and time again. In retrospect it was a tribute to solid Victorian Stone architecture that the building remained standing.
It was not until four the following morning that the all clear was sounded and everyone, tired and weary, began to file out of the building, only to be met by a sea of flame covering the whole of the city centre. All the major stores were on fire C&A, Modes, Walsh’s Cockayne’s. The Marples Hotel, opposite the C&A store in Fitzalan Square suffered a direct hit and 70 people lost their lives instantly. Tram cars and buses lay scattered all over the street literally cut in half by the blast of the bombs.

Surprisingly calm, Uncle Gordon and I proceeded amongst the flames and rubble to the Town Hall square (where miraculously another Victorian building, the Town Hall, had remained intact) and then carried on down The Moor, that lovely pre-war shopping street, where now, on both sides, was a sea of flames for almost the mile of it’s length and the shops razed to the ground in a mass of rubble and twisted metal. In many shop doorways, many bodies, completely intact, lay dead as a result of burst lungs due to bomb blasts.

As we reached the bottom end of The Moor and turned into Ecclesall Road, the Sheffield & Ecclesall Co-op store came into view, every single plate-glass window shattered, the glass lying all over the road.

Looking back, we must have been in a state of shock at the time because, quite out of character, seeing hundreds of caps and trilby hats scattered all over the road, we both helped ourselves to one and swore later when out all of the hats we could have picked up, the ones we did pick up were riddled with shrapnel holes. Rough justice indeed!

I cannot really remember being anxious about the state great granddad and grandma Nunn or indeed the house itself would be in, but eventually we did arrive home about 6am to find both houses miraculously intact amongst many bombed houses in the area.

The bombers had dropped their bombs in ‘sticks’ of around half a dozen and if you were lucky, your home survived between the stocks of bombs dropped.

The only incident at home had been an incendiary bomb landing in the backyard and great-granddad Nunn had tried to extinguish it with a bucket of water-the very last thing you should do. Instead of putting the fire out, it excited the incendiary into a brighter flame!

In the Thursday air raid, 450 high explosive bombs, six parachute land mines and thousands of incendiary bombs were dropped on the city, causing enormous damage, particularly in the centre of the city and in the north-west and south-east.

Thursday, at that time, early closing day in the city and has always been a popular day for down-town entertainments. This particular evening was no exception. Amusement houses were crowded, a dance was in progress in the Cutlers’ Hall, hotels and restaurants were busy-and we were at the technical college. With so many people in the city, it was little short of a miracle that the number of dead did not number thousands.

Apart from a major operation many years later, that night, Thursday, December 12th, 1940 in the centre of the Sheffield Blitz, must have been my closest encounter with death.

On the following Sunday, a second raid was carried out by the Luftwaffe, but this time, it was concentrated on the east end of the city and the famous steelworks. Strangely, the works suffered very little damage, although thousands of tightly packed houses in the Attercliffe area suffered considerable damage.

However, the following morning after the raid I attempted and successfully achieved, with many thousands of others, to reach my place of work, the Thomas Firth & John Brown steel works in Savile Street. Hitler wasn’t going to beat us!

On the 5th August, 1941, I volunteered and entered service in the Royal Air Force as a ground Wireless operator and remained in that capacity for the next four years. On the 10th February 1945, I was released to industry, eventually obtaining a position at Rolls Royce, Derby where I spent 38 very happy years until retirement in December 1982.

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