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My parents moved to Wakefield in 1932 when my father became the section engineer for the new National Grid. His parents, my mother’s widowed father who was the vicar of a city-centre parish, and various of my parents’ sisters, brothers and friends remained in their home town, Sheffield. Although we had a telephone at home — needed for my father’s work in overseeing the transmission of electricity across a wide area — telephones were still a rarity in those days and none of our family in Sheffield had one. So that, when we learned that Sheffield had been subjected to a heavy bombardment on the night of 12 December 1940, there was no means of knowing whether any of the family had been affected — even killed — without going to see. So the day after the blitz Father drove us all to Sheffield — in those days long before the M1 this meant driving along the A61 and through the centre of Barnsley. Reaching the outskirts of Sheffield we could see the huge pall of smoke hanging over it. First, then, to my grandfather’s vicarage. This was a substantial Georgian house in Gell Street lying between the Somme Barracks and the Jessop Hospital for Women. There was much activity in the road outside. A bomb had fallen between the vicarage and the hospital making a huge crater but not, in fact, exploding. The vicarage was still standing but as we went inside we realised how dreadfully dark it all was. Almost all the windows had been shattered and the blackout curtains remained drawn to keep whatever warmth there was in. Four of my grandfather’s grown-up children still lived at home and we heard how they had spent the night putting out the numerous incendiary bombs which had fallen around the house and into its roof. But the devastating news was the Grandfather’s church, St James’s, a handsome Georgian building, had taken a direct hit and was razed practically to the ground.
My father’s parents lived in a bungalow (which my grandfather had built himself) on the outskirts of Sheffield at Bents Green. The area had escaped the blitz altogether and none of the family (there was a daughter living at home and another living nearby) had come to any harm.
But when we went on to check on Mother’s closest friend, May Newton, it was a different story. The house where she lived with her mother, in the Beauchief area of Sheffield, had been bombed and little of it remained. I recall noticing a pretty blue china salt pot lying unbroken on the lawn. What had happened to old Mrs Newton and to May? We drove on to May’s brother’s house. Remarkably both of the women were there and unhurt. They had heard the bomb coming and rushed out of the front of the house as the building fell in towards the back.
The real casualty of all this was my grandfather. The loss of his beloved church was a blow he never recovered from. He died the following year.

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