Autumn 2000

Views on disc - The past reflected - Sheffield's Secret Museum - Treasure ship to hell - West View Cottage

Views on disc

A CD-ROM disc containing nearly all the known older pictures of Bradway is now available for those with a computer and an interest in the history of Bradway.

75 of the images were taken between 1900 and 1990, with 44 present day photographs, taken from the same viewpoints. These are then juxta-positioned in a further set of images to make comparisons easier. A full text index is also included.
Further details and copies of Scenes Past and present in Bradway and Adjoining Areas are available from Tony Smith on 236 7548.

Tony has also produced a booklet containing a collection of drawings and plans of Beauchief Abbey and the surrounding area, with notes on the various archaeological excavations that have taken place on the site.
Ed. If you have any old pictures of Bradway and its inhabitants to add to the collection Tony would be interested to hear from you, or you can contact us at the Bugle on 236 9025.

The past reflected

In January 1887, my grandmother Sarah Ellen was born in Bradway. I was thinking about this one day as I stood in the schoolyard of Bradway Annexe, helping out at the Pre-School Play Group. The lovely old school building had interested me and I was standing back to look up at the bell tower when I noticed the sign in the brickwork, Norton School Board 1872.
It occurred to me that my grandmother would have attended this school. She must have played in this playground, I thought, and now, around one hundred years later, her great-great-granddaughter was doing exactly the same. And uncannily, this little girl, my granddaughter, had almost the same name.

As I watched Helen Sarah run to her favourite pedal car, I half closed my eyes and tried to imagine the scene when Sarah Ellen had played here. Had she too run laughing down the playground chasing her friends? I began to picture how she would have been dressed and the games she might have played. Then I remembered what had happened to her and how those carefree days had come abruptly to an end.

My great-grandfather, Francis William Mayfield worked as a platelayer on the railway. He had probably worked locally on the new line to Manchester which opened in 1894. One Saturday, he told his wife that he was going into Sheffield to do some shopping. He took all the money from the pot on the mantelpiece and left.

That was the last anyone saw of him, for he just disappeared. What happened to him remains a mystery. Did he meet with an accident, or did he plan to leave and disappear? No-one ever found out.

The impact on his family was shattering. As the weeks passed with no word of him, my great-grandmother, who had been Annie Mancer before she married, was eventually forced to leave Bradway. It may have been that they were living in a tied cottage, but most likely it was simply a lack of income and the pressing need for her to find work that forced them out.
Annie found lodgings for herself in Arundel Street in Sheffield, but not for the children. At just eight years old, Sarah Ellen was put into a Home for Girls on City Road.

The family never returned to Bradway. I came to live here with my own family about 15 years ago. As for my grandmother, Sarah Ellen, she was happily married for nearly 60 years and lived to the ripe old age of 90.

Joan Mettam

Sheffield's Secret Museum

You will find yourself stepping back into Sheffield's rich past when you visit the Traditional Heritage Museum on Ecclesall Road. The museum features exhibits of local trades, crafts, occupations and traditional lifestyles in a fascinating mixture of domestic and industrial cameos.

As you enter the Museum through the pawnbrokers, you step back into an era when the pace of life was much slower and there was time to linger. Here is the old corner shop that supplied all your needs, everything, from pan scrubbers to pot-menders, coffee to candles and soap powders to soup powders. Next to it is the cobbler's, with clogs and shoes under repair, tins of polish, laces and shoe protectors. Behind this is the basket maker's, with a variety of baskets for every need and occasion, all made from the finest reeds and willows.

The city's industrial heart is not forgotten. The grinding hull is where the grinder would have put an expert edge on the knives; the horn workshop where the handles were prepared; the silversmith whose intricate work adorns much of the cutlery - all these and others.

Perhaps you worked in an office and would be interested in seeing some of the latest gadgets. There are many of these on display, and, if the ledger clerk is not around, you can examine them, including the latest idea, the typewriter.
Step into the chemist's and inhale the smell of camphorated oil. Lotions and ointments to cure any ailments cram the shelves and weird and wonderful medical contraptions can be seen. Next door is an optician's with a wonderful range of spectacles and whose eye-testing machine was the envy of all others.

The domestic department has not been overlooked - rubbing boards, flat irons, possers and soap savers all help to lighten the burden of washing day. There is even the latest labour saving device, a washing machine and for the housewife with electricity, the wonder of the age, the vacuum cleaner.

Because the Museum is run by a handful of volunteers, it is only open occasionally, usually the last Saturday in the month, or by prior appointment. For further information, phone Sheffield 222 6296. The next two open days are Saturday 30 September and Saturday 28 October from 10.30am to 4.30pm. Admission £1, concessions 70p, Family Ticket £3.
Traditional Heritage Museum, 605 Ecclesall Road, S11 8PR.

Treasure ship to hell

In his fourth article spotlighting the wartime experiences of former Bradway servicemen, Roger Davis meets a veteran of the Malta and Russian convoys who sailed on a real treasure ship.

There are not many Yorkshire men around who have been firemen and can claim to have had the water from the fire noses blowing back and forming icicles hanging from their helmets; there are certainly not many who sailed through Hell and back with the Malta and Russian convoys and survived after their ship was torpedoed; and there can surely only be a few who have sailed an a real treasure ship carrying a hoard of gold bars worth a Czar's ransom.

One such remarkable man who qualifies on each count is Harry Hibbert aged 79, of Ladybower Court, Everard Avenue. Born in Wheedon Street, Tinsley, Harry left school at 15 to work as a storeman with Sheffield and Ecclesall Co-operative Society at the Midhill Road and Archer Road branches, and joined the fire service in 1946 after five perilous years in the Royal navy.
Harry has been a Bradway resident since retiring 19 years ago from his post as Sheffield divisional commander of South Yorkshire Fire Brigade. In that post he had responsibility for the old Division Street headquarters, the Ringinglow, Rivelin, Low Edges, and Intake fire stations, as well as part of the Mexborough Division, with a total of some 270 staff under his command.

A Saturday evening visit to the old Abbeydale Cinema, where a newsreel programme was featuring the early wartime action in which the German battleship, the Graf Spee, was scuttled in the South Atlantic after clashing with the British cruisers Ajax, Achilles, and Exeter, made up Harry's mind that the Senior Service was the one for him to join.

Enlisting, at the end of 1940, his first ship was the cruiser Edinburgh, sailing from Scapa Flow in the Shetlands, with Harry joining the crew as a radar operator. For his first voyage, the Edinburgh went straight out on a North Atlantic patrol for three weeks, and intercepted a 12,000 ton German submarine supply ship.

The Edinburgh then joined the escort force for a convoy sailing through the Mediterranean to the besieged island of Malta. The destroyers Firedrake and Fearless were sunk, and the aircraft carrier Illustrious badly damaged. "On our two Malta convoys we clobbered a couple of Gerrnan E boats and shot down about 18 Savoy Machete type Italian torpedo bombers" recalled Harry, "but we were very wary about encountering the big Italian capital ships, and being at the receiving end of their high level bombers and the E boat night attacks".

A convoy to Cape Town by way of the Suez Canal followed, before the news came that the Edinburgh would be sailing on a Russian convoy. "If the announcement was not actually received with horror, it was viewed with apprehension" said Harry.
"On a previous convoy up to Murmansk, the cruiser Trinidad had engaged three German destroyers from Northern Norway. The weather was so bad that the decks were frozen over and the guns had to be kept constantly on the move to be ready for action. The Trinidad fired two torpedoes at the destroyers, but because of the effect of the cold on the mechanism, one went wildly astray and the second one did a U-turn in the water and torpedoed its own ship! The Trinidad struggled on to Murmansk with a big hole in its side and the Edinburgh was carrying steel plates to repair the damage".

"After the Murmansk trip, we looked back on the Malta convoys as milk runs" grinned Harry.
The Edinburgh's Russian convoy trip was to ensure that the ship became a Royal Navy legend, to be talked about wherever sea-faring men and treasure seekers gathered for the rest of the century and so on into this new millennium.
"We saw that something unusual was happening when the ship was loading up for the voyage home from Murmansk in April, 1942", recalled Harry. "There were Russian guards with rifles and fixed bayonets on the quayside and on the ship as a lot of boxes were brought aboard. It was not until we sailed that the buzz, as we called it, got around that we had ten tons of Russian gold on board. When we were torpedoed in the Barents Sea, about 170 miles north of Murmansk, someone shouts 'What about the gold' and a lot of voices told him what to do about the gold!

The gold bars, then valued at £63 million, were intended as a payment from Russia to the United States for weapons and munitions being supplied to fight the Germans".

About 85 per cent of the gold was recovered at a depth of 800 feet in 1981 in a salvage operation organized by the almost legendary Keith Jessop, the most successful treasure hunter and salvage diver in history, and which is vividly described in his recently published book, Goldfinder. The divers had to get into the wreck of the Edinburgh through the holes blasted in her side by the torpedoes.

Recalling the grim drama of the Edinburgh's last hours, Harry said the cruiser was hit by three torpedoes. Eighty members of the Edinburgh's crew of 850 lost their lives in the action, as did the 40 members of a party of Polish VIPs being taken to Britain. "Fortunately, we had two destroyers and two minesweepers with us to give assistance" said Harry. "We stayed in action for 36 hours engaging two German destroyers after being hit by the first two torpedoes, and then we were hit again".
"We had been taken in tow twice and I was making some toast in the transmitter room at the end of my watch when the third torpedo hit us. The minesweepers came alongside to take off survivors and I jumped onto the deck of one of them. We were all taken back to a Russian military camp outside Murmansk, where the conditions, to say the least, were primitive. They gave us wooden bowls and spoons and all we had to eat was black bread, some kind of pine leaf tea, and if you were lucky, reindeer soup".

"From the camp, I joined the crew of the destroyer Foresight, where my first job was to repair the radar cabin wrecked a by a shell that had blown the legs off the two operators. On the return convoy. we were soon attacked by submarines and Stuka dive bombers and more ships were lost, including the repaired Trinidad, which had many of the wounded survivors from the Edinburgh and other ships on board".

Nearly 60 years have gone by since the Russia convoys battled through the freezing Arctic waters, but Harry still retains his admiration for the fighter pilots who volunteered to be catapulted from the decks of merchant ships in the convoys. Their dangerous task was to fight off German Condor reconnaissance planes shadowing the ships and reporting the positions to the waiting packs of submarines. At the end of the flight, the pilot could only hope to ditch his plane, or to parachute into the sea close enough to a ship to be able to survive the freezing water temperature that would kill him within a few minutes unless he was rescued.

"We admired them terrifically and I'd love to meet any of them who survived" said Harry. "We had it rough and bad enough on the Russian convoys, but we knew there was a fifty-fifty chance of us surviving. Those courageous pilots had hardly any chance".

Back at Scapa Flow after the sinking of the Edinburgh, Harry was given a fortnights survival leave. "I had an old black overcoat on, tied up in the middle with a lanyard and sea boots with old stockings, my Post Office bank book and a little camera. That is all I had managed to save".

"We were still in that condition when we arrived back at Portsmouth, where a young sub-lieutenant at the station took command of our party of survivors and marched us right through the centre of the town to the barracks. The senior officer on duty at the barrack gates then stopped us and gave the sub lieutenant a right rollicking for making us march through the town in the state we were in, instead of arranging transport. The incident certainly did no good to his promotion prospects!
After his leave, Harry was posted to an armed merchant ship as a Leading Seaman radar operator, and promptly sailed for Australia and New Zealand, via the Panama Canal. He made three such trips, sailing south with general cargo and returning with tinned meat, fruit and other foodstuffs to help eke out British rations. Harry then joined the crew of the troopship Nieuw Amsterdam, sailing between Britain and the United States and Canada, before a posting to a new aircraft carrier, HMS Pioneer, with yet another voyage to Australia!

When asked about his most vivid fire service memories, Harry looks back to the early years in Sheffield, with a great blaze at the former Corn Exchange in the city centre in 1946. Fire crews fought the flames for two days in weather conditions reminiscent of the Russian convoys, with two feet of snow and ice on the roofs of surrounding buildings.

"I have a photograph of me with icicles hanging from my helmet" recalls Harry. "After the fire we couldn't roll up the hoses because they were frozen solid and we had to cut them into lengths. And when it came to removing the turn-table ladders, we had to go up with blow lamps to free the joints".

Roger Davis

West View Cottage

Dear Sir
I was most interested to read the article on West View Cottage by Brian Edwards, since I believe that my late wife and I were the last people to live in it before it was demolished in about 1972.

We bought it [as The Cottage Abbeydale Road South] at Auction in 1962; and lived in it until 1969 when my work took me to London. Prior to 1962 it had been occupied by two maiden ladies, the Misses Lockwood who were related to an old Sheffield family, and it came on the market on the death of the last of these.

The house stood in 3 1/4 acres comprising:- an acre of preserved woodland; an acre of garden on two levels; and a paddock of 1 1/4 acres. It was approached from Abbeydale Road South by a narrow private drive across the railway bridge, which turned right into the property, and was connected by a public footpath to steps leading up to Queen Victoria Road. From there, a public footpath skirted the paddock and led through the woodland to the Baslow Road.

We were given to understand that the cottage had originally been the site of a Grinding Wheel. The woodland had been the dam [which had silted up when the Wheel was no longer used, and become overgrown with trees] which supplied water to the Wheel through a channel or goit which was still clearly visible. This led from the wood through the garden and eventually to a sluice, which was still in existence in 1969. The sluice discharged into the river Sheaf which formed the boundary of the wood and part of the garden. The outbuildings had housed the grinding machinery, and the house had originally been two cottages in which the manager and the foreman of the Works had lived.

It was also thought that the works were established in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries at a time when the Sheaf provided the water power for the large amount of industrial activity located in the valley. Certainly the Deeds of the property required the occupants to '... keep the goits and Culverts clear for the Rolling Mill at Abbeydale...'
It would seem, therefore, that this was indeed the site of the Upper Wheel referred to in Mr Edwards article; and that it was driven by water from its dam, subsequently silted up, which was fed with water from the Totley Brook which still flows past the end of the woodland. When we took over the property, we found two unused grindstones, presumably abandoned when the Works ceased production.

The Cottage was a substantial property. It was stone-built, with walls three feet thick. It had three large reception rooms, each with an open fireplace, one of which was the entrance hall with a staircase leading to the first floor; a large kitchen and a utility room. The first floor had two bathrooms and five bedrooms, two of which were furnished with antique Georgian fireplaces. Although clearly the house could not have had a conventional 'damp course' when we were excavating near the outside walls we discovered that these went down a very considerable distance and were surrounded by triangular banks of coke, the vertical sides of which were flush with the waits, thus providing for rainwater to drain away. The roof consisted of large overlapping stone slabs. The far right-hand door led into the outbuildings, and the door next to it into a passage between the house and the outbuildings.

When we bought the property, a certain amount of refurbishment was necessary. Consequently we were not able to move in until late Autumn 1962, just before the onset of the worst winter since 1947! In early January 1963 the water supply to the Cottage failed and we discovered that water was delivered by a 4"iron pipe which led from the mains in Abbeydale Road South along the drive, under the railway bridge [with no insulation] and into the property. Apparently the large capacity pipe had been installed at the turn of the Century when it had been thought that a number of houses would be built on part of the land and in the absence of motorised transport, the narrowness of the railway bridge would be no obstacle to this development. Clearly one house could not use enough water to cause much movement in a 4' pipe some 80yds long and consequently it froze at the bridge. Fortunately the Water Board excavated the pipe and replaced it with a suitably lagged modern plastic pipe.

During the period of two weeks which this work look we were regularly supplied with drinking water delivered in an unused galvanised dustbin and there was well in the paddock which provided water for household chores to a tap in the kitchen. Apart from this episode we encountered no problems during the time we occupied this delightful property.
We were extremely sorry to leave our beautiful house and very sad that it was subsequently demolished.

Henry D Turner

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