Periwood Pool
I was delighted on 16th March 1996 to attend the opening
of Periwood Pool by the then Lord Mayor of Sheffield - David Heslop with
my wife, Pauline, and grandson Miles.
The pool and its immediate surroundings provides shelter and accommodation
for local wildlife, already it had been graced by both heron and kingfisher.
In wishing the project well, I hoped that local people, particularly children,
would appreciate the facilities as I did on this very spot some years
ago. I took the opportunity then of writing a few notes on the times when
I was much attached to the spot.
1939
My father, Colin Hill, born in 1882, was a nursery man,
as was his father. Illness, following the First World War, caused a break
in this career, but in 1939, following warnings to rest in case his heart
gave in, he ignored the advice and took on 1 ½ acres of overgrown
land, which was made up of 5 'allotments' owned by Mr. Hardcastle of Camping
Lane.
On a Summer's day I went with him to make a start. (We lived nearby on
Chatfield Road). The first thing he did was to dig up turfs, turn them
upside down and block the river for me to play in (I was 6 years old at
the time).
The next weeks were filled with clearing rubbish, repairing hedges and
building a gate at the entrance. One of the brick built gate posts is
still there at the top of the bank. Work was diverted to erecting 'Anderson
Shelters' in many local gardens. This greatly interested me as they formed
excellent dens in which my friends and I would spend much time during
the war.
As clearance of the site progressed the ground yielded a great deal of
rock which was used to contain the ornamental pool and all the nursery
beds. Many vegetables were grown as part of the war effort, but people
still bedded out annuals and planted shrubs so many thousands of plants
were grown.
As I look back, I am reminded how self sufficient the
business was. My father, then the ARP 'Post' Warden at Holmhirst Road
Methodist Chapel, had another warden as partner (Mr. Cadman) and together
they developed a nursery which was to be featured in the local press for
its beauty. The blitz helped them. They were able to collect great quantities
of wood and broken glass from Sheffield Moor after the bombing, at very
little cost. Winter evenings in cellars converted this into greenhouse
sashes, beams, posts, etc. and eventually 6 large greenhouses were built
at the top of the site which now is housing. Water was drawn from the
pond in the bottom for all the rows of vegetables on the bank. A well
was dug at the top where water was found at about 12 or 15 feet. This
supplied the greenhouses and nursery beds. Digging the well exposed a
coal seam. This supplied all the fuel required for many years for the
large greenhouse heating system. When the fire was stoked up at night
an equal amount of clay (from the same source) was added to the coal.
Raking out in the morning produced a sharp red ash which was used for
all the pathways and as an additive to composts. Turf was rotted to form
the bulk of the compost and seed trays were made from second-hand wood.
More water was saved from the greenhouse roofs and this was stored in
massive cisterns underneath the greenhouses.
The rent for the five allotments was £5 a year and
bought seed (most was saved from stock) came to a similar amount.
Vines grew in the greenhouses, climbers covered the archways and one rose
hedge of Emily Gray stretched 40 yards and filled the air with scent in
Summer. Four hundred pots of late chrysanthemums took the place of four
hundred pots of tomato in Autumn. The only lady barber of the day cut
our hair outside on the top lawn. I took my father a hot lunch and his
days, as recorded in his diaries, were between 14 and 16 hours when light
permitted. I was often sent to fetch him back in the dark.
We had a great many customers, and we also laid out and maintained private
gardens.
In the space of just a few weeks in 1952 everything changed. Mr Cadman
died after watering the vegetables with me after a very hot day in the
Summer. My sister was married a few days later. My father died a week
or two after that. This left me in sole charge with a thick order book
and an enormous amount of work (I had been working with the Forestry Commission
and the felling gang of the Derwent Valley Water Board).
I fulfilled all the orders, kept growing bedding plants
and furnishing hanging baskets, and re-planned the whole site as an ornamental
garden with walks, seats, arbors and plants. The pond I had already filled
with roach. The adjacent watercress pond (fed from a spring on the cemetery
side of the river) had breeding goldfish. The island in the main pond
was home to water voles. Wild life abounded.
Soon I was married and after a little while we moved back into the old
family nursery - Abbey lane Nurseries - where we built a house and stayed
for some 30 years. Remnants of the 'Periwood' site still remain with me
and they include one of the first stainless steel spades made and 'trialled'
by my father.
I had learned to swim in the pond, I learned my craft as a nursery man
on the site, and more importantly it provided the richest environment
possible for a growing boy. I am glad others have the opportunity to do
the same.
Michael Hill
Fateful Day
Britain and Germany were at war. It was 1943 and we were
young, but we knew about war. We were old enough to move on and we were
being moved on. We had been told it would be alright, but we had seen
the others coming back covered in chalk dust and clutching bits of paper
as proof that they had been there.
All we had to do, they said, was cross the road, go up the sloping ground
and enter the building. Once inside we would be met and directed to our
place. Our support group would go with us to see us settled in.
The appointed hour arrived and we moved off from our various places of
shelter, all aiming to go up the sloping ground and gain the safety of
the building at the top of the hill.
Not all who should have been there that day arrived, but most of us did
on that fateful day. We gathered in our places and soon it was time for
our support people to withdraw. We knew we were on our own with people
we had never seen before but now had to trust.
Those of us who survived and are now quite old can still remember that
some of us cried quite openly when our support group left us. I can still
remember very clearly that first day. I will never forget it. The day
I went to Infant School.
A bit of nonsance written by Ken Mettam
Careful!
The toilet chain is booby trapped!
Roger Davis continues his series about Bradway area service
veterans, and writes about the headmaster who became an explosives expert.
Nobody expects to discover that a former headmaster of a large Sheffield
junior school has a detailed practical knowledge of how to booby trap
a toilet chain, a telephone directory, or an innocent cushion, but such
a person is Harold Mayson, of Wollaton Road, Bradway.
Harold, who will celebrate his 80th birthday next month (March), was headmaster
of Birley Spa school until retiring in 1982, and his booby trap ability
represents just a fraction of his wartime training as a highly skilled
Corporal Fitter/Armourer (Guns and Bombs) in the RAF.
Secretary of the Sheffield area branch of The Royal Air Forces Association,
and also a member of the Bomber Command Association, Harold has kept in
close touch with service developments since he was demobbed in 1946. He
still enjoys a well earned reputation as something of a national authority
on the mysterious and semi-secret world of the specialists who tended
to the guns and bombs carried by a vast range of Allied aircraft.
Rejected for flying duties because of his eyesight, Harold
immersed himself in the technicalities of the world of the aircraft fitters
for his years of war service. He will always be in the front ranks of
those praising the skill and bravery of the flying crews who battled day
after day against enormous odds in their fighters and bombers, but he
is also justly proud of the men with whom he worked directly on a host
of airfields. "There is no doubt about it" he said. "We
all had our backs right up against the wall and a job to be done.
Just how big a job Harold was faced with for five years of war service
is shown by one of his proudest possessions, a highly detailed and meticulously
recorded 225 page typed manuscript in which he recorded his life and duties
in those now far off days. The manuscript, entitled "A Choice of
Weapons - Reminiscences of a Fitter Armourer" fills two A-4 sized
ring binders, and Harold still has dreams of having it published as a
book .
In total, he completed 53 weeks of intensive technical
training to qualify as a fitter/armourer (bombs and guns) to become one
of the highest paid Corporals in the RAF. Then on retiring from the education
world, he filled his leisure time with gardening, fly-fishing and organ
playing, and has held office in various societies, as well as keeping
abreast of current affairs.
"I felt a deep sense of anger and betrayal at the writings of armchair
critics, most of whom had not been born until after the war" he said.
"Whatever facts or statistics they had unearthed, they failed completely
to understand the mood of the British people during wartime. They almost
completely ignored the ruthless efficiency of the enemy and the admirable
self control of our aircrews who, night and day, lived under the shadow
of death".
Harold's first posting to an operational station was to
RAF Scampton, near Lincoln, where he said morale was very high, but the
aircrews were under no illusion as to their chances of surviving a tour
of operations. "With an average loss rate per operation for the whole
of Bomber Command of 4-5 per cent for the first six months of 1942, those
who survived a tour of 30 operations were a very fortunate minority".
With no hesitation, Harold can still instantly recall
the detailed alignment procedure for harmonising the Browning machine
guns of an eight-gun Spitfire fighter to put 9,200 bullets a minute into
a twelve foot diameter circle at 200 yards, or 460 in a three second burst.
The fitters were familiar with every aspect of the gun turrets of the
bombers in their care, and were fully aware that the survival of the plane's
crew would often depend on the accurate aim of the rear gunner, often
the first person to catch sight of an attacking enemy fighter, as the
plane gyrated wildly across the sky in violent evasive action. All to
often, they saw the horrific results of the enemy attack in a wrecked
turret, which had to be cleaned out after the gunner's body had been removed.
Perhaps the most emotive and saddest day of Harold's service
life was when news came through that the 235 and 248 Mosquito squadrons
with whom they had formerly shared the Portreath base had been decimated
in a single operation from Banff. Nineteen Mosquitoes had set out to attack
German naval units in the Rombach Fjord in Norway, but only four aircraft
returned.
Amid the memories of horror and tragedy, Harold recalls
a host of light hearted moments from his service days, such as the occasion
when he was on a lonely late night guard duty in a remote area of Credenhill
airfield, Hereford, and heard a suspicious rustling in some bushes. Flicking
off the safety catch on his rifle, he challenged "Halt or I fire",
only to find himself face to face with a curious cow!
While at Credenhill, he was given the nickname Tiger. "There was
some connection with a boxing match" he smilingly recalls, and when
he went to a dance at the NAAFI the band immediately struck up with Tiger
Rag.
On one never to be forgotten morning, Harold and his colleagues
were paraded to hear a lecture "from a pompous ass of a squadron
leader" on the action they should take if the airfield was attacked
by enemy parachutists. "We were told that as there would not be enough
rifles to go round, the armourers would be issued with pikes, and that
dustbin lids could provide some protection - presumably against the bows
and arrows of the parachutists!"
Always a keen music lover, with tastes ranging from the
popular to the classics, he found his tolerance stretched to the limit
one night when he returned to his hut to be greeted with "a terrible
sound of screeching and wailing, like some poor injured animal in its
last agonising throes of death". The cause of the disharmony was
a young airman trying to learn the bagpipes, who was promptly banished
to some distant fields!
On another day when checking boxes of explosives stacked
in a bomb dump building, Harold bent down to close a lid when he was startled
by a sudden flurry as a whole family of field mice, which had been nibbling
the explosive, poured out of the box, scampering in all directions!
For much of his service, Harold was stationed at Portreath
on the Cornish coast and on subsequent holiday visits to the area he has
frequently stood on the cliff tops near to the one time site of the station
wireless section, hearing, in imagination, the soft voice of a WAAF radio
operator repeating over and over again the call sign "Pond weed calling,
Pond weed calling".
She was trying in vain to contact a hopelessly lost Polish fighter pilot
who persisted in taking a course far out into the Atlantic until his plane
ran out of fuel.
Almost every type of Allied plane passed through Portreath,
with the fitters in a state of almost constant alert. Sometimes they had
to deal with "lame ducks" as planes returned from raids still
carrying bombs which had failed to release over the target, or after being
released, finished up rolling about in the bomb bay minus their safety
devices.
Shortly after D-Day, Harold was sent on a course to train
as an instructor on dealing with mines and booby traps likely to be encountered
on captured enemy airfields on the continent. "One had to develop
a sixth sense in regard to the placing of booby traps, and we spent most
of the time crawling around on our stomachs uncovering mines and feeling
for trip wires. Our only equipment was a hacksaw blade, with none of the
paraphernalia used in bomb disposal work nowadays. "Almost any object
could be booby trapped - toilet cisterns and seats, telephones, directories
and tools -.in the war of dirty tricks".
Looking back now over nearly 60 years to those years of
conflict, Harold Mayson expresses himself in the following words: "As
a convinced Christian, I abhor war and the suffering it brings in its
wake, but I fail to see how we could have avoided being involved in 1939.
Like the majority of my generation, I went to war to fight an evil which,
but for their self sacrifice, would surely have engulfed us. I find it
difficult to feel any regret for the part I played. The nation cannot
ever repay the debt it owes to our aircrew, who, day and night, fought
savage battles over land and sea. The burden of keeping alive their hopes
and ideals rests on we who survived and on succeeding generations".
Roger Davis
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