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Sheffield Blitz Memorial Trust
The Sheffield Blitz Memorial Trust was established to promote knowledge and education about the German attacks of December 1940. The Sheffield Blitz has had a profound and lasting impact on the city, and we believe that its legacy and influence should be known by as wide an audience as possible
Our project
The Sheffield Blitz Memorial Trust is recording the memories of the last living generation affected by the 1940 Sheffield bombings—those who were children during World War Two. Additionally, the project will enhance the Sheffield Blitz exhibition at the National Emergency Services Museum, introduce a book of 'blitz kids' stories, and launch educational activities, ensuring the Blitz's legacy is preserved for future generations
Get involved
The project is offering the chance for the whole community to get involved through volunteer roles which will provide training in:
• recording interviews
• web design skills
• research skills.
Fancy getting involved? Please fill in the form below.
News
Hear the memories of Sheffield's blitz kids
"I wasn’t really very good at school because you didn’t have lessons like you do now. Sometimes we went to school, but there were always the sirens going off and that meant you had to take cover. It was all right if you were at home because we had an Anderson shelter in the garden. But at school... well, we must have had a big one there for everyone to get in, though I can’t remember exactly.
Often we didn’t have proper lessons. We went in groups of six to different parents’ houses. My friend said we hardly did any schoolwork in those years. There was no fuel – everything was in short supply. One day, someone came from abroad and held up a piece of fruit and said, 'Does anybody know what this is?' None of us did. What would you think it was? Maybe a pineapple? It was a banana. Nobody had ever seen a banana. The war had gone on that long – we just didn’t get them anymore.
There were 60 children in the class. My two granddaughters would’ve moaned like mad if they had to teach 60! But all the men had gone to be soldiers, and a lot of the women too – ambulance drivers and such. So we didn’t really learn very much.
When the bombs were dropping... oh, that was horrible. My dad worked in the steelworks – that’s why Sheffield got bombed so badly. He had to go out with the Home Guard. The sirens would go and he’d have to dash to the shelter. Sometimes it went on for hours at night. It wasn’t warm – just corrugated metal, like sheds now. It was awful, hearing the bombs and worrying whether he’d get back all right.
He always used to take me to town on a Saturday and buy me a Peach Melba at Woolworths. One Saturday, we had to walk to town – hardly any transport – and when we got there, the Moor was completely flattened. Nothing left. All the shops gone. I didn’t get my Peach Melba that day.
It was very frightening when the planes came over. The sirens would go, and you’d hear the bombs. Frightening for children – and I suppose for my mother too. It went on for hours sometimes. I was always worrying if my dad had been killed.
My mum made us dressing gowns from army surplus – grey, but warm, if a bit tickly. She made flasks up as well, in case we had to be down there for hours. I was too frightened to sleep properly. My brother Alan was four years younger than me.
After the bombing, Sheffield was just flattened. All the places you knew were gone. There was a little lane where we used to get coal – it disappeared completely, never came back.
There were so many shortages. On Greystones Road, there was a lovely old couple who ran a shop – he always wore a black suit with a little dickie bow. They were so kind to us kids, never impatient. When word got round that Mrs Scotsman had sweets, we’d all dash down there.
You had coupons for sugar, bacon, eggs... not very much for each person. One time, Mum said she had one point left and I asked for raisins and currants. She said yes – I ate the lot and was sick as a dog. I couldn’t touch raisins for months. Hardly any butter or cheese. We used to have tinned bacon – it was actually nice, rolled in fat inside a big tin – and powdered eggs. I believe you can still get that now.
We were quite lucky because my uncle had a fruit stall in the market. My grandmother had it before him. He used to swap with someone who had eggs – oranges for eggs, so we got the odd orange now and again.
In between school and the shelters, we still played. You don’t see it now, but we used to have long skipping ropes – kids would jump in one after another without stopping the rope. Whipping tops too. There were different shapes – one like a cone, one called a mushroom. You'd put your knee on it, whip it, and keep it spinning.
We played in the road. Had a washing line across it and kids took turns jumping in. My dad narrowly missed being bombed in a pub in Fitzalan Square. He’d just come out when the sirens went and the pub was bombed. There’s a plaque now saying how many people died. Talk about a close call. Very frightening. I don’t know how kids today would cope.
Christmases were different. We’d get books and crayons – not like the games you get now. There wasn’t much in the shops. I can’t remember a proper Christmas dinner – no turkeys or chickens back then.
You couldn’t arrange to go anywhere – the sirens could go at any time. You’d dash home, wait it out in the shelter. It was really scary. I think kids today would be frightened to death. I suppose I was, but we just got on with it. I remember the assembly at school – I’ve never forgotten 1939.
We weren’t really told what to expect. They didn’t know what was going to happen. Mostly, you were at home because schools weren’t heated – the fuel was needed for the war effort.
Six years it lasted. I was about twelve. Fancy that – out of 60 kids, only one passed the exam. Shows how little we learnt.
I never visited the steelworks where my dad worked, but I’ve seen pictures. Big furnaces, molten metal – it looked like gold. They made war parts there. It was hard work. No wonder the Germans wanted to knock it down – they hit some, but not all.
When I heard the industrial side had been bombed on the second night, I was really frightened and worried. Then you’d hear someone you knew had been killed. Lots of houses were blown up. One night, they really went to town with it. You dreaded it – the siren would go and it was a mad dash to the shelter.
We didn’t have beds in the shelter – maybe some chairs or old seating. There were four of us, so no neighbours in there with us. In London, they went down the Underground – that’s where Leon’s mum got trapped. They had it worse than us, I think. But the steelworks meant Sheffield got it bad too.
Transport stopped on the blitz nights. My dad had to walk home – no buses or trams running.
When I heard about places like Marples or the Moor being bombed, we didn’t know until the next day. I think Atkinson’s was lucky. A woman I knew used to work there. Most of the big shops had gone – just nothing left."
"I was born in 1935. I can remember as far back as when I was probably only two years old. My dad had pneumonia back then. It was very serious at the time, and he was taken into the Royal Infirmary in Sheffield. I can still clearly remember playing on the railings outside with my Aunt Agnes – she was my chaperone.
My dad ended up having two or three ribs taken out, and after that he was reasonably all right.
The next thing I remember before the Blitz was my great-granddad’s burial at Loxley. I would have been four at the time. I remember playing on a wall while everything was going on.
I lived at Malin Bridge – that’s where the two rivers, the Loxley and the Rivelin, converge. That comes into the Blitz later, because the Germans used the rivers as guides.
Before the war, my dad had gone back to work after his operation. He was pulling people in for the army. How he passed the medical, I’ll never know – he had two ribs missing. He joined the Royal Artillery and was stationed at Aberystwyth, but they brought him back eventually due to his health.
I remember when he returned, he took me walking near Dam Flask at Bradfield. It was the time of the Dambusters, and across Dam Flask they had strung a steel cable. People say it was there to stop the Germans copying what we’d done. They hung barrels full of rubbish from it, and the cable was fastened into the concrete on both sides of the valley. Those anchor points are still there.
Around the time the war started, my dad was demobbed again because of his health. Then came the Blitz. It became pretty regular – bombings night after night. Fires, searchlights – but I was just a kid and it didn’t bother me much.
We shared an Anderson shelter with another family. One of them, a big fella who liked to be the boss, stood in the shelter panicking, shouting, 'Get back! Come on, come on!' He vanished after that – gone for hours. We later found out the Germans had dropped a string of bombs right down from Malin Bridge to the bottom where the rivers joined.
When we came out of the shelter, the whole bottom end of Malin Bridge was ablaze. Trees on fire. My uncle had pigsties down there – they were lucky, they didn’t get hit.
The next day, my dad took me down where a secondary shelter had been. I remember picking up pieces of shrapnel about the size of milk bottles.
I later learned they dropped three land mines at our end of town. One came down on a parachute but didn’t go off – probably had a timer. I remember the army lads coming in to deal with it, and all the women running up with scissors – they all wanted the parachute silk to make knickers. That’s what they said, anyway!
Another bomb dropped demolished the school. One landed on Hawksley Avenue – it demolished a house. My wife, who was just a small child then, had been in her nan’s shelter on Bradford Road. When they returned, they found the door had been blasted in.
There was another bomb where Lidl is now at Wadsley Bridge. That one exploded and left a massive crater.
My dad came back from the army again and took me back out to Bradfield. Above a pub called The Horns in the village, the American Army were stationed. They were shelling into the dam that had burst 200 years before. I think they were based at Grenoside – that’s where their ammunition depot was. You can still see the shape of it now.
The Blitz left Sheffield in a terrible state. Buildings flattened. You could see the flames from Rotherham. Around 1944, my dad pointed out a buzz bomb – a V-1 – flying overhead. People said there weren’t any, but I know what I saw. It made that awful buzzing noise – like 'brrrrrrrrrrr'. It was meant for Manchester, I think, or Ridgeway where they trained the paratroops. But it crashed on the moors.
Food was very scarce after the Blitz. We were lucky – my uncle kept pigs near the river. I still remember the best bacon sandwich of my life.
At Loxley, I could show you where the sentries used to stand. If a German pilot bailed out, that’s where they’d land. I remember the sentry box exactly – though it’s gone now, I know the spot.
I also remember eating whale meat. There was a butcher on Langsett Road who sold whale and horse meat. I couldn’t stomach whale. I suppose I had horse meat too – but when you’re little, it doesn’t really bother you.
Now, Malin Bridge – you might not know this – had a little plot of land where the rivers converge. Only small, but it had balloon barrages. All women ran them – RAF or army – and they sent up massive balloons to stop German planes flying low. The steel wires attached to them forced the bombers higher, which probably meant their bombs landed on the wrong side of the river.
When we were in the shelter, you’d hear bombs dropping – bump, bump, bump. I heard one and asked my dad what it was. He said it was a motorbike. I believed him. But it wasn’t. It was an Ack Ack gun – the anti-aircraft guns up at Stannington. They followed the rivers down into the city and bombed everything along the way – right to Attercliffe.
At Stannington, if you go past the church and keep going, you’ll find the old gun emplacements. There was even a decoy tram line with fake lights – to trick the bombers into dropping bombs in the wrong place. That might’ve helped save Malin Bridge."
"I was born on the 26th of April, 1935.
I don’t really remember the actual declaration of war – I was very young. But I do remember we were going to be evacuated. My mum considered sending us to Canada – there was this big ship taking children over – and she’d always wanted to go. But she wouldn’t have been able to come with us, so she scrapped that idea.
Instead, we were evacuated to Thrussington near Leicester. We had a bed-sitting room in a lovely cottage in this beautiful village. I remember it well. The toilets were outside and the family had a tortoise with string attached to it. I used to walk it up and down the garden, and Eric would say, 'No wonder your mum worries about you!' My sister was 18 months younger than me – she came too.
My dad had been in the regular army, and because of the recession, he’d stayed in rather than being out of work. He was discharged right at the end of his reserve service, and I remember my mum saying we had to go back. We’d been living in Ersham Street – a lovely street – but we couldn’t afford both that rent and the cottage, so we moved to Sheaf Gardens.
I remember Sheaf Gardens well – we were the second house from the top. Leadmill Road ran across below and Duchess Road above. On the night of the Blitz, we went down into the cellar. Our neighbours were there too. You could go all the way through the cellars along the street, but we stayed put in ours.
My dad and Mr Croom, our next-door neighbour, were fire watching. You could hear the bombs coming down and feel the vibration in the house. My dad came running into the cellar, sweating and shaken – I’d never seen him like that before. We were all cramped in, my mum, my sister, me and the neighbours. I had a torch – I dropped it at some point, probably because Mum shouted at me – but we managed to find it again in the dark.
Before the sirens went that night, Mum had put a rabbit stew on in the little kitchen at the back. It was in a big black saucepan, slow cooking on the Yorkshire range. But the sirens went off, so down we went into the cellar. When we came back up after the all-clear, the kitchen was covered in soot – no rabbit stew for lunch that day.
We went outside to look around. There were two big craters in the middle of Leadmill Road where bombs had fallen. Duchess Road School had been hit – I’d only just started there. At the bottom of Sheaf Gardens, the boys’ Catholic school had been flattened. So there were a lot of us with nowhere to go.
St Marie’s across the road was a girls’ Catholic school. A school board man came round and said we could either go there or to another school further away. Mum said I’d go across the road – simple as that.
That’s how I ended up at St Marie’s. I think the headteacher was Sister Fidelis. There was another nun, Sister Mary – she was lovely. I remember her more clearly. One day, a little boy sitting next to me came in crying – his 18-year-old brother had been killed. Another teacher came in another day and her husband had been killed. We were all affected by it.
My teacher was Miss Worth – she was wonderful. She taught me right up until I took the scholarship.
Years later, after I’d married, I saw Miss Worth again. I was at the bottom of Derbyshire Lane, saw this woman come out of a chiropodist’s, and I said to my husband, 'That’s Miss Worth!' I went up and said, 'You’re Miss Worth, aren’t you? I’m Dorothy Woodhall.' And she remembered me. I introduced her to my husband, Eric, and told her I had two daughters. It was lovely.
At school, we used to wear gas masks – they came in cardboard boxes. We had to carry them everywhere. I hated them. We did gas mask drills, and if the sirens went, we went into the shelters under Duchess Road School. In the shelters, we used to sing wartime songs – I remember 'Run Rabbit, Run Rabbit'.
Eventually, the girls were downstairs and the boys were upstairs at school. Everything was rationed. At the top of Matilda Street, there was a horse meat shop – Mum never bought from there, though we did get rabbit sometimes. Fish and chips weren’t rationed, and they were cooked in dripping – that’s how they should be done, none of this vegetable oil nonsense.
There was a pub at the top of Matilda Street. After Dad died, Mum would sometimes send me there on a hot day to get her half a jug of beer. The Norfolk pub was opposite, and the Montgomery pub was at the bottom. That’s where my dad used to go.
On the second night of the Blitz, it was the Moor and High Street that got it. There was a rumour going round that the Germans thought the steelworks were there. My mum had blackout curtains made into dresses – trimmed with bias binding – by a local dressmaker on Sheaf Gardens.
Colin, a family friend, later told me they’d lit up the Moor deliberately to lure bombs away from key targets. We’ve got books with pictures showing the damage – trams snapped in two.
Eric, who I later married, was a trainee at Forgemasters. He was walking home on the night of the Blitz, and couldn’t get back. His parents were worried sick, but he got home in the end. He worked in a reserved occupation and was in the Home Guard, so he wasn’t called up.
Rationing was strict. Everyone had a ration book. You didn’t get much – just tiny bits of cheese and butter. My mum took us down to Melius’ on Heeley Bottom for hours to queue. When my half-brother got married, he had to hand over his and his bride’s ration books to Mum so we could eat!
You had to register with a specific butcher. We had a greengrocer’s, a baker’s, and a little shop at the top of the road that sold everything from underwear to elastic. We always had a Sunday dinner, though. One lady sold pop and kept chocolate in a drawer. My sister and I used to go buy a bottle of Tizer for Sundays.
Mum made Yorkshire puddings in the oven, though she complained that the coal was more like shale. After dinner, Dad would go to bed for a bit – he was only in his 40s. Then we’d go for a walk.
We had gas rings fitted around the Yorkshire range to heat the oven – no health and safety back then. Breakfast was usually bread and lard, or bread and dripping. Mum used to warm our gloves on the shelf above the range and put a spoonful of whisky in her tea. I got terrible chilblains.
We didn’t have much money – there was no sick pay. So Mum took in a lodger, Mr Yardley, who stayed in the attic and gave my sister and me sixpence a week. I remember saving for a draughts set in the newsagent’s window.
I remember standing in the middle of the street looking at bomb craters and thinking how lucky we were. So close – but no one on our street was killed. There were two raids – the main Blitz and then another one a few days later. After that, we spent Christmas with Auntie Hilda in Hoyland Nether. Her house was spotless – she’d be up scrubbing early, and everything was shining when Uncle Sidney came downstairs. I was a bit scared of him, but she was lovely.
When the war ended, the best bit was being allowed to keep the lights on! No more blackout curtains. My sister and I went outside with our friends – the streetlamps looked just the same, though. My dad worked shifts as a back-lever man at George Senior’s steelworks on Sheaf Street. On clear nights, you could hear the hammer going.
I remember one day I came running in shouting, 'Mum! Billy Charles has got bananas!' She’d already got some – they were on the table.
I loved school. There was a boy called Sydney who could play the piano beautifully – he’d play for us at playtime. Sister Mary encouraged him. It was lovely."
"I was born on the 1st of June, 1930.
I remember when war was announced. They said it on the radio. I can picture my mum now – she was sat on a chair by the radio, crying. Her brother had died of wounds in the First World War after being shot in the stomach. My dad was in the Royal Navy – still had connections – but he never had to go again.
I think it all just came back to her and she sat there crying that morning. As children, you didn’t really understand. I was only nine when war broke out. You’d heard about the First World War, but you didn’t really take it in.
My dad became a naval recruiting officer in Sheffield. He had a gun strapped around him, a steel helmet, a stirrup pump and a bucket of sand by the door. That’s when we started to realise it was serious. From where we lived in Stannington – on Orfield Road in a bungalow – we could see the fires in Sheffield when they started bombing. You could see the flames from here.
We didn’t go into Sheffield much, but I remember the market – there was a man who used to toss a whole dinner service in the air and catch it again. I loved watching that.
In December 1940, my eldest sister Mona – she was 18 – had heard that the film The Bluebird was showing at the Central Picture House in town. She asked if she could take me and our sister Thelma, who was 12. I was 10. Our parents weren’t thrilled but said yes. So we got the bus and then the old double-decker tram right down the Moor.
I still remember the entrance to the cinema – two pillars, steps going up. We got in and were watching the film – it was about two children searching for the Bluebird of Happiness. Then the lights came on halfway through. We hadn’t heard the sirens because the film was so loud. The manager came in and said the air raid sirens had gone off – we could leave if we wanted or stay and carry on watching. We decided to stay. We were told to go into the basement and get under the billiard tables.
I remember standing on someone’s leg and apologising – they just said, 'All right, love.' My sister Mona saw blue lights coming from a little room with some chairs and said, 'Come on, let’s go in there.' So we did. After a while she said, 'Let’s try and get home.' But when we got to the door, an air raid warden stopped us – 'Where do you think you’re going?' she said we were walking to Stannington. He wasn’t having any of it.
He pointed to a street with a shelter. We went, but it was full, so we stood in the entrance all night, huddled together. I’ll never forget this little lad with a woman called Alice. He kept saying, 'Alice, where do you think Mum is?' and then, 'She’ll be making a cup of tea now.' Then it all went quiet until the all clear.
Afterwards, we had no choice but to walk home – straight up the tram track. We had to go round craters, but eventually we made it to Malin Bridge and then up the hill. When we got home, Mum was there – she said, 'Oh thank God.' But I asked, 'Where’s Pop?' Turns out a neighbour with petrol had driven him into town to look for us.
Because Dad was in naval uniform, he was let through the cordon. He saw three girls near the old C&A and thought it was us. When he got home, he was white as a sheet. He’d been told the cinema had taken a direct hit and said, 'I don’t think we’ll see any of them again.' It turned out it had been damaged, but not destroyed.
We all went straight to bed and slept. I woke up at quarter to twelve the next day and realised we should’ve been at school. Mum had gone to the fish and chip shop for something for lunch. She said we needed to wash our hair – we’d gone straight to bed filthy.
Looking back, I don’t remember being frightened. But thinking about our parents – seeing the red and orange glow from the city, not knowing where their children were – it must’ve been dreadful.
We didn’t go to school that day. The next day, in assembly, the headmaster asked, 'Who wasn’t at school yesterday?' We had to step forward and explain. Another boy and his sister had been under a table when a land mine hit near them. They were all right.
Years later, I told the story to Paul Clarke, a local church historian. He was very interested – he’d written a book about one of the churches that had been destroyed in the Blitz. He even gave me a photo, saying it showed the Central Picture House. I said it couldn’t have been completely destroyed – and I was right. Atkinson’s store, just across the road, had taken damage but they set up again in the Central Picture House. Mr Atkinson himself once told me – they put tarpaulins up to protect the stock and restarted business from there. There’s a plaque in the store now to mark it.
Another lady told me her relative had been in the cinema during the raid and escaped through a window – she never got over it and died young. I think it affected people differently. But we were very lucky.
My sister Mona later joined the Wrens, which pleased Dad after 25 years in the Navy. She was sent all over and ended up in Moncton, where she met her husband – a Lieutenant Commando!
After the war, Sheffield didn’t feel the same. It took a long time to rebuild. But Atkinson’s became like my second home – I was always in there.
In terms of daily life, I don’t think it changed us too much. We got up, went to school. Dad loved gardening – I mostly just watched him. We did all right really. A cousin of my husband once said to me, 'Edie, we were lucky up here.'
Before we moved to Sheffield, we’d lived in Lincolnshire. I went back sometimes to visit my grandma. We weren’t far from Waddington, and I remember hearing bombers going out – sometimes dogfights overhead. It all made you realise just how lucky you were.
I remember the crash in Endcliffe Park. An American plane. There were children playing, and the pilot tried to wave them off. One of the boys thought he was waving hello and waved back. They all died. But there’s a service held every year now, and I think one of the boys who survived – or maybe someone who saw it – looked after the memorial for years. I haven’t seen it myself.
When war ended, it was fabulous. My sister Thelma and I were in bed when someone knocked at the door. Friends dragged us out – the lady from the fish and chip shop turned on all the lights and wheeled out a piano. We sang in the street. There weren’t many people – I think most were just so relieved it was over.
I remember seeing a man come home – his wife ran down the street to him. He’d been a prisoner of war. Another man we knew had been torpedoed three times and would hide behind the settee whenever war footage came on the telly. One man who’d been a prisoner of the Japanese used to walk around the village at night shouting. He would never talk about it. Just said, 'I don’t want to talk about it.'
My husband was in the Army – he was twelve years older than me. We met after the war. He didn’t go in on D-Day – his regiment waited in the Channel. When they did go in, he said they passed the bodies of the lads they’d trained with. He said, 'We were the elite – why didn’t we go in first?' He never understood it.
Looking back, as a child you don’t see war the same way. Maybe kids today would feel it more. We were near Sheffield, but still in the country. People ask me what it was like. I don’t think about it much now. But I remember that shelter. And I remember that cinema. And I remember hoping it wouldn’t get bombed."
"I was born on the 23rd of October 1937. I grew up in Crookes, Sheffield, and when the war started I was only three years old, so my memories start from around then.
I went to Western Road Infant School in Crookes, and I remember the air raid shelters built in the playground. When the sirens went, all the classes would troop into them. At home, my dad built an Anderson shelter in the garden – the government supplied them, and you were supposed to dig a hole and bury it halfway, then pile the soil on top. It was damp and musty, and we had bunk beds in there with metal strip bases, but I don’t think we ever actually slept in it – the air raids didn’t usually last all night.
Mum would wake me and my brother up, saying, “Come on, Graham, it’s that man again,” meaning Hitler. We’d throw our coats over our pyjamas and go up the garden into the shelter, past the outside toilet. Our neighbours used our shelter too – their dad was away at war, and they didn’t have one of their own.
I didn’t feel scared when the sirens went off. It was just life. By the time the Blitz came in 1940, I was already used to it. We all gathered around the radio every evening, listening to the war news. That was just the way it was.
One of the most exciting things was the bomb damage. An aunt of mine lived three streets away – their house wasn’t directly hit, but a nearby bomb did enough damage that they couldn’t live there anymore. They moved to a village near Sutton in Ashfield.
At the top of our cul-de-sac, just over a wall, a couple of bombs fell on another road – I can’t remember its name now – and the craters were allowed to fill with water so the fire service could use them. We weren’t supposed to play there, but of course, we did. That route became our preferred way to school, picking our way across the bombed buildings. We’d search for bits of shrapnel – jagged bits of metal from exploded bombs. The bigger the bit, the better. They were like currency – we traded them for marbles or other bits of shrapnel.
School itself was quite normal to me. I walked there in about 15 minutes. If the sirens went off, we went into the shelters. I can’t remember if we had lights or candles, but I do remember us singing to pass the time – “One man went to mow…” that sort of thing. The teachers were brilliant – they kept us cheerful.
One teacher I didn’t like said something once: “If you had a ‘D’ in your name, you’d be a blind cow.” That stuck with me. But the teacher who left the biggest impression was Mr Boma. He taught me just after the war. When we left junior school, everyone collected autographs from teachers and classmates. In mine, Mr Boma wrote: “Whatever the world finds you to do, do it with all your might.” I’ve never forgotten that.
My dad was a bus driver – a reserved occupation, so he didn’t go to war. His route was Sheffield to Barnsley, through the Wicker and Ecclesfield. On the night of the big raid – the 15th of December – he couldn’t get back into Sheffield because the Wicker was on fire and the tram lines were down. He abandoned the bus and walked home. Mum went mad – he should’ve found shelter, but he just came home. Same when we were in the shelter one night – after 15 minutes, he said, “Oh blow this, I’m going to make a cup of tea,” and went back inside.
We had family routines – blackout curtains, no street lights, no light spilling out of houses. Wardens would shout, “Put that bloody light out!” if they saw a crack. We even had rescue ladders hanging in our shared passageway, and little symbols on the front of the house so wardens knew where shelters and equipment were.
There was a decoy setup out on the moors – lights to trick the bombers into dropping their bombs away from the city. I also remember the POW camp at Lodge Moor near the Sportsman pub. We used to go and jeer at the prisoners – most were Italians, some Germans. They wore brown uniforms with big yellow patches so guards could aim if they had to shoot – not to kill, just to injure. I remember hearing that Admiral Dönitz even passed through briefly.
Those prisoners were safer there than on the front lines. Some worked on local farms. They didn’t leave until about 1947.
As the war went on, I think we got used to it. We were lulled into a kind of false normality, even when hearing about places like Singapore falling or what was going on in Burma. It wasn’t until D-Day in 1944 that everyone’s attention turned again. The Americans had joined, things were shifting.
When the war finally ended, I had one big question: “Will there still be a news?” Because all I’d ever known was war news. It was strange to think there’d be something else instead.
We lived through rationing. Two ounces of sweets a week – if you had the coupons. Clothes, shoes, food – all needed coupons. Mum saved and saved for things like new shoes. Bread needed coupons too. Most of our food came across the Atlantic, and the convoys weren’t always successful.
But all that – the shelter, the bombs, the blackouts – it wasn’t scary, not really. It was just life."
"I was born on 26 April 1933 and grew up on Crowder Road, opposite Longley Park.
I was an only child, a bit spoiled I suppose, and went to Longley School. It was a lovely place to grow up, though as I got older, I remember people starting to talk about war.
We had an Anderson shelter in the garden. My dad, who was very handy, fitted it out with bunk beds, a little table, and even a camping stove. My mum would keep cakes in tins down there and a kettle ready to boil. At first it felt like a big game. But as the war escalated, it became very real.
Just across Longley Lane from us was what is now part of the Northern General Hospital, but back then it housed the wardens. They would shout warnings – “Purple alert! They’re coming over the coast!” – and we’d scramble into the shelter. Sometimes the bombs would miss Sheffield, heading to Coventry or elsewhere. But I remember vividly when the alerts went from purple, to pink, and then red – that meant they were over Sheffield.
The bombing was terrifying. I still shudder when I hear a siren. I remember coming out of the shelter after one particularly bad night to find all the ceilings in our house cracked, as if they'd been lifted and dropped. A landmine had gone off nearby.
We were lucky, but the house was badly shaken.
My dad worked as an accountant at Wincobank Rolling Mills, so he wasn’t called up. After one raid, he walked all the way to Southey Green to check on my grandparents. My gran was unbothered, but my grandad was hiding under the stairs with an enamel potty on his head, saying, “Nothing’s going to hurt me!”
We children used to go out collecting shrapnel. One day I knocked on the door of a friend’s house and was told to “come in”. No one was there, but on the table was a parrot in a cage – the only thing left from a bombed house. It had been trained to say “come in”!
Eventually, Dad decided it was too dangerous for us to stay. He arranged for me and Mum to go down to Stroud to stay with distant relatives. We travelled by train, in total blackout. The relatives had passed away, but the people who now lived there were kind. Mum went dancing with soldiers from a nearby camp, and I amused myself painting faces on apples in the attic – Churchill, Hitler, Mussolini. I got into trouble for that!
After a time in Wisbech and then on a farm in Gedney, where I was horrified to be told I had to kill a piglet to get its tail for a belt ornament, we moved back up north. Dad had got us a house in Worksop, then we moved to Grenoside and lived on School Lane. There was a quarry at the bottom of the garden and we had another shelter. A nurse named Mitchell would come running down the lane during raids shouting, “Get in your shelters! They’ll kill us all!”
After the Blitz, we visited the city centre. It was awful. Burnt-out trams, destroyed shops. There was a place where you could get a meal without giving up ration coupons. I remember tying my balloon to a chair and losing it to the high ceiling while eating cottage pie. It broke my heart.
Before the Blitz, I'd been promised a bike for Christmas from Walsh's. We'd seen Father Christmas and everything. But the store was bombed and I didn’t get my bike until I was 11.
Schooling changed too. After the raids, we couldn't go into the school buildings anymore, so children were sent to designated houses around Southey Green. We had lessons in people’s homes. Years later, I discovered one of my neighbours had actually been in my class back then.
The loss of life was hard to comprehend. I recall a pub near Fitzalan Square where everyone in the cellar died when it took a direct hit. You don’t forget things like that. I didn’t see the bombers myself, but you could hear them. My dad said you could tell they were German because their engines sounded different.
After the worst had passed, we still lived with fear. But life slowly returned to some sort of normal. What sticks with me most are the strange little moments – the parrot, the painted apples, the lost balloon. But also the fear, the noise, and the resilience. We just got on with it, didn’t we?"
Sheffield Blitz Memorial Trail - the start of our journey
Our Sheffield Blitz Memorial Trail received funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund to mark the 75th anniversary ten years ago. Sheffield author, Neil Anderson, began working on the plans to commemorate the anniversary following the publication of his, 'Sheffield's Date with Hitler' in 2010. You can download the free Sheffield Blitz app/walking trail on Playstore or iTunes.
Sheffield Blitz permanent exhibition
We opened a permanent exhibition at the National Emergency Services Museum in Sheffield to commemorate the attacks.The German air raids took place over two nights in December 1940, killing and wounding more than 2,000 people. A recreation of life in the blitz, including recordings of the raids, is now on permanent display. It was opened by 98-year-old Doug Lightning who worked as a firefighter during the bombing attacks.
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Check out our event at Sheffield Markets that marked the 75th anniversary of the Sheffield Blitz
With support from National lottery players
Sheffield Blitz 85th
A grant from The National Lottery Heritage Fund is ensuring the memories of the last generation to remember the devastating German bombing that left nearly a tenth of Sheffield homeless will not be forgotten.
The 'blitz kids' are now in their very late 80s to 90s and recording their stories is a key part of our project.
Sheffield Blitz 85th is being run by the Sheffield Blitz Memorial Trust and extends beyond the city’s boundaries to record the memories of people from surrounding towns that remember the attacks.
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