Author: Delicto

Categories
Buildings

Barker’s Pool House

We’re about to lose a city centre landmark, although one we barely notice these days. Planning permission has been submitted to demolish the link bridge between John Lewis and Barker’s Pool House, on Burgess Street.

The bridge was built in 1973, linking Barker’s Pool House, built about 1970, with John Lewis (then Cole brothers), constructed ten years earlier, and serving as office access for the department store.

The link bridge is no longer required, with Barker’s Pool House forming part of Block A in the Heart of the City II project, a new construction, designated for retail and leisure space, a hotel, with residential above.

The link bridge was designed by architect R.D. Cook, and made of primary castellated beams, which carry the floor and roof structure, with glazed cladding. Its deck stands about 12 metres above street level, 16 metres in length, 2.5 metres wide, and a height of 3.4 metres.

Once planning permission is granted, likely to be a formality, the access space from both buildings will be made good.

Categories
Buildings

Town Hall Police Box

This landmark has become so familiar that we barely notice it now. But, this police box, next to the Town Hall, on Surrey Street, is the only survivor of a system of 120 boxes that once existed across Sheffield.

Police boxes were introduced in Britain in the 1920s. Chief Constable Frederick James Crawley installed them initially in Sunderland in 1923, and then in Newcastle upon Tyne, after he became Chief Constable there in 1925.

They were designed to increase efficiency by decentralising police constables away from the police station and preventing the necessity to return to base several times during their beat.

Other northern cities then followed suit including Sheffield in 1928.

The Sheffield police box system was introduced by Chief Constable Percy J Sillitoe, subsequently appointed as Chief Constable of Glasgow in 1931, where he also set up a police box system; he was later to receive a knighthood and became Director General of MI5. (Think, Sam Neill’s Major Chester Campbell character in Peaky Blinders).

The Sheffield boxes were sited on police beats all over the city where they provided contact points for both police officers and members of the public, with each box having a direct telephone link with the local police station.

The telephone was in a small compartment accessible from the outside of the box, as was a first aid kit, both intended for public use. They were also used by patrolling officers, who visited the boxes at hourly intervals when information was passed by phone between the officers and supervisory staff at police stations.

Additionally, a ‘blue’ electric lamp was located on the top of each box; the Sheffield boxes originally had bulb lights suspended from curved metal brackets. These were controlled from the local police station and used to indicate when there was an important message to be relayed.

Inside, the boxes had a desk and stool where the patrolling officers could have meal breaks and write reports. The boxes could also be used as temporary lock-ups if necessary, for those arrested and awaiting transport to a police station.

The police boxes remained in regular use until the 1960s when the development of improved communications and increased use of police cars made them obsolete.

This box is the sole survivor and has latterly been used as a public information point by Sheffield’s city centre ambassadors, though it is not presently in regular use.

The police box is well-known as Doctor Who’s Tardis, but the type used on TV is typical of the shallow pyramidical roof boxes, adopted by the Metropolitan Police in 1930.

Categories
People

The Duke of Darnall

If we’re not careful we’re going to forget about the Duke of Darnall, so for future generations, it’s time to write about one of Sheffield’s great eccentrics.

His real name was Harry Taylor, who lived on Darnall Road, and a clue about his daily life appeared in the Daily Mirror in 1939.

“Mr Harry Taylor is out of work and ‘deaf and dumb’, but he’s always immaculately dressed. Usually he takes an airing in black morning coat and striped trousers, with a flower in his buttonhole and carrying gloves. His manners are elegant, in keeping with his appearance.”

It appears that Harry lacked the ability to hear or speak all his life. A sign of our shameful past is that he was sacked as a core-maker at a steel works.

“Being ‘deaf and dumb’ proved a great handicap,” said Mr Antcliffe, a relative, “And he lost his job, but for some time he persevered in trying to talk, in the hopes of getting work.

“He made himself popular in the city and for some years shop managers and businessmen have kept him in clothes.”

As Harry grew older, his style of dress became even more colourful, always well-dressed, and carrying a stick or rolled-up umbrella, with monocle, bright bow-tie, bowler hat and spats.

In the 1940s and 1950s, he became known as the Duke of Darnall, with pretensions of grandeur, habiting the Darnall, Attercliffe and Haymarket areas of Sheffield, often taking over traffic control, much to the amusement of passers-by and annoyance of police, who regularly moved him on.

Harry was also referred to as ‘The Burton’s Dummy’, as he could often be found outside Burton’s on Attercliffe Road, or ‘The Toff of Sheffield’.

According to legend, Harry married a ‘deaf and dumb’ lady, and had a daughter. However, it is also said that one of Sheffield’s other eccentrics, Melanie Birch, known as Russian Edna, lodged with him until her tragic death in 1954, found murdered in a public shelter at High Hazels Park.

The date of his death is uncertain, but stories of his exploits can still be found on social media forums, including the taunts he received from cruel children who found him a figure of fun.

This eccentric old gentleman lived on in name, the Andrew’s Bus Company naming a bus after him, and a canal boat called ‘The Duke of Darnall’. Harry has also been the subject of paintings, brought to life in colour, by artists Brian Wilges and John Firminger.

And so, let us not ever forget The Duke of Darnall, a man once loved by Sheffielders.

Categories
Companies

Batchelor’s

Batchelor’s Cup a Soup, Super Noodles, Garden Peas, Mushy Peas – all recognisable products on supermarket shelves – but how many of you realise that their origins were in Sheffield?

In 1895, William Batchelor, a young tea salesman, set up a small shop and started selling tea in packets, as well as other sundry grocery items.

In an extract from his diary the same year, Batchelor said that he needed £4 by the end of the week to meet his debts, but four years later he was able to write, “What a change in life there has been. What confidence people display in me, both creditors and customers.”

In 1912, he came up with the idea of packing and selling dried peas, which he did in the cellar of a disused Methodist Chapel in Stanley Street, off The Wicker, later moving to an old building in Stanley Lane nearby.

Unfortunately, William Batchelor died on holiday at Bridlington in 1913, leaving a daughter and two sons.

Ella Batchelor, the daughter, aged 22, took over the running of the business, soon joined by her younger brothers, Maurice and Fred.

From being a small family business, Batchelor’s soon grew to national fame, acquiring some of its competitors – Chef Peas, Dinna Peas, and Paull’s of Penrith.

There was rapid progress in the ‘dried pea’ trade with Batchelor’s selling them in 2d and 3d packs, but to the housewife, the preparation of the peas was a lengthy process.

Peas had to be soaked overnight, so when the company devised a ground-breaking new process in 1928, it was an instant success.

Batchelor’s came up with the idea of soaking and canning peas in a factory, henceforth ‘processed peas’ appeared in shops for the first time. Taking a plant near Lady’s Bridge, the company were only able to use small peas in the process, selling them under the Dwarf brand label.

However, in 1932, advances allowed them to use mature peas, extending canning to include Bigga Marrowfat Peas.

In 1935, Batchelor’s needed to increase production and made plans to build a new factory at Wadsley Bridge. In order to finance this the company turned public with an issue of 250,000 one-pound preference shares and 800,000 five-shilling ordinary shares.

The factory was built at a cost of over £100,000 on green-belt land in 1937, opened by the Marquis of Hartington, later to become the Duke of Devonshire. The new works, the largest canning plant in Britain, allowed production to be extended to include canned beans, soups and canned fruits.

At the beginning of World War Two, Batchelor’s was one of the largest suppliers of canned goods to the armed forces – and because there was an embargo on imports of foreign peas, the company set up an agricultural service in the East of England, stretching from the East Riding down to the Weald of Kent, providing about 200,00-acres of land for growing peas. Once cultivated, the peas were sent to new factories in Worksop, Newark or East Bridgford, in Nottinghamshire.

But staff shortages and rationing during the war put a strain on finances, and Batchelor’s was bought by James Van den Bergh of Unilever in 1943, becoming part of Van den Bergh Foods.

Ella Gasking, as she became, retired in 1948 – the same year that Batchelor’s bought Poulton and Noel, a soup manufacturer – and her brother, Maurice, took over the running. A year later, the first dried instant soup was created, chicken noodle flavour, the forerunner to perhaps its biggest success, Batchelor’s Cup a Soup, launched in 1972.

The Sheffield site continued to be Batchelor’s head office, the factory in Worksop was extended, and a plant at Ashford, Kent, was where Vesta dried meals were manufactured.

In 1982, Batchelor’s closed the Wadsley Bridge site, with the loss of 650 jobs, reputedly because the narrow lane and low bridge on its approach restricted heavy goods vehicles going to and from the factory.

Since then, production has remained in Worksop and Ashford, although ownership of the company has changed.

In 2001, Unilever sold Batchelor’s to Campbell’s Soups, with Premier Foods acquiring the UK operations five years later.

Alas, another old Sheffield name that is no longer connected to the city.

Categories
Places

Peace Gardens

The biggest surprise is that it wasn’t until 1985 that the Peace Gardens were formally named. Created in 1938, originally called St. Paul’s Garden, the name was at first suggested, then adopted by the people of Sheffield. It appears that nobody was in any hurry to suggest anything different.

But it wasn’t the case in the beginning.

The gardens stand on the site of St. Paul’s Church, demolished in 1938, when inner city slum clearance resulted in falling attendances. Quickly swept away, Sheffield Council laid out pathways, flower beds and grassed areas within the old churchyard walls.

It was a short-term solution, the council buying the land for £130,000, and designating it for a proposed Town Hall extension.

The name, Peace Garden, was proposed in response to the Munich Agreement.

This was a treaty, concluded at Munich on 30 September 1938, by Nazi Germany, the United Kingdom, France and Italy, that allowed Germany to claim the “Sudeten German territory” of Czechoslovakia. Most of Europe celebrated the agreement, because it prevented the war threatened by Adolf Hitler, who had announced it was his last territorial claim in Europe, the choice seemingly between war and appeasement.

The country thought that war had been averted, a pretence, because hostilities started a year later.

The name was suggested at a formal dinner by Alderman Ernest Rowlinson, the proposal immediately mocked by Mr Slater Willis, who thought it would be taken by many to mean the commemoration of Charles Peace, the Sheffield-born burglar and murderer.

There were critics of the garden scheme, Herbert Oliver, standing as Progressive candidate for Crookesmoor said, “I would rather we built 5,000 homes for old age pensioners than use the money making a garden on St. Paul’s site.”

An offer had already been made that the grounds of Brincliffe Towers at Nether Edge, a gift to the city by Dr Roger Styring, should be used as a Peace Garden instead.

The Sheffield Evening Telegraph was also cynical, writing that, “As for peace, this has never, since the Great War, been in graver danger.” It also suggested a better name – “the Appeasement Garden.”

But the Peace Garden name stuck, and after completion there were congratulatory comments in local newspapers.

“There isn’t much to be proud of in the centre of the city so far, which will render this garden the more surprising and impressive to strangers,” said one correspondent.

Bob Green said that, “The Peace Garden is a boon to old age and workers of the city at dinner hours. I’ve been informed that the garden is only temporary. But I hope the garden will continue and not be built on. I say, ‘Long Live the Peace Garden’.”

Another said, “May I suggest that the garden is illuminated or floodlit at night, also a drinking fountain, and a few more seats would be welcome.”

A year later, the city’s residents seemed satisfied with the Peace Garden, and even the Sheffield Evening Telegraph had changed its tune.

“The suggestion that it should be called the Peace Garden was received with ribald mirth. Whatever its official title may be, it is undoubtedly a delightful and peaceful spot, rich with flowers.”

But there were worrying developments that would blight it for decades to come.

“This morning at 8 o’clock it looked like a battlefield. Seats were overturned and the whole place a disgrace. Last week the gardener put in some thousand bulbs and the next morning most of the beds had been trampled on.”

Another correspondent also expressed concern. “I have occasion to come through this morning before the cleaning process begins and it is not a pretty sight – cigarette ends, empty cigarette boxes, matches, and matchboxes, waste-paper round each seat, and a lot of it blown to the grass.”

And there were still critics of the scheme.

“It may surprise a good many to know that the garden is going to cost this generation, and the next, just about £6,000 a year, quite apart, or rather in addition to upkeep, gardeners’ wages, renewals and the like. That is £16 a day in order that a few people may sit there for about seven or eight weeks in the year.”

The Second World War curtailed any plans for Town Hall expansion, although the ‘Egg Box’ extension appeared nearby in the 1970s.

The Peace Garden, or Peace Gardens as they became, survived the war and became subject of civic pride, all-year round planting schemes, grass to lay on and a place to sit and talk.

However, the garden also attracted undesirable characters – the homeless, drunkards and unruly gangs.

When the Heart of the City project came about during the 1990s the Peace Gardens were at the centre of the scheme. In 1997-1998, they were redesigned by the council’s Design and Property Services, a series of water features, pathways, balustrades and artworks, built in Stoke Hall sandstone, the same material used in the Town Hall.

The new garden, without traditional flower beds and less maintenance, were slightly sunk to mask the noise of buses from Pinstone Street.

Its centrepiece is the Goodwin Fountain, 89 individual jets of water, dedicated to Sir Stuart and Lady Goodwin, and the Holberry Cascades, named after Chartist leader Samuel Holberry, including eight large water features located on either side of the four main entrances.

Categories
Sculpture

Goodwin Fountains

The Goodwin Fountains in the Peace Gardens. Eighty-nine individual jets of water inviting Sheffield’s kids to run through them during the summer and avoid them during winter. These are dedicated to Sir Stuart Goodwin (1886-1969), head of the Neepsend Steel and Tool Corporation. He gave away over £500,000 to charities and was honoured with the original Goodwin Fountain which stood at the top of Fargate between 1961 and 1998.

Categories
Sculpture

Holberry Cascades

The Holberry Cascades. Named after the Chartist leader Samuel Holberry (1814-1842), they consist of eight large water features located on either side of the four main entrances to the Peace Gardens. The waterfalls from the bronze vessels represent both the pouring of water into Sheffield’s five rivers, and the pouring of molten metal used in the city’s metal industries. 57,000 litres of water are pumped through its water features, the system using a water re-circulation system, and is kept clean using a brine solution rather than chemicals.

Categories
Sculpture

Bochum Bell

The Bochum Bell, in the Peace Gardens, was presented to the people of Sheffield in 1985 by our twin city of Bochum in Germany to commemorate the 35th anniversary of the link between the two cities. The steel bell was made by apprentices at the Krupp AG Works and reflects the shared heritage of the two cities in the manufacturing of the highest quality steel and steel artefacts. The bell is located in the top flower-bed along Pinstone Street. A Bochum Bell also exists at Donetsk in the Ukraine, another sister city.

Categories
Buildings

Gatecrasher One

When somebody asks you about this building then you realise that history can be more recent than you realise. Especially for those millennials who’ve never seen another century, nor are likely to.

This ordinary looking student accommodation on Matilda Street, at the edge of the city centre, was built in 2016. It takes the name of Gatecrasher, complete with a logo of a vinyl disc.

Our story begins with Henry John Roper and George Wreaks, who set up an engineering company in the nineteenth century, eventually moving to the Oval Works at the corner of Arundel Street and Matilda Street, about 1904.

The two-storey brick building was in use until 1986, and like many former industrial sites, was left empty for several years.

In 1991, an application was made to convert the building into offices, a plan never realised, and then subject to numerous requests for conversion into a nightclub.

The final application succeeded, and after refurbishment, the building opened as The Republic nightclub in 1995.

The building was extended on a sloping topography by Birmingham architects, Mills Beaumont Levy, “in a fragmented style of Gehry-esque fractured geometry with a mono-pitch roof, and varnished timber cladding, not quite vertical with tiny square windows.”

The Republic struggled financially, its rescuer being Gatecrasher, a club night, that started using the building on Saturday nights in 1996.

Gatecrasher, a pioneering trance music event in Birmingham, had been set up by Simon Raine and Scott Bond in the early nineties.

Due to competition in the city, the duo moved the event to Sheffield, originally at The Leadmill, then at The Arches, near The Wicker, and eventually The Adelphi, a disused cinema in Attercliffe.

Gatecrasher eventually bought The Republic for a six-figure sum, afterwards renaming it Gatecrasher One in 2003, the first of ten proposed clubs, although subsequent venues in Leeds, Nottingham, Birmingham and Watford did not get numbered.

The main body of Gatecrasher One was split into five areas – The Foyer, Main Room, Electric Box, Lounge and the VIP Pod. The interior design was by Matt Rawlinson of RAW, and famous for its bespoke Opus sound system.

Gatecrasher One became legendary on the British dance music scene, with resident DJs including the likes of Judge Jules, Paul Van Dyck and Tiesto, and was often over-subscribed, entry only obtained if you were lucky enough.

Its demise came on 18 June 2007, when a fire destroyed it and caused partial collapse of the building. While council officers were keen for it to be repaired, structural engineers claimed it was beyond reparation and it was demolished.

After demolition, it was a vacant site until the six-storey Gatecrasher apartments were built in 2016, the garden feature built in the shape of a record turntable and four wings named after musical terms – Opus, Mezzo, Viva and Accent.

While the signage might be the only reminder of its halcyon days, Gatecrasher arrived back in Sheffield the same year as the apartments opened, taking a lease on the former Kingdom nightclub on Burgess Street, opening as Area, and eventually to be demolished as part of the Heart of the City II scheme.

Categories
People

Sue Biggs

Sue-Anne Hilbre Biggs, CBE, or Sue Biggs for short, Director-General of the Royal Horticultural Society.

She was born in Leicester in 1956 but brought up on Caxton Road at Broomhill.

After attending Abbeydale Grange School she obtained a BA in English and American literature from the University of Manchester and a Postgraduate Diploma in Tourism at the University of Manchester.

She held senior positions at Kuoni Travel and Thomas Cook, before being appointed to the RHS in 2010.

“For my seventh birthday my mum gave me a packet of seeds and a baby trowel,” and the rest is history. Now living in Surrey, she still has close family at Crosspool and Ranmoor. “Yorkshire is the centre of Britain.”