Category: People

Imagine you are a famous actor, at the top of your game, and have just appeared in a movie with Mick Jagger. And then you give it all up and move to Sheffield to become a travelling salesman. This story has done the rounds since the 1970s and yes, it is all true.

William Fox, born London 1939, was the son of theatrical agent Robin Fox and actress Angela Worthington. He first appeared on film in 1960 in The Miniver Story but was working in a bank when director Tony Richardson offered him a minor role in The Loneliness of a Long-Distance Runner.

Under his stage name, James Fox, he went on to star in The Servant, King Rat, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines and The Chase. Handsome and appealing, Hollywood was calling, but there was a problem.

After playing alongside Mick Jagger in Performance in 1968 (not released until 1970 owing to its sexual content and graphic violence), James Fox was in a crisis.

“There were so many things that caused tension in me,” he said. “Working on Sundays, making love on screen and using bad language.”

The result of this self-torture was that Fox turned to religion. In 1970 he joined a Christian group called The Navigators, his involvement the subject of a BBC documentary, Escape to Fulfilment, in 1971.

“When it was over, I had to decide what to do in the longer term. I had met another Christian, Alan, from near Sheffield, that summer, and we immediately became friends. He was an administrative manager with British Steel at Stocksbridge. He invited me to come north to live with his family.

“I was told that I’d have to get a job, so I bought a copy of the Sheffield Morning Telegraph and sat down in Barker’s Pool to study it. Just about the only job I could see that I could do was as a salesman and there was a vacancy for a post with Phonatas, to get new clients for their office telephone sterilising service in the Sheffield and Rotherham area.

“On my first day at work, I went to London Road. My second stop was a car showroom. The manager interviewed me. ‘You’re James Fox, aren’t you? What on earth are you doing here?’ I told him I wanted him to sign up to have five phones cleaned weekly and that I’d come to live in Sheffield and was doing this as a job. I was given the contract by the incredulous manager.”

For the next eighteen months he toured every business district in Sheffield and Rotherham, the evenings spent making evangelism visits, attending meetings and Bible studies.

Attracted by the estate agency business, Fox moved to T. Saxton and Co, to become an assistant in its commercial property department. During the summer of 1972 he met Mary, a nurse, whom he married the following year and set up home at Oughtibridge.

“I went to the office each day by bus down London Road, which I had walked so many times as a salesman, and in the evening, I came home to my wonderful wife and her cooking.”

After he was offered a chance to join the staff of The Navigators, Fox and his wife finally left Sheffield and moved to Leeds in 1974.

By the early eighties, suitably refreshed, Fox decided to return to acting. The first role he was offered was playing opposite Meryl Street in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, a role he understandably turned down.

In the end, his comeback involved several dramas for the BBC before hitting the big screen again with Greystoke: The legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, A Passage to India and Absolute Beginners.

Since then, Fox has enjoyed a second career on stage and screen, although often overshadowed by acting brother, Edward Fox.

James and Mary Fox have five children – Thomas, Robin, Laurence (DS James Hathaway in Lewis), Lydia and Jack, the youngest two also capable actors. He is, of course, also uncle to other acting offspring – Emilia and Freddie Fox.

The Sheffield connection may now be forgotten, but when James Fox appeared on Desert Island Discs, he chose Oft in the Stilly Night by the Bolsterstone Male Voice Choir, as one of his eight discs.

James Dover Grant. Born Coventry in 1954. Better known as author Lee Child, writer of the Jack Reacher thriller series, following a former American military policeman who wanders the United States (selling over 100 million books to date).

He has strong connections with Sheffield, studying law at the University of Sheffield in the 1970s.

“I was here for four years to do my three-year degree as I failed the second year and retook it. All my memories are of the University of Sheffield Drama Studio where I spent most of my time. I remember the lovely people alongside the sex, drugs and rock & roll! My favourite places whilst I was here were the Drama Studio and the open country – I used to party to 4/5am and then catch a bus out to the moors and watch the sun come up.”

Afterwards he worked for Granada Television as a presentation director, until being made redundant in 1995, turning his attention to writing novels.

Now living in New York, but a regular visitor to Sheffield, Child has funded 50 ‘Jack Reacher Scholarships’ in the city, supporting students through their studies, and was presented with an Honorary Doctor of Letters from Sheffield University in 2009.

Helen Patricia Sharman CMG, OBE, HonFRSC. Born at Grenoside, Sheffield, in 1963. She later moved to Greenhill, attended Jordanthorpe Comprehensive, and later studied chemistry at the University of Sheffield and Birkbeck, University of London. Better known to us as plain old Helen Sharman, the UK’s first astronaut.

In 1989, she responded to a radio advert and was selected from more than 13,000 applicants to be part of Project Juno, an Anglo-Soviet space mission. In May 1991, she launched on a Soyuz spacecraft to spend eight days orbiting the earth, most of that time on the Mir space station.

She’s also famous for tripping and dropping the torch, extinguishing the flame, at the opening ceremony of Sheffield’s World Student Games in the same year. But she has other claims to fame as well, including an appearance in an episode of Hollyoaks, and having Sharman Court student flats on Broad Lane named after her.

These days she works full time at the Department of Chemistry, Imperial College, London.

I sometimes think these posts ought to be called “They escaped from Sheffield.”

Dominic Gerard Francis Eagleton West. Born Sheffield, in 1969. Actor and producer. Educated at Westbourne School, Broomhill, Eton College and Trinity College, Dublin. First cousin, once removed, of American Thomas Eagleton, briefly the 1972 Democratic nominee for Vice President. West is celebrated for once spending four months as a cattle herder in Argentina.

Best known for The Wire (2002), Chicago (2002) and Tomb Raider (2018). Also famous for playing serial killer Fred West in ITV’s Appropriate Adult and appearing three times on the Crucible Theatre stage (The Country Wife, Othello and My Fair Lady).

West is married to Catherine FitzGerald, daughter of Desmond FitzGerald, 29th Knight of Glin, and lives in Shepherd’s Bush, London, and Glin Castle, County Limerick.

He’s also received an Honorary Doctorate from Sheffield Hallam University and an Honorary Degree from the University of Sheffield.

“When I meet anyone from Sheffield, they look at me sceptically, as if to say, ‘You don’t come from Yorkshire’.”

It is incredibly difficult to write about Henry Jasper Redfern (1871-1928). Almost forgotten now, his curriculum vitae is almost too long:- optician, photographer, exhibitor, filmmaker, the proprietor of a photographic and lantern business, cinema pioneer, as well as being an x-ray and radiographic innovator.

On reflection, he was a jack-of-all trades, probably master of none, because his business undertakings often ended in financial failure.

Born in Sheffield, Redfern trained as an optician and opened a business on Surrey Street, later opening a photography shop nearby. However, he was more famous in the realms of cinematography, studying the form in its early stages, and became a forerunner in exhibiting moving pictures.

In 1898, Redfern was offering photographic supplies and instruction, Röntgen rays (X-rays), and exhibitions of the Lumière Cinématographe, for which he was one of a number of agents in Britain at this time.

Specialising in ‘locals’, films of interest around Sheffield, Redfern travelled around with Sheffield United during 1899, photographing at least four major matches, climaxing with the Cup Final at Crystal Palace, when Sheffield United played Derby. He entitled the series Football Events. He also filmed local cricket matches.

The following year he seems to have made a tour of Africa (Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria), making travelogues, and eventually went wholeheartedly into the moving picture business with his ‘World Renowned Animated Pictures and Refined Vaudeville Entertainments’.

These package shows eventually led to his owning and operating a seaside summer show at Westcliffe, ‘Jasper Redfern’s Palace by the Sea’, the ‘Grand Theatre of Varieties’ in Manchester, while also operating the Theatre Royal, Windsor, and the Public Hall in Barnsley.

Together with Frank Mottershaw, he made the first outdoor films in Sheffield, producing A Daylight Robbery in 1905.

In the same year, Redfern took over the lease of the Central Hall in Norfolk Street, built in 1899 for the Sheffield Workmen’s Mission. Here, he showed his own work, opening with ‘The Royal Visit to Sheffield in its Entirety.’

Redfern was also famous in x-ray work. In its infancy, he travelled from hospital to hospital around the country with portable apparatus, subsequently joining the Army during the Great War where his expertise was used to treat wounded soldiers.

Afterwards, Redfern was a radiologist at Grange Thorpe Hospital, Manchester, but had lost use of most of his fingers due to x-ray work. He died from cancer, thought to have been accelerated by the effects of radiation poisoning.

Redfern died in comparative poverty and obscurity, aged 56, leaving a widow and four children, and his collection of motion picture memorabilia was presented to the Science Museum.

Not strictly a Sheffielder, but somebody who chose to settle in the city. She is Marina Lewycka, British novelist of Ukrainian descent.

She is the author of A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (2005), a million-seller, Two Caravans (2007), We Are All Made of Glue (2009), Various Pets Alive and Dead (2012), The Lubetkin Legacy (2016) and the soon-to-be-published The Good, the Bad and the Little Bit Stupid (2020).

Lewycka was born in 1946 at a displaced persons camp in Schleswig Holstein in Germany. Her family subsequently moved to England, where she attended Gainsborough High School for Girls and Witney Grammar School, Oxfordshire, later graduating from Keele University and the University of York.

In 1985, Lewycka moved to Sheffield with her husband, who worked for the National Union of Mineworkers. She became a teacher and afterwards a lecturer of Media Studies at Sheffield Hallam University, retiring in 2011.

She now splits her time between Sheffield and London and is aware of the north-south divide. “When I get off a train (in Sheffield) you can just see how poor everybody is.”

Richard Matthew Bannister. Born at Sheffield in 1957. Better known to us as plain old Matthew Bannister. Media executive and broadcaster. He grew up around Millhouses and Ecclesall, attending King Edward VII School, and played as a folk musician around the area, also performing on BBC Radio Sheffield.

His mother, Olga, was a paediatric physiotherapist at the Sheffield Children’s Hospital, while his father was a research chemist for British Steel at Orgreave.

In the early 70s, Bannister signed up for a young people’s acting class at the Crucible Theatre, later taking a course with the National Youth Theatre in London, whilst at the same time studying law at the University of Nottingham.

Instead of a theatre career, Bannister joined BBC Radio Nottingham as a trainee reporter, later presenting Morning Report. He moved to Capital Radio as a journalist, before heading to Radio 1 as presenter of Newsbeat (1983-1985).

Bannister moved back to Capital as Head of News and Talks, became Managing Editor of BBC GLR, and was later appointed as the controversial Controller of Radio 1. He sparked the end of the “Smashie and Nicey” era with the likes of Dave Lee Travis, Simon Bates and Alan Freeman jumping before they were pushed.

He was nicknamed the “fat controller” by his most famous hiring, Chris Evans, with whom he would later have a spectacular falling-out over his refusal to let the DJ work a four-day week.

Rising the executive ladder, he lost out to Greg Dyke for the Director General’s job, before deciding that his future was behind the microphone instead.

Presenting shows on BBC Radio Five Live and World Service, notably Outlook, he is known as the ‘Celebrator of Death’, presenter, since 2006, of Last Word, Radio 4’s obituary programme, and Folk on Foot, his own podcast, where he goes for a walk and chat with a folk musician.

Bannister co-owns Wire Free Productions, the company behind a syndicated evening show for the BBC local radio network – think Mark Forrest and Georgey Spanswick – that ended last year.

His proudest achievement?

“Changing Radio 1 from a middle-aged radio station to a champion of new music, particularly the major role it played in the success of Britpop and the UK dance scene in the 1990s.”