Eighty years ago this month, at about 7.30 pm on 12 December 1940, my mum, Gladys Swift as she was then, my Grandad Maurice and Grandma Ann, rushed for this air raid shelter in the back garden of their house at 77 Nether Edge Road, as the alarm sounded at the start of the Sheffield Blitz. They hadn’t finished their tea (the term for early evening meal at the time) and my mum grabbed the pan of stew from the stove, so that grandad wouldn’t miss out.
An incendiary landed within yards of the shelter, causing irreparable damage to my grandad’s house and to the joined-on semi-detached house of his mother, Sarah Ann Swift, next door. Another bomb that landed nearby wiped out a whole family with direct hit on their house, so I feel lucky to be here really (I would be born 10 years later).
As I’ve mentioned before, I used to listen to my mum’s stories about her experience and try to picture the interior of the shelter but I never dreamed that I’d get to see it, so my thanks to Andy and Neil who on the day of the 80th anniversary invited my brother, sister and I to a Zoom meeting live from the shelter (or rather from the coach house next to it as the wi-fi couldn’t penetrate those built-to-withstand-a-bomb concrete walls).
On the the guided-tour phone footage that they showed us, I was impressed by the original concrete door, still in place on rusty hinges on one of the entrances.
This door led to a flight of stairs (now blocked with rubble) which was intended as an entrance for my great grandma Sarah Ann, who, as I’ve said, lived next door. On that evening though, she took shelter in her cellar along with her pet bird and her Pomeranian, Queenie. The rescuers brought her out of the wrecked house through the coal chute, along with the bird and the dog.
I imagined there were rudimentary bunks in the shelter but there isn’t as much room in there as I expected. Probably they sat it out, as I remember my mum saying that she once fell asleep down there in a deckchair and had the most extreme form of pins and needles imaginable when she woke because the cross-bar had been digging in behind her knees.
Links
Sheffield Blitz my comic strip version of the air raid, drawn when I was 14 years old.
Ernest Bowler, Castleton: a painting belonging to my grandad, which survived the raid.
Nether Edge in the Second World War compiled by the Nether Edge History Group, Second World War Research team, ISBN 09514003-2, paperback. You can order a copy, £10 plus postage, from the group via this e-mail: nenghistory@gmail.com