Today, for the first time, we’re visiting – snow over Sheffield permitting – what was the Swift family home on Nether Edge Road, Sheffield. Number 77 was where my mum, Gladys Joan Swift spent her childhood but 82 years ago tomorrow, on the evening of the 12th December 1940, it was damaged beyond repair by an incendiary bomb in the Sheffield Blitz.
The Rolls Royce in the driveway looks impressive but the explanation for that is that my grandad was a funeral director.
Here’s my mum (on the right) with her neighbour Marjorie from number 81.
Living next door was my mum’s grandma, Sarah Ann Swift. She didn’t join my mum and her parents, Maurice and Ann Swift, in their stoutly built concrete air raid shelter at the end of the garden on the night of the raid, preferring to stay in her cellar, but unfortunately her side of the semi-detached house, number 79, was so badly damaged in the raid that she had to be rescued through the coal chute, along with her little dog Queenie.
To judge by the photographs, those two went everywhere together. She bought herself a house in another part of Sheffield when she was made homeless by the raid . . . a house that would cause a bit of a stir when she didn’t leave it to her son Maurice (my grandad) in her will. He felt as he’d paid off her mortgage he would be in line to inherit it. Why he didn’t I’m still not entirely sure . . .
My mum gave the impression that Maurice could be a difficult character and I think that is borne out by the fact that on my mum and dad’s wedding photograph, taken at the end of the war, he is the only guest who isn’t smiling!
Like Great Grandma Sarah Ann, he’s a character I would have liked to have got the chance to get to know. I remember him and I was fascinated by his interest in home movies – wish we still had those.
He had some talent as an artist and, I believe, as a designer of furniture. Here’s watercolour drawn when he was aged 13, which I think would have been in 1890.
