22 DECEMBER 1944, Page 8

SHEFFIELD'S WAY

By J. L. HODSON

SHEFFIELD folk, for all their kindliness, can be difficult to get to know. A man who is a leading citizen today, and who in his time has worked in the Far East and Lanca- shire, said to me: " I was lonelier after being in Sheffield three months than I was in the Far East. Now in Lancashire they accept you at once, and they're staunch until you let 'em down ; but in Sheffield you have to prove yourself before they accept you at all, and it may take some time. But once they do—why, they're so kind as to be embarrassing." And yet (for so many provisoes are there) Sheffield people can be sensitive, and a kind of shyness can mix with their solid Victorianism with its tincture of pride and Puritanism. For they declare that Sheffield, in spite of its fame and distinction (were not Hadfield and John Brown, known from Essen to Phila- delphia, Sheffield men, and were not Sheffield's blades well known in the fourteenth century?), is sometimes overlooked. I have been assured, though it sounds incredible, that there are maps of England whereon Sheffield doesn't appear, that those exploring England too often leave Sheffield out (as Wendell Willkie did). When the Luft- waffe was striking at Coventry, London, Liverpool and the rest, and ignoring Sheffield, some of its citizens asked themselves amidst their thankfulness, " Do they think we're not important enough? " Alas! they found out. There's a chunk of Sheffield that is spectacular ruin, and well-known shops have taken private houses or rooms in hotels or even pieces of cinemas to display their wares in.

Sheffield, like many another city, is anxious to know what the Government is really going to do about planning and building and rebuilding. And what its prospects are, too, of getting some r ew industries. It was a leading city official who said to mg: " You could say that Sheffield is only going full speed when we are either getting ready for war or waging war. Between the two wars we had 65,000 unemployed at the worst, and that was nearly one worker out of four." It doesn't need much insight to discern some disbalance there. Sheffield lacks diversity of trades, and enough opportunity for its women to work in peace-time industries. They are working now, right enough ; even a good many married women with families are toiling half-time in munition factories. (The term ' half-time' was born, I .think, in Lancashire, to describe an abominable system whereby children went to school in the morning and to the cotton- mill in the afternoon. War has brought it back, but, more happily, to adults and not to children). Sheffield folk are looking with eager eyes to an horizon over which new plastic or other industries may come their way that don't need rumours of wars to set them in motion. And those eyes look the more keenly because already some few of Sheffield's munition-workers have been paid off since this war is seen to be drawing nearer its end, and since certain war contracts are running out. The number is not large as yet, but one day it will be large, indeed. And what will happen then? You don't have to be a pessimist to see rough water beyond the present comparative smooth.

The workers of Sheffield certainly deserve good days in the future. It is two and a-half years now since the managing director of a steel- works told me his men were beginning to be rather tired and jaded. After Dunkirk that works had a seven-day and seven-night week ; men had seldom worked as they worked in those days when the world trembled on its base. Housman's lines on an army of mer- cenaries—

" Their shoulders held the sky suspended ; They stood, and earth's foundations stay ;" could be used with almost as much justice of the workmen of Sheffield as of the men of Mons in the last war or the lads of the R.A.F. in this. I have often thought we don't do enough to honour our working folk who toil in a fashion and degree that I, for one, have never known. No thrills, no medals, no glory for them ; just slogging hard work ; humdrum and, for most of them, the sort they did pre-war and will do post-war. Precious little kick to be got out of it. It's a point worth remembering when we get angry over news of strikes in one or other of our industrial regions—and I get just as angry as most of us do.

So that I was glad to be told by several prominent citizens I talked with that a good many minds, at all events, are looking for a better Britain and a better world. You can wonder, as a Sheffield man, when the day will arrive when the last_hindrances to export that exist under Lend-Lease will be removed (and realise that, while some barriers are to go down, the final ones will probably be there till Japan is defeated), and you can wonder the next moment; as a works manager told me he did, whether it is wise to permit one man to hold more than one directorship, and whether the time has come when the nation as such should take over all land and all transport. He went on: " You can certainly talk frankly on such things to managing directors today to a degree you couldn't before the war. Most of our minds seem to have stretched a bit." I was given a pamphlet written two years ago now by the Zetetic Club of Sheffield, a club composed of, a small number of professional and business- men to study and discuss social and economic and financial problems. They set down seventeen points on which in their view an ordered society should be based. The first says that every man shall have a sufficient supply of the basic needs of life (food, clothing and shelter), and this right shall be natural and unquestioned, and the first charge on the community's productive capacity. Other points ask that citizenship shall be limited to those of twenty-five years and over who are willing to equip themselves to undertake its responsibilities and prove their fitness before tribunals. They would have Parlia- ment limited to one House of 250 members, which would delegate certain powers lo Economic Councils and Industrial Councils. Many of their points are fresh and lively. But more important perhaps than their intrinsic value is this evidence of hard thinking by an ordinary group of people who show their deep discontents with a system which has, in a broad sense, suited them fairly well, but suited others less fortunate very badly.

Another fact I found admirable in the city was the creation since the war of fellowship groups. The city libraries have been the spur, aided by dark streets, fewer buses and trams and the need to stay at home in the evenings. Leisure has had to be replanned, and in some ways the result has been happy, because groups to play music, read plays, talk of the world's religions, start handicrafts, discourse on art or economics have sprung up here and there. The home as a centre of delight has gained renewed prestige, and this in Sheffield's eyes, and not only hers, is important. Love of home and homely things remains strong in English folk. As any vast muniton centre must be troubled as peace draws nearer, Sheffield is troubled. War affects its bread and butter too closely not to be. Too often between the wars I was told in depressed English areas by unemployed men: "No hope for us unless there's another war." That proved tragically true.. Sheffield people in the mass hate war like you and me ; I don't think they're fond of a situation which makes them dependent too much on munitions and armaments. That's why they peer ahead with eager and sometimes anxious eyes.