A Place In My Mind
The Name on the Knife-Blade
By ROY HA TERSIF Y. Ml' ON the day that 1 was born my grandmother wept to think that she should have a grand- child who would never see a green lield. An invalid, she had travelled by closed car from Nottingham and all she really knew of Sheffield was the walk, last made thirty years before, from the Victoria Station, through the Pond Street slums to the Edwardian shops on the Moor.
The Pond Street slums were demolished in 1930 during one of the earliest and most imaginative slum-clearance programmes in Eng- lish history: the Edwardian shops were flattened by a ruder hand during two December nights in 1940; even the Victoria Station will soon • be swept away. But one thing about Sheffield never changes. It is still the unknown city, the name on the knife-blade and no more. The real people remain hidden behind a pall of now imaginary smoke. Most of Britain knows as little about Sheffield as my grandmother did.
History is to blame. It set Sheffield at the foot of the Pennines on the millstone grit which made its grindstones and near to the water that drove them. Coal confirmed its place at the heart of nineteenth-century England, but made it an industrial city where people work, not a commercial city that people visit. In consequence, Sheffield has fewer hotels than most towns half its size and hardly any of the goodwill that replete salesmen an satisfied representatives carry home from Birmingham and Manchester.
But Sheffield has hills (more than Rome) and rivers (more than Venice), and although they are no longer the tools and the power of the city:s trade, they have an abiding influence on the character of the place. Sheffield is divided by them into suburbs as distinct and separate as the cutlery proCesses in which they each
■ once specialised. The people of Walkley, Wood- seats, Firth Park and Wadsley still talk of 'going into .$heffield' as if it were some friendly but distant place. Sheffield is less a unified city than a federation of sovereign suburbs which owe guarded allegiance to the Labour local govern- ment that has ruled from the Gothic Town Hall for over thirty continuous years.
It is almost as long since one of the Sheffield football clubs won either the Cup or the League. Although the city has no time for any other
winter game (Rugby League is unknown. Rugby Union has a precarious toe-hold on the southern Derbyshire boundary), only grandfathers can •re- member the last time a local team came home to a civic reception and was carried through the cheering crowds on a be-ribboned bus. Sup- porters of United and Wednesday eye'each other warily across the city lest, by some freak of chance (merit being out of the question). `the other side' wins the Cup or League first. The rivalry between them is of the fratricidal, not the fraternal. sort. As a boy, I genuinely believed in the man who never ate bacon because its red-and-white stripes reminded him of United- indeed, I supported and applauded his loyalty. But although I despised Bramall Lane in the winter, in the summer it was the only place I wanted to be. When Worcestershire beat York- shire for the first time in the history of the County Championship. I suffered every ball that was bowled.
Bramall Lane seemed to me the only flat cricket ground in Sheffield. I played my youthful strokes on pitches cut into hillsides where, on one side of the wicket, uppish shots hit the ground a yard above the batsman's head, and on the other, fielders vVaited for catches, eyes on a level with the batsman's boots. Gradients like that broke fielders' hearts. but they made the reputations' of several architects. Most of the virgin land available for housing after the war had been rejected twenty years earlier as too steep for practical'building. Yet houses have been cut into, hung from and stuck on to the steep slopes of Gleadless,,Woodside, Stannington and Nether- thorp. The 'maisonettes and the' town houses, the point blocks and the flats have extended and elaborated the city skyline and provided a thousand new vantage points from which the city can be seen spreading out from the factory roofs of the East End to the Victorian suburb of Broomhill in the west.
Men who spend their lives working with hot and sharp metal acquire special virtues. Twenty years of bending and breaking steel will convince any man that no task is beyond him, given the Alan Brien is away. He will resume 'After- thought' next week.
tools and given the time. It will convince him, too, that caution as a virtue is second only to courage. When, as the bloom or billet goes back from the hammer to the furnace, one of its masters spits on it with unerring aim and pre- cision, it is not a sign of contemn, for the cooling steel. It is an admission tha: even now possesses hard, hot strength. It is an indication that although he will shape it in :he end, if he approaches it too rashly its value and his bonus (and possibly the hand or eye of one of his mates) will be destroyed as quickly as his spittle vanished from the hot ingot.
So Sheflield men are both cautious and cocky, and they are sceptical, too. They are especially sceptical about the proposition that outside Sheffield there are places with ideas or habits or neighbours as good as theirs. Because of this, they have preserved pieces of the nineteenth cen- tury unspoilt by improvement. The Whitsun- tide processions of Sunday School queens and captains that sing in the public parks, the typi- cally Sheffield suit, broad-shouldered, narrow- waisted and bell:hottomed, the pipeclayed steps and window7Mlls arc part of an earlier, less sophisticated age. Sheffield kept its trams longer than any other English city. It kept them for good practical reasons and patted from them with solemn and formal regret. 'The Last Tram' drove ceremoniously to the Town Hall to the tune of 'Auld Lang Syne' and, in, the square where the unemployed rioted in 1926, the assembled Corporation bade it a last sad farewell.
Sheffield is a booming city. Although the crafts- manship of its cutlers will soon be swamped by the new techniques of ,European mass-produc- tion, its engineers, its rollers, its turners, its coggers, its tampers and its pressers still exert a great influence on the life of the nation. But despite its new (and doomed) enthusiasm to take its place as capital of one of Britain's new regions, despite the success of the campaign to convince the nation that within, live miles of the City .Hall is some of the most beautiful country in Britain, Sheffield will remain a city to itself.
Three years ago, a . party of . Russian visitors was astounded to hear the Lord Mayor explain that within the city boundary it is possible to shoot grouse, tickle trout and sail a yacht. Most Sheffielders prefer pleasures other than these, but they believe that all that they need can be found along the banks of the Sheaf, the Porter and the Don. Oscar Wilde believed that 'when good Americans die they go to Paris.' There is no doubt where the good Sheffielders go. They go to Sheffield.
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