Ghost City
The Hillsborough disaster, which twenty-five years on is still big news as relatives and friends strive to prise truths from the mailed fist of authority, was a turning point in the history of football, and of Sheffield.
The 96 ghosts created on the
afternoon of April 15th, 1989 saw the end of football terraces, the concrete
steps where men in flat caps would clutch mugs of OXO or Bovril after a
lunchtime in the pub. But also they became
part of the mist that shrouded the change in Sheffield
from city of heavy industry, to a city of indeterminate purpose.
Once upon a time arriving at
Sheffield Midland Station (once Pond
Street , and now Sheffield Station) meant stepping
into steel air, with the odour of burnt scrap metal from Attercliffe mingling
with the sweet fragrance of malt liquor from the breweries by the Don, which
signalled the heat and thirst of mill-work.
On rare Sundays, when winds blustered down from the Pennines to scour
the valleys between Sheffield 's seven hills, the air would seem fresh, though the shut-down fortnight in August would also
clear the light. Otherwise, day and
night, open hearth furnaces burned, in some cases with wires thicker than
thighs pulsing and switching to the massive surges of electric heat, in others
stoked with coke and pumping out dusty smoke through slender brick chimneys
spiring up into the clouds. Mills
rolled, sparking and rumbling like manic giant mangles; forges hissed and
thumped, their flywheels spinning and clicking, their operators starched with
sweat; railway engines clanked and screeched, pulling and shunting backwards
and forwards on works' sidelines. In a
thousand smaller workshops, steel was heated, stretched, thinned, beaten,
moulded, wrought and finished in a din of clinking anvils, whirring belts and
clattering machinery.
In the grey mornings, feeling
grey, my skin grey, my thoughts grey, I would board a bus and clamber to the
upper deck, where similarly grey men in white cotton neck scarves and flat caps
coughed in the bitter fug of Park Drive smoke, our snap bags on our laps, our
uniform indicative of our employment at one of the many works in Attercliffe or
Tinsley.
For a period
(which marked me out from most in that mine was not a life sentence) I was an
upset-forge furnaceman for Brown Bayley Steels, a member of BISAKTA (British
Iron, Steel and Kindred Trades Association) sweating eight (sometimes sixteen)
hours a day to produce blanks for axle rods, sometimes for domestic cars,
sometimes for combine harvesters, sometimes for railway engines. The shed I worked in was floored with steel
plates, uneven and slippery in places; overhead giant gantry cranes would
trundle up and down the bays with great bundles of shiny steel rods, or
occasionally they would sway with huge rolls of raw steel, orange red hot at
one end, sparking and scaling as they passed.
Dante would have recognised the scene as his Inferno, the damned toiling at hellish tasks to a universal
cacophony of trip hammers, drop forges (including one which dropped 1,000 tons),
the rapidly repeated whumphs of eight
upset forges, the clanking of chains and the zinging of rotary sanders burring
the ends of rough cut rods.
At tea break some of us would
fill a six pint kettle with water and a quarter pound of tea and place it on
top of a 1,000 degree furnace. In
minutes it would boil and we would stir in a pound of sugar and a pint of
milk. When we broke to go to the canteen
we would eat bread and dripping, eggs, bacon, sausage, tomatoes and beans,
sprinkled liberally with sauces and washed down with a pint of milk and a mug
of tea. I remember a discussion about
health issues: that isn't good for you;
that furs your arteries, etc, until eighteen
stone Roy Hattersley, an expert forge-man, pronounced that, There's only one thing that's bad for 'ee,
and t'doctors won't tell 'ee what it is, and that's work!
When we punched our cards at home-time,
we would stop for a drink near the bus stop.
In the evenings, dry and stiff with salt, I would ask for two pints at
the bar, and would drink the first before the second was pulled.
It was an education. In fact it was a privilege to share for a
while the lives and work of those men, and women. Some, like a set of guys from Pakistan ,
worked permanent twelve hour night shifts, saving money to send home to support
families with a hope that one day they might be brought over to live here. Others, like Sam, my fat and breathless forge-man,
came and went as regularly as a worker bee, doing what he did in order that
honey was there for the young. Then
others, older and parked in light duty lay-bys, were held together by pins and
plates having fallen prey to industrial accidents in their pursuit of an honest
living in perilous surroundings.
But all that has gone. I returned to the site of Brown Bayley Steels
in the 1980s and it had evaporated entirely; all that was there were storage
units and offices, car parks and soulless blank buildings dressed with weeds
and wire (this was then buried under the Don Valley Stadium, itself now a
ghost). The steel has almost all gone,
with, I believe, only one special steel producer left in the area. The cutlery producers, who also made razors,
clippers, skates and scissors, have disappeared, presumably to China or cheaper climes.
And with it has gone the Castle
Market, a tower block that once overflowed with vegetables, fish and meat,
cheeses, fruit and life, drawing folk in from all parts of the city and
beyond. I remember the woman who sold
winkles, clams, shrimps and whelks. In
her handbag she kept the shells of the only left-handed whelks she had come
across in her long life as a stall-holder; five left handed whelks in a lifetime,
and so interested and proud!
It is a city of ghosts. The ghosts of Hillsborough, the ghosts of the
steel industry, and the ghosts of long gone friends and memories. I was there, visiting my brother at the
university, the night that Hendrix died, and immediately, as if by spontaneous
ghostly hand, the legend Hendrix Lives! appeared scrawled on
walls. I was there the night that Nixon
resigned, though this made less impression on me at the time. And the house I lived in at that time, in a
room I had painted green, brown and black, was a kerb crawl from the spot where
later Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, would be apprehended by the
Yorkshire Police.
Recently, after many years, I
returned to the city. As I stepped out
from the railway station into Sheaf
Square , not only was the air rancid with commerce
rather than industry but I was confronted with the towers of Sheffield Hallam
University
Signs of demolition and reconstruction were
everywhere. The Castle Market building
stood empty and for sale. The West Bar
Police Station where we had learnt of my grandfather's death is now a museum of
emergency service vehicles. While a
brand new tram system dings its way up West Street , the old tram shed by the Don
has become the Kelham Island Museum ,
displaying machinery that once drove the industries, and trades that put Sheffield on the map.
The Don itself, never a great river at this stage, slips quietly past
ruined mills and litter-strewn car parks as if it is ashamed of itself, and
seeks a hole in which to die. The pub at
the top of Lambert Street ,
where my brother lived for a time, is now a cheap hostel, while not far down
the road the once elegant Queen's Hotel is derelict.
My friend Lindsay, himself a
graduate of the University and a friend since those intellectual days,
introduces himself to the Porter in the Arts Tower
Looking down the city is spread
out, not so much like a patient etherised upon the table, but as a corpse
exposed for a post mortem. There below
is a row of three Victorian houses, where once I stayed, constrained by cold to
eschew the outside toilet in favour of a night-time wee in a potty, except that
the middle house, the one I stayed in, had been bulldozed, violently erased,
leaving tattered edges to the neighbouring roofs.
And there below, to the north side, is the Star and Garter, preferred haunt of the
dons, including Lindsay's late great professor William Empson, author not only
of The
Seven Types of Ambiguity, but also of an episode of emesis over the bar
of the aforementioned hostelry (though, as John Haffenden notes in his
biography: Appalled onlookers were
nonetheless favourably impressed by the way he made up for his gross behaviour
with elaborate and winning courtesy).
In parenthesis I believe that one of Professor Empson's more memorable
lectures consisted of him coming onto the stage, standing there for a while
leafing through a text, and then saying, Well,
after all, what can you say about King Lear? and walking off.
As we descend in the lift I am
reminded of another distinguished member of the staff who is now but a
ghost. Joe Warrington taught philosophy,
who I had met through mutual friends. I
recall meeting him in his office on the seventh floor one day, when he offered
me a whisky from the bottle in his desk drawer.
Having nothing else pressing to do he invited me back to his home to
listen to Louis Armstrong, for whom he had a passionate enthusiasm. On the way we stopped at his local off
licence to buy some bottles. The lady
shopkeeper politely reminded Joe that the last time he had passed by he had
written her a cheque, but sadly this had bounced. Oh,
don't worry about that! Joe smiled
winningly, I'll just write you another one!
Joe, and other members of the
university fraternity, used to frequent a pub called The Raven, of which now no
trace remains, its site occupied by a glass and concrete edifice with little
discernable purpose. However, to my
delight, I find that a favourite haunt of mine in those distant days is still
there, even though John, my friend and owner at the time, has now retired, and
it is being run by his brother. This is Rare and Racy, a shop which specialises
in buying and selling books and records.
I enter, to the faint scent of joss
and the music of John Coltrane, and I feel I am dreaming - this was how it was;
wall to wall books and stacks of records, even now largely vinyl LPs. The only real difference (apart from the shop
sign) is that the front rooms of the first floor are also stacked with books,
and the walls are covered with framed prints of local interest. For me, this is a treasure trove, and I can
hardly believe it is still in business.
But moving on, my last port of
call is the Cathedral. As Cathedrals go
it is not the grandest, nor the most highly decorated, but it stands in a
pleasant space, with some attractive Georgian buildings around. One morning, many years ago, I remember
wandering here at about the same time of year.
A number of homeless people were stretched out on the ground beside the
ancient walls.
Then, as now, the cherry
trees were in blossom, and the sleeping figures were delicately decorated with
fallen petals. It is an image that has
stayed in my mind, one that stands for a certain kind of peace. As I stand under the very same trees, with
their flowers softly falling, I see the ghosts of those sleeping forms upon the
ground, I see the ghosts of friends, and I see a ghostly image of my own youth,
drifting through the fallen flowers.
Paradoxically, the spectres
remain. Ghosts are elusive things: you
see them; you don't. My brother and I
had learned of our grandfather's death by finding a note slipped under his door
in Lambert Street
when we came back from a weekend on the moors; Please come to West Bar Police Station..... A day or two later, at three a.m. I woke with
a start, my curtain billowing in a chill breeze on a very still, warm
night. Immediately I sensed that my
grandad's spirit, not knowing where I had been in Yorkshire ,
had come to say goodbye.
In Sheffield, the familiar faces
have gone; the steelworks have gone; the pubs, with their pianos and juke boxes
have gone, or at least changed irrevocably (though the Kelham Island Tavern, which was
The White Hart, a Stones' pub, is
still a fine establishment, and the nearby Fat
Cat, which was a Wards' pub, is
also a survivor); the terraces (both at Hillsborough and Bramall Lane, where I
spent Saturday afternoons clutching Styrofoam cups of OXO, aching for a pee); the thick atmosphere of
heavy industry has dispersed, and only a thin mist of vocational degrees and
snooker remains. Even the laudable Kelham Island Museum only represents a
flickering shadow of what once was. The
cathedral is empty, itself now embalmed in cherry petals.
The clouds, which have been
gathering all day, well up and cry.
Splashes of dirty water spot the pavement, and we hurry to the
station. A young man with a can of
happiness waves as we pass. In my head I
hear the voice of Joe Cocker, once a gas-fitter in Sheffield . I can
stand a little rain..... and we dive
for shelter on the southbound train.
Puddling iron, blending steel;
Turn the fire on to anneal
What you feel about the siren;
Blending steel,
Puddling iron,
ROLLING STEEL.
Final chorus of William Empson's The Birth of Steel - a
masque written for and performed before the Queen when she visited Sheffield
and the University
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