The Sheffield Blitz

This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Roger Marsh of the ‘Action Desk — Sheffield’ Team on behalf of Jean Hutchinson and has been added to the site with the author’s permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

The Sheffield Blitz
By
Jean Hutchinson

The Sheffield blitz took place on Thursday night on December 13, 1940. I was working up St. Mary’s Road, Sheffield at Smith & Seymour making Knife, Fork and Spoon sets marked up for the army. The morning after the blitz, I went to catch the bus from Beighton where I lived, to Sheffield, which only ran every hour. When it came it had no windows and was very damaged.

Walking up St. Mary’s Road, I saw that all of the houses on both sides of the road were down and some were still on fire. People were laying out the bodies. When we arrived at work, the roof was blown off and we could not work. On the Moor, all of the shops had been bombed and were on fire.

It was a week or so after, that I received a letter saying that they had another factory in St. Mary’s and that we could start work again.

On the Sunday night following the earlier raids, we had a landmine drop over the railway line at Beighton and there was a lot of shrapnel that landed in our yard where we lived, in Manvers Road. We all went out and collected it for souvenirs.

Whilst the air raids where on we sat under the stairs of our house because we did not have an air raid shelter.

Pr-BR

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