APTER 9: SHEFFIELD, BRADFORD & GUILDFORD AND SOME MODEL CHURCHES AS WELL

I’ve already voted for my favourite cathedral - Wells, my least favourite cathedral- Newcastle and now it’s time for the weirdest cathedral: and the award goes to ... Sheffield. The cathedral wasn’t the principle reason for a visit to South Yorkshire. We were on a two family day out to the National Centre for Popular Music, a lottery funded museum costing £15 million that opened on March 1st 1999 and closed fifteen months later after failing to attract anything like the number of visitors it needed to make it commercially viable. We actually found it quite interesting if a little on the pricey side. It was certainly a much better experience than our previous visit to Sheffield for H’s surprise birthday present. 

On that occasion, we’d been briefed to arrive at their house one Saturday morning in June and after wishing H many happy returns we set off up the M1 to Sheffield. H was blissfully unaware of the final destination, believing that A had planned a day out at an attraction for both families. A, meanwhile, was blissfully unaware that his surprise present of a shopping day for H with Sue at the Meadowhall Shopping Centre outside Sheffield fell far short of the great day H was expecting. Those different expectations became painfully evident as we parked up. To say H was a little unimpressed with her gift was a considerable understatement and words had already been exchanged before we met up with them in the car park. A compromise was reached in that H agreed to some shopping time provided that it was followed by some activity that involved all of us together. 

The girls headed off to the shops whilst A and I took the four young children to the adventure playground in the shopping centre. Those of you familiar with Meadowhall, the second largest shopping complex in the country when it opened in 1990, may be struggling to identify the location of the adventure playground for the simple reason that there wasn’t one. It was another ice cream at the top of Symmonds Yat/McDonalds in Haverfordwest moment. Well almost, because the centre did boast a play area. This consisted of one slide. There are only so many times that nine to twelve year olds will descend a playground slide before the exercise becomes excessively boring. Our children took five minutes. We were meeting up again in two hours. Now A, having already upset H, could add me to his list. The remaining time passed exceedingly slowly and when we did all join forces again, H had gone from irritated and upset to feeling guilty and upset. It was proving to be a wonderful birthday. 

The road atlas in my car showed a visitor attraction a short distance from Meadowhall: the Rother Valley Country Park, so that’s where we decided to go. It had everything you could want for a fun day out: parking by a lake and a cafe - oh and grass we could sit on provided we didn’t mind the copious amounts of Canada Goose poo that covered every square inch. And, as we sat there enjoying the view, we quickly became aware of a rare courting ritual taking place behind us. There on the far side of the road were a collection of young ladies in their late teens, dressed to impress, mooching around in groups. On the road came a procession of lads in their late teens, driving endlessly up and down the road, their cars souped up, their windows wound down, their music systems playing at maximum volume. We never observed any interaction between the two groups - maybe that came when the light began to fade. We endured the constant thudding base notes for probably about ten minutes before we could take it no more and set off for a short walk away from the lusting teenagers. It was on the walk that A approached Sue and me with a request: could we all go back to our house for the evening as he didn’t want to be on his own with H who had now progressed from guilty and upset to totally fed up and upset. We agreed of course. It hadn’t been the best of birthdays for H and even though A had meant well, practically everything had gone wrong. Still, he had one ace up his sleeve - he’d bought her a birthday cake. “What kind of cake?” we enquired. He turned and smiled sympathetically at his incredibly miserable wife walking behind us, the turned back: “It’s a Mr Happy cake.”

Naturally, memories of this wonderful birthday treat were recalled a number of times during our second trip to Sheffield. After lunch, we all trooped off to the cathedral to experience its bizarre construction. After enjoying a run of ancient edifices we were at another of those churches that had been upgraded to cathedrals. Whilst some, such as Leicester, had remained much the same, others had been expanded to befit their new status and the increased numbers they would need to accommodate. Once inside the cathedral, we could see clearly that it had been extended, but rather than lengthening the nave, they'd built on an extension at right angles to the original. This was rather disorienting as you didn't quite know where the focal point of the building was. To be fair, it wasn't meant to be like this. When the architect Charles Nicholson presented his plans a few years after it became a cathedral, the idea was to rotate the orientation of the building by 90 degrees so that the cathedral would lie on a north south axis with extensions built in both of these directions. Unfortunately only the northern part was constructed, the plans being abandoned n 1945 due to lack of funds and World Wars. The east west section is mainly 15th century, a major rebuilding of the previous church taking place at that time. A century later and one of the cathedral's gems was added - the Shrewsbury Chapel which contains two wonderfully elaborate and detailed Tudor tombs. One belongs to George Talbot, 4th Earl of Shrewsbury, who moved to the town in the late 1400s and had the chapel built with a crypt below. Lying alongside his effigy are those of his two wives. In another part of the chapel we found the tomb of another George Talbot, this time the 6th Earl who, along with his wife, the formidable Bess of Hardwick, held Mary, Queen of Scots imprisoned in Sheffield Castle for most of her time in English captivity. In 1932, the Shrewsbury family vault was entered but the 4th and 6th earls' remains were not there. Indeed, of the seventeen earls recorded as being interred in the chapel, only two were present. The whereabouts of the missing fifteen remains a mystery to this day. 

At the west end of the cathedral we discovered the ship's bell from the first HMS Sheffield, a World War II cruiser (the second HMS Sheffield was sunk by the Argentine navy during the Falklands War). The steel bell was made by one of the city's steelworks and was a reminder of the importance of that industry to the area. The writer Geoffrey Chaucer mentions a Sheffield thwitel, a kind of knife, in his Canterbury Tales at a time when the town was gaining a reputation for making cutlery. Just over 200 years later, a company of cutlers was established. In about 1740, a Lincolnshire inventor called Benjamin Huntsman moved his watch-making works to the Attercliffe area of Sheffield where he produced something called crucible steel. The crucibles were about two metres in diameter and made of clay. The steel was heated in the crucibles over coke and then lifted by two men and poured off, the crucibles then being reused. The Sheffield cutlers dismissed this new method of steel production until Huntsman began exporting it to France where it was exceedingly popular. After an attempt to get the exports banned, the Sheffield foundries adopted his methods (the process was never patented so others simply stole his idea) as they produced a far purer steel. Whilst Huntsman spent his life deliberately experimenting, the success of Thomas Boulsover, a local cutler, came as the result of a mistake. Whilst trying to repair the decorative handle of a knife, he over-heated it, causing the silver and copper components to melt and join together in a way that created a new kind of metal - Sheffield plate. Boulsover found he could hammer it into a sheet of metal that consisted of two distinct but joined layers; a thicker copper layer and a thin silver layer. He used it to create buttons that had all the appearance of being solid silver but were considerably cheaper to make. In Victorian times, new methods for producing steel were adopted in Sheffield. The Bessemer process pumped air through the molten metal to remove impurities whilst Siemens open hearth process was a more efficient method. 

I won't go into the details of these approaches as I find the whole subject of steel production arouses too many memories. For some unexplained reason, my secondary school taught metalwork as opposed to woodwork which I would have found far more useful. To be fair, I don't have the patience for either but of the two, wood is the only medium I have had the need to shape mould and fix in later life. We had projects that involved a bit of measuring out, no problem, a bit of cutting out, quite enjoyable, and hour upon hour of tedious, mind sapping sanding down. My first project was to make an octagonal spinner out of steel. We hammered a number on each edge so that after the spinning ceased, the spinner would rest upon any one of the eight numbers, or in the case of my spinner, the number five. Next came an aluminium egg cup which was mildly interesting and at least had a useful purpose if you didn't mind your boiled egg wobbling from side to side as you attempted to eat it. Finally there was the iron paper hook for storing receipts, bills, kitchen orders and any other number of things a twelve year old boy never had any call to use. This involved endlessly putting the wretched structure in the forge and then hammering a curve, millimetre by millimetre on the anvil. I watched on enviously as the talented boys who'd excelled in their hook turning skills progress to making a poker, something of actual value. I never got that far. Apart from the awful practical sessions, we also learned the theory of metal working. This, if it were possible, was even more irrelevant to my life than attempting to make things. Various words and phrases still float around my long term memory, occupying valuable space that I could have filled with more important stuff. Things like 'pig iron' and 'crucible' and 'Bessemer Convertor'. My final flourish before dropping the subject was to achieve my only bottom of the class exam result. I wore my 20% like a badge of honour, frankly mystified at how I'd managed to achieve even that meagre score. Strangely, steel had played a key part in my very existence. My father's maternal grandmother, Susan, was born in Dudley in an area of England known as the Black Country. It either takes its name from the rich black seams of coal or the door from the heavy industry that dominated the area for years. Her father was a steelworker but when the steelworks in Dudley closed down, something to do with the size of the coke they used in their foundries, he, his family and many of the other redundant workers packed up all their belonging and literally shipped them on Pickfords' barges to a new steelworks at Stanton, near Ilkeston in Derbyshire. There my great grandmother met and married Elijah, a Derbyshire miner and one of their many children was my grandmother. 

We returned to the scene of our previous visit, the Meadowhall Shopping Centre by tram, the ridiculously high fares for our return journey being the only downer on an otherwise successful day. Trams don't hold quite the same pull for me as trains although they really should because they follow a fixed route. I suppose what they don't do is give you a new perspective on your surroundings, following in part ordinary roads. Consequently, I passed over the chance to ride the trams in a number of foreign cities before deciding I could start collecting them, and I only have a small list of the systems I've been on but it is growing. I do enjoy a tram though, especially the former East European trams with their distinctive warning bell to alert you to the immanent announcement regarding the next stop. At one time every English city and many smaller towns had their own tram networks but all bar one of these closed and was dismantled. The survivor is Blackpool, opened in 1885, which still boasts regular old fashioned single and double decker trams plying their trade from Fleetwood in the north to the southern end of the town. It has now been joined by five other systems plus the two light rail networks which don't actually travel at any time on roads - the Tyne and Wear Metro and the Docklands Light Railway. The first modern tramway to open was the Manchester Metrolink which opened in 1990 and uses disused railway lines for much of its route before running on the streets in the centre of Manchester. Next came the one we were travelling on, the Sheffield Supertram which has three lines radiating out from the city centre and extensive street running. The Midland Metro running from Birmingham New Street Station to Wolverhampton also runs on former railways apart from at each end and, opening in 1999, it preceded the Croydon Tramlink by a year. The final tramway to open was the Nottingham Express Transit in 1994. Some, like Nottingham, have been extended. Others systems have been proposed but as I write, these are still the only systems running in the UK. I've travelled on all of them except the one in Croydon. My collection also includes ten foreign tramways, the most atmospheric being in San Francisco where you climb up and up from the city centre. A journey back down the hill at speed in the small tramcars was made all the more interesting when the driver allowed various passengers to gain first hand experience of driving the tram. There's a lovely little red tram in Lisbon that travels a circuitous route passing many major landmarks where passengers can alight to explore before catching a later tram. 

So that was Sheffield. In addition to disappointing birthday presents, failing museum, strangely constructed cathedrals and prohibitively expensive trams, it was also the scene of Leicester City winning their first piece of silverware during my time supporting them, a city where Sue spent several weeks of her training to become a journalist, and a place where five of my great aunts worked as headteachers or deputies. It was also where a certain James Montgomery arrived in 2892 to become the editor of the local newspaper, the Sheffield Register. He'd be lost to history were it not for the Christmas carol he composed - Angels from the Realms of Glory. Every year I go carol singing for charity around the streets of a nearby village, singing the bass parts that I learnt at school, and this is one of my favourites. It has a twice sung refrain, "Come and Worship," with the word 'Come' having thirteen different notes for the basses. It's not the easiest of carols and so I was a little surprised it featured in a secondary school carol service, arranged by my music teacher brother in law, with me at the organ. Forgetting the complexity of the carol, I took it at a fair old speed and as we trooped out of the church at the end, my brother in law came over to thank me for playing. "Although I did think you went a bit too fast at times'" he added, "especially that last carol." Maybe it was a tad frenetic: I admitted to a miscalculation. He continued, "It was less like Angels from the Realms of Glory and more like Bats from Hell!" He had a point.