14th April - Day 33 - Sign of the times
As I stopped to take this picture, I was convinced that when I was a child, City of Sheffield signs had something about the ‘Home of Steel’ or a similar slogan on them. I must have been imagining this though, as after researching it today, I can’t find any evidence.
The sign marking the boundary as you enter Totley (Useless fact alert - Totingelei is mentioned in the Doomsday Book – a spy or watching place) did, however, make me smile. Helen, our Office Manager and Keith our Workshop Technician have selflessly been out and about each lunchtime, under their new names of Madame Cholet and Tobermory picking up rubbish on the streets around the Centre and helping to keep Sheffield clean. So - Stainless certainly seems to have changed its significance in Sheffield over the years.
In 1724, Daniel Defoe wrote, ‘This town of Sheffield is very populous and large, the streets narrow, and the houses dark and black, occasioned by the continued smoke of the forges, which are always at work: Here they make all sorts of cutlery-ware, but especially that of edged-tools, knives, razors, axes, &c. and nails.’ and in 1830, Cobbett wrote, ‘All the way along, from Leeds to Sheffield, it is coal and iron, and iron and coal…They call it Black Sheffield, and black enough it is; but from this one town and its environs go nine-tenths of the knives that are used in the whole world’.
History we know is often wrongly remembered (a bit like me with the City of Sheffield signs) and nostalgia surrounding the steel and cutlery industries does tend to ignore the difficult working and living conditions people experienced. Similarly, some people choose to ignore rubbish they can see or worse, drop it with no thought to the landscape created. I’ve certainly become aware while cycling of what litter lies in hedgerows. Shared responsibility, heritage and people of steel are all parts of Sheffield past and its present. As our St Wilfrid’s Wombles continue with their sterling work, they continue to be heartened by the kind words given by those who stop to praise or thank them and I am equally inspired by the support given to the challenge. We may not be stainless but we can at least all do our best to take up the challenge of recognising the shared responsibility we hold for the society we are all part of.
