Any memories of Crookesmoor School?

[goneforeign]

Here's one for 55ranby, This Saturday's the 74th anniversary of the blitz.

 

And then there was the blitz. Thursday December the 12th. 1941. Being winter it was dark when the sirens went at about 7pm, it was dark but there was a full moon. Sirens were not uncommon, we often heard sirens: that night however we were in for something special. The Jerry's had a policy of individual saturation bombing of the large industrial cities and it was now our turn. I was at home with my Granny and Grandad and we’d just had dinner. Normally we didn’t bother about air raid sirens ‘cos they’d go even if it was just a single enemy plane but it was soon apparent that this one was different. Bombs started falling everywhere, there were constant explosions and fires burning and the sound of our anti-aircraft guns firing with dozens of searchlights criss-crossing the sky looking for the bombers: as the night progressed it got worse. Finally we went down into the coal cellar and sat on the cold stone cellar steps. Cold, dark and dirty with only a flashlight or candles for light: I don’t remember the details but I’m sure we must have had a cushion to sit on and blankets to keep warm. It went on all night with some bombs falling very close and shaking the house and at one point there was a huge crash of breaking glass as the windows in the living room right overhead shattered from a bomb blast across the street. I remember it being 3am but soon after that I must have dosed off and I awoke to the all-clear sirens going off at about 7am.

 

My dad, who still hadn’t been called up yet, came by that morning, we went for a walk to see the damage, it was very difficult to travel anywhere since there was no public transportation, many houses and buildings were on fire, gas mains in the streets were on fire and water was gushing out of ruptured mains, electric power lines were down and there were lots of shattered and burning buildings and people out in the streets looking at it all. About 200 yards up Crooksmoor road from us was a huge landmine that had come down on a parachute, but had not exploded. It was black, about 8 -10ft long and 2ft diameter and covered with very interesting, but totally unintelligable German writing: it was lying in the gutter outside the Unitarian church. The bomb disposal people took care of it, they removed one end and all the explosives leaving the empty carcass there for weeks, it became a plaything for us, we used to play inside it.

[John1941]

I would have been 2 months old when the Sheffield Blitz took place. My dad worked at Osbornes Steel factory, in the Wicker, making parts for war planes and that section of Sheffield was bombed very heavily. The Germans must have known that that's where the steel factories were - they stretched for miles along Attercliffe Road. He was working the night shift and when he didn't come home my mum feared the worst. He arrived home about 6 hours later. He'd been helping the firefighters and ambulance services pull bodies from under the wreckage of houses and factories. Dad was lucky; where he worked wasn't hit but a lot of the other factories were.

 

Of course I only learned about this when I was much older but I remember all the bombed out sites where houses had been.

 

In about 1980 I was visiting England, my mum and dad lived on Harefield Road, near Hunters Bar and it must have been a Saturday because I think we were going to watch Sheffield United play. The start time was 3pm but around noon we were listening to the radio and found out the game had been called off. A construction crew, laying the foundations for a block of flats had discovered an unexploded bomb. They cleared the area for about a mile in every direction then exploded it. My parent's house was at least two miles away but the explosion shook every window.

 

---------- Post added 09-12-2015 at 16:22 ----------

 

I was in the same class as Roger Taylor. What was your brother's name?

 

John1941

[Dexy27]

The infants school at the top is st Vincent boxing club its not been open long.

 

---------- Post added 21-12-2015 at 21:46 ----------

 

The infants school at the top is st Vincent boxing club its not been open long.

[John1941]

Not sure what 'top' means. Wasn't the infant's school below the junior school. There was a road between them called Tay St. I checked Google maps and there's a for sale sign on the junior school on oxford street.

[Dexy27]

No ths infants school at the top I live near it.

[Alan Else]

I was in the same class as Roger Taylor. What was your brother's name? John1941

My brother was in Roger Taylor's class, Roger was our gang leader in stone cobbing wars against the Hoylands gang.

I went to Crookesmoor from 1948 to 1950.

[goneforeign]

Just came across this, I sent it to an article in the Star some years ago that was about 'Amigo', a B17 that crashed in Endcliff park, the last paragraph relates to something in the article.

One summer afternoon about 5 o’clock I was out playing with my friend John Webster when a B17 with only two of it’s four engines working flew over very low, it was badly shot up, trailing smoke and in obvious trouble. When we saw it we were at the corner of Barber Rd and Crooksmoor Rd right outside the church, the plane had come from the direction of Upperthorpe and it flew directly overhead the length of Crooksmoor Rd. When it disappeared from our view it was approx over Broomhill, about a mile away. It flew from the north east towards the south west. We knew immediately where it was heading: Endcliff Park! This was a park about 1 1/2 miles away that lay along the bottom of a valley in a heavily residential area: a river ran through the length of park, on one side of the river were football and cricket areas and on the other a heavily wooded steep bank.

We jumped on a bus that was heading directly towards the park and within a few minutes we were there. We entered the park at the Hunter's Bar entrance and immediately saw that the plane had crashed into the trees on the hillside and broken up over a very large area, there were trees on fire and already a police and army cordon stretched along the river bank to prevent public access. In a glance we knew how to get to the wreckage: there was a row of houses along the top of the ridge whose back gardens looked down on the burning trees. We quickly ran out of the park and up Brocco Bank to the street where those houses were, [i think it was Endciffe Glen Rd] We ran through their gardens and onto the wooded hillside. One detail that I must comment on is that the tail structure was not at the top of the hill, that's where we entered from nor did we hear any bullets exploding. As we neared the wreckage we saw that we not alone, we recognised several kids from the Harcourt Rd. gang, a street very close to where we lived, and they were already flitting from behind the trees and gathering souvenirs: down at the bottom of the hillside we could see a crowd with the police and soldiers holding them back. Collecting bomb and anti-aircraft shrapnel after air-raids was a normal procedure for all kids back then, so we picked up pieces of debris from the wreckage and knew it was time to leave when we saw fire engines pulling up below and firemen heading up towards the burning trees. As we scrambled back up the hill with our booty we passed the Harcourt Rd. gang, two of them were struggling to carry a pair of 50 cal. machine guns that must have weighed a ton! Next day we saw them again and they invited us to their house to see the guns, we were extremely envious, we’d never found anything like that!

 

Having spent several years in the RAF in a flying capacity I can't imagine 'three terrific spins' or 'rolled over three times': the plane was so low when it passed overhead when we first saw it, it was probably not more than 2 -300 feet above us. Any sort of maneuver like a roll or a spin would cause it to lose altitude before there was any possibility of rolling over and it didn't have any altitude to lose. And I find it difficult to believe that it had been 'flying around the Ecclesall area for some time', I believe that it travelled in a straight line from the time that we saw it 'til it crashed and that the pilot possibly was trying to reach the open grass area. The idea that he was 'circling around Ecclesall' is nonsense, from whatever minimal altitude he had he could have seen the open country around Ringinglow Rd and I'm sure he was hoping that he could make it that far. He came in a direct line from Doncaster and Rotherham, why he didn't choose to put it down in the open country out there we'll never know.

 

I recommend 'Bomber' by Len Deighton and also 'Inferno' by Keith Lowe, both books deal with B17's during WW2.

 

---------- Post added 25-12-2015 at 07:58 ----------

 

Here's another.

There were many events interesting to a kid, like one night I awoke at about 2 am and came downstairs, probably to go to the outside toilet, I heard a weird noise, like an aircraft with a 2 stroke motorbike engine, and then suddenly this thing with a flame shooting out behind it went overhead very low: the next day the paper said that the farthest north sighted V1 had passed over Sheffield and had crashed into farmland, normally they didn’t have the range to target cities as far north as Sheffield, I just happened to see the only one they fired at us! And then 30 odd years later I made a TV documentary about 'em.

 

---------- Post added 26-12-2015 at 09:48 ----------

 

Christmas morning I was reading a book and two words jumped out at me, two words that I hadn't heard together since my childhood, the two words were 'slag heap'. Growing up in and around Sheffield in the 1940's I was quite familiar with slag heaps, they were quite common particularly around coal mines and industrial sites; conical piles that looked like the Pyramids.

I know I've made reference to slag re. the 'tip' adjacent to Crooksmoor rd school but I'd never put the two words together, now the dam wall at the top of the 'tip' makes sense. Reading this prompted me to google 'slag heaps' and the results were quite amazing, they exist all over the world wherever the industrial revolution took root.

I clicked on google's images and was amazed at the photos and their descriptions; 600ft high is/was not uncommon and in some places they have multiple 600 footers side by side! I've speculated that the dam wall and the tip were created from industrial slag and this reinforces that thought. The word 'tip' also pops up frequently, many slag heaps were referred to as tips. See my comments at the Sheffield Forum dated 07-12-2015 for my initial musings on this subject.

 

---------- Post added 26-12-2015 at 09:50 ----------

 

Christmas morning I was reading a book and two words jumped out at me, two words that I hadn't heard together since my childhood, the two words were 'slag heap'. Growing up in and around Sheffield in the 1940's I was quite familiar with slag heaps, they were quite common particularly around coal mines and industrial sites; conical piles that looked like the Pyramids.

I know I've made reference to slag re. the 'tip' adjacent to Crooksmoor rd school but I'd never put the two words together, now the dam wall at the top of the 'tip' makes sense. Reading this prompted me to google 'slag heaps' and the results were quite amazing, they exist all over the world wherever the industrial revolution took root.

I clicked on google's images and was amazed at the photos and their descriptions; 600ft high is/was not uncommon and in some places they have multiple 600 footers side by side! I've speculated that the dam wall and the tip were created from industrial slag and this reinforces that thought. The word 'tip' also pops up frequently, many slag heaps were referred to as tips. See my comments at the Sheffield Forum dated 07-12-2015 for my initial musings on this subject.

[John1941]

The site of the crashed aircraft, in Endcliffe Park, is still there and usually has flowers there. I don't know who looks after it. Maybe someone who saw the plane go down, although there won't be a lot of them left

[waymel 1]

Hi does any one remember George Mellor started around 1946 till he was 15.

[Alan Else]

No ths infants school at the top I live near it.

The infants school in 1948 was in Oxford St below Tay St.

The junior school in 1950 was in Crookesmoor Rd still below Tay St.

I left in 1950 when we moved to Walkley where I went to Burgoyne Rd School until I left in 1958 to start work on my 15th birthday.