Did you ever live in Parson Cross? (Part 2)

[Young Ann]

My cousin lived on Yew Lane Veronica Harrison, iv been trying to find her for years no luck she married a Barry Fox, dont know if the names ring any bells let me know. thanks

 

Iremember Veronica on Yew Lane went To School (Yew Lane Secondary Modern School ) with her early 60's - lost touch when i moved away after getting married. I remember she 'knocked 'around with a girl named Christine Hudson

[sid63]

I've been trying to find out when St Cecelia's church was built.

I grew up thinking it was a really old building, but was told recently that it was built at the same time as the estate? Is this true?

 

I used to be a choir boy there, they used to pay us a tanner to sing at a wedding,a shiiling if you did a solo, sometimes got invited to the reception after :|

[Johnny P]

No I didn't !

[Young Ann]

St Cecilia'sChurch was built in 1938.

[disleydog]

St Cecilia'sChurch was built in 1938.

 

The Foundation stone was laid on

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 24th 1938, at 3 p. m.

 

Don't know when it was finished or consecrated though

[Bushbaby]

The Foundation stone was laid on

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 24th 1938, at 3 p. m.

Don't know when it was finished or consecrated though

 

Thank you all

 

The breadth of knowledge and info I get from the Forum never ceases to amaze.

It's brilliant!!

[Bushbaby]

Celebrating Parson Cross in the 50s & 60s

 

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=197307473680136

 

Time 1 December · 19:00 - 21:00

Location Parson Cross Library @ The Learning Zone

Wordsworth Avenue

 

Back in the early seventies I was a day-release student at Granville College, one of the further education colleges in Sheffield, taking a course in business studies. As well as all the business relevant subjects, Marketing, Accountancy etc, there was also a couple of subjects which were compulsory to all students, regardless of their specialty. One of these was “Social Studies”. Coincidentally, one of my lecturers was young local political activist called David Blunkett.

Among other things, one of the areas covered by the curriculum was “Social History”. This was a comparatively new way of looking at history. Instead of seeing things from the point of view of Kings, Popes, Prime Ministers and Generals, the academic version of history which had bored us all stiff during our schooldays, some people had the bright idea of looking at the lives of ordinary people and recording times and events from their viewpoints.

The idea had first started in the fifties I think, but gained momentum during the following decade. Sheffield University was at the forefront of the movement, with teams of students and lecturers, going into nursing homes armed only with a Dansette open-reel tape deck and a Wigfalls microphone, and speaking to men and women who had been born in the 19th century, and finding out about ordinary life in Sheffield and similar places, during and after World War One.

They had many fascinating stories to tell, and were much more interesting than the Norman Conquests and the Crusades, to me at least, and for the first time in my life I began to be interested in History. I never cared much for Kings chopping off their wives’ heads and to be honest I still don’t.

I remember listening to a fascinating recollection by an elderly lady who had been in Service during the early decades of the last century, and had worked for the family of one of the large steel magnates, the Firths, as in Firth Brown, a famous Sheffield Steel alliance. What particularly caught my attention was that, during her time serving at a large estate on the west side of Sheffield, she mentioned that they were often visited by the young Francis Bacon!! I was knocked out by this. I’d had an interest in Bacon since watching a BBC “Aquarius” documentary about him and had read a bit about him, but couldn’t imagine why he would be visiting the Firth’s company estate. In those pre-internet days, it took me a few lunchtime library sessions to discover that Bacon’s mother was in fact Winnie Firth, one of the heirs to the company fortune, and that the family trust fund had subsidised Francis through much of his early career.

That’s my kind of history, then and now. The minutiae rather than the body politic.

 

When I came back to live in Sheffield, after spending twenty years Rock Climbing, Windsurfing, Abseiling and generally living the life of Reilly at the taxpayer’s expense, I started to look a lot deeper into the city’s social history, combing through the appropriate sections of the Uni library and WH Smith’s, and reading stories about Attercliffe and Darnall, Norton, Woodseats and Hillsborough, but try as I may, I couldn’t seem to find anything about Parson Cross. Eventually, fed up of listening to my moaning, my wife said that, if I wanted to read a book about Parson Cross, the chances were that I would have to write it first!! – and of course she was absolutely right.

Although I didn’t set out to write a book, I did take it on myself to become a bit of a spokesman for my generation, through the ever expanding World Wide Web, and in particular sites like the Sheffield Forum. The first article of any depth I wrote was in response to someone asking “Do you remember WMC day trips to the seaside?” Instead of just saying , “Yeah, they were great weren’t they?” I wrote a short, basically true story, starting from getting a lift off my dad to The Ritz in the morning, and finishing with the long walk back up Wordsworth at the end of the day, and covering everything in between from Law Brothers Coaches, 7/6d spending money, and fish and chips at the Victoria café. I thought carefully about it and tried to be as accurate as I could, and, if I say so myself, was very pleased with the end result. In return, I got a handful of personal mails from people saying that they’d enjoyed my recollections and that, most important of all, my article had rekindled their own memories. I followed this over the next few months with stories about Country Dancing in Grenoside, Playing Truant from De La Salle, and wonderful nights singing “My old man said follow the van” in the disco at Mansell Youth Club.

After yet more positive feedback I set up a blog of my own, and began putting stories into their chronological order before uploading them at monthly intervals. I knew I had interest when, being a few weeks late with my Cycle Speedway article due to a business trip to Hong Kong, I was bombarded with two or three emails asking where the next feature was.

When I had about twenty stories covering the 1960s from start to finish, a few close friends advised me to think about publishing a book. I had no idea how to go about this but, luckily, a couple of my stories had appeared as letters in The Star, and one of the girls on the desk in York St, Debbie, offered to look my work over and maybe forward it to a locally based publishing company. The next thing I knew, Neil was contacting me to say they were going to publish, and the rest as they say……..

[mr_blue_owl]

St Cecilia'sChurch was built in 1938.

I was christened there in 1951

[mr_blue_owl]

Celebrating Parson Cross in the 50s & 60s

 

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=197307473680136

 

Time 1 December · 19:00 - 21:00

Location Parson Cross Library @ The Learning Zone

Wordsworth Avenue

 

Back in the early seventies I was a day-release student at Granville College, one of the further education colleges in Sheffield, taking a course in business studies. As well as all the business relevant subjects, Marketing, Accountancy etc, there was also a couple of subjects which were compulsory to all students, regardless of their specialty. One of these was “Social Studies”. Coincidentally, one of my lecturers was young local political activist called David Blunkett.

Among other things, one of the areas covered by the curriculum was “Social History”. This was a comparatively new way of looking at history. Instead of seeing things from the point of view of Kings, Popes, Prime Ministers and Generals, the academic version of history which had bored us all stiff during our schooldays, some people had the bright idea of looking at the lives of ordinary people and recording times and events from their viewpoints.

The idea had first started in the fifties I think, but gained momentum during the following decade. Sheffield University was at the forefront of the movement, with teams of students and lecturers, going into nursing homes armed only with a Dansette open-reel tape deck and a Wigfalls microphone, and speaking to men and women who had been born in the 19th century, and finding out about ordinary life in Sheffield and similar places, during and after World War One.

They had many fascinating stories to tell, and were much more interesting than the Norman Conquests and the Crusades, to me at least, and for the first time in my life I began to be interested in History. I never cared much for Kings chopping off their wives’ heads and to be honest I still don’t.

I remember listening to a fascinating recollection by an elderly lady who had been in Service during the early decades of the last century, and had worked for the family of one of the large steel magnates, the Firths, as in Firth Brown, a famous Sheffield Steel alliance. What particularly caught my attention was that, during her time serving at a large estate on the west side of Sheffield, she mentioned that they were often visited by the young Francis Bacon!! I was knocked out by this. I’d had an interest in Bacon since watching a BBC “Aquarius” documentary about him and had read a bit about him, but couldn’t imagine why he would be visiting the Firth’s company estate. In those pre-internet days, it took me a few lunchtime library sessions to discover that Bacon’s mother was in fact Winnie Firth, one of the heirs to the company fortune, and that the family trust fund had subsidised Francis through much of his early career.

That’s my kind of history, then and now. The minutiae rather than the body politic.

 

When I came back to live in Sheffield, after spending twenty years Rock Climbing, Windsurfing, Abseiling and generally living the life of Reilly at the taxpayer’s expense, I started to look a lot deeper into the city’s social history, combing through the appropriate sections of the Uni library and WH Smith’s, and reading stories about Attercliffe and Darnall, Norton, Woodseats and Hillsborough, but try as I may, I couldn’t seem to find anything about Parson Cross. Eventually, fed up of listening to my moaning, my wife said that, if I wanted to read a book about Parson Cross, the chances were that I would have to write it first!! – and of course she was absolutely right.

Although I didn’t set out to write a book, I did take it on myself to become a bit of a spokesman for my generation, through the ever expanding World Wide Web, and in particular sites like the Sheffield Forum. The first article of any depth I wrote was in response to someone asking “Do you remember WMC day trips to the seaside?” Instead of just saying , “Yeah, they were great weren’t they?” I wrote a short, basically true story, starting from getting a lift off my dad to The Ritz in the morning, and finishing with the long walk back up Wordsworth at the end of the day, and covering everything in between from Law Brothers Coaches, 7/6d spending money, and fish and chips at the Victoria café. I thought carefully about it and tried to be as accurate as I could, and, if I say so myself, was very pleased with the end result. In return, I got a handful of personal mails from people saying that they’d enjoyed my recollections and that, most important of all, my article had rekindled their own memories. I followed this over the next few months with stories about Country Dancing in Grenoside, Playing Truant from De La Salle, and wonderful nights singing “My old man said follow the van” in the disco at Mansell Youth Club.

After yet more positive feedback I set up a blog of my own, and began putting stories into their chronological order before uploading them at monthly intervals. I knew I had interest when, being a few weeks late with my Cycle Speedway article due to a business trip to Hong Kong, I was bombarded with two or three emails asking where the next feature was.

When I had about twenty stories covering the 1960s from start to finish, a few close friends advised me to think about publishing a book. I had no idea how to go about this but, luckily, a couple of my stories had appeared as letters in The Star, and one of the girls on the desk in York St, Debbie, offered to look my work over and maybe forward it to a locally based publishing company. The next thing I knew, Neil was contacting me to say they were going to publish, and the rest as they say……..

 

It was a bit like Deja Vu reading this post

I lived on Wordsworth - opposite St Paul's church

I used to go to the Ritz for the Saturday Matinee

I remember the Law Brothers coaches seaside coach trips very well

I used to ride cycle speedway

I went to Granville College 1966-1970

I went to live in Hong Kong (81-83, 85-97)

And I have an avid interest in history

 

Small world etc

[smary]

I was christened there in 1948 - I went to school with a girl who lived opposite the church - she was called Felicity Dawn Revill - we then went onto Granville College