Book - Sheffield’s Shocking Past: The Twentieth Century

A BOOK has been released about shocking incidents from Sheffield’s past.


It is called Sheffield’s Shocking Past: The Twentieth Century, and was written by local historians Chris Hobbs and Matthew Bell.

It is the follow up to a similar tome by the pair which focused on the Victorian period.

Included are tales about a killer cat from Millhouses, death by scalding at Heeley Baths, and the city’s earliest motor accidents.

Chris, 58, of Crookes, said: “It’s a bit ghastly but there seems to be a real appetite for this kind of thing.”

Matthew, 50, of Heeley, added: “People are fascinated by a little historic death and disaster.”

Here The Diary presents some of the best - or should that be worst? - extracts...

Hillsborough crush, 1934:
The record attendance at Hillsborough was on February 17 1934 for Wednesday’s FA Cup tie against Manchester City. But tragedy struck when a fan was crushed to death in the Leppings Lane end.

The Manchester Guardian reported five of George Hill’s ribs were broken. It said: “The inquest jury said more crush-barriers ought to be erected at the ground. A mounted policeman who had several years experience said he had never seen a crowd behave in such a manner. Several people near the railings were screaming for assistance.”

The city’s first motor tragedy, 1907:

Three people died in Sheffield’s first motor accident on August 25, 1907.

The Manchester Guardian reported: “A terrible accident occurred in Manchester Road, near Sheffield. A motor charabanc, conveying a party organised by the proprietor of a Sheffield hotel, was returning from Derbyshire, and all went well until Moscar Top was reached. Here...one of the wheels caught a telegraph pole. The char-a-banc was swung around into a stone wall with a fearful impact and overturned.”

The dead were five-year-old William Ernest Harrison, the son of a stoker at Sheffield Corporation; Benjamin Handley, 33, a bricklayer of Boston Street; and Hugh Fearn, 37, a clerk of Abbeydale Road.

Death by Cat, 1904:
Domestic butler William Ranger, of Millhouses Lane, was 63 when, in March 1904, he was scratched on his arm by his Persian cat.

The Manchester Guardian reported: “A few days afterwards there was severe pain and swelling near the elbow, and a doctor was summoned. A month after the accident the doctor found the patient livid and struggling for breath. There was no improvement after that time and he died.”

The book, published by city firm ACM Retro on November 14, is available for pre-order from The Star.

From: http://www.thestar.co.uk/community/the-diary/the-diary-shocking-sheffield-1-5120272

Book - SHEFFIELD’S SHOCKING PAST: Forgotten Tales of Murder, Mishap and Gruesome Misdemeanour

Author and Heeley resident Matthew Bell and local historian Chris Hobbs have joined forces to write a book relating some of the darker episodes – in all their grisly detail – of Victorian Sheffield .


SHEFFIELD’S SHOCKING PAST: Forgotten Tales of Murder, Mishap and Gruesome Misdemeanour, published by ACM Retro, recalls a poverty-stricken world defined by tragedy, misfortune and murder.

Victorian justice was brutal and Sheffield had the dubious honour of being home to Thomas Williams, the first man to be hanged during Queen Victoria’s reign. But not all crimes were solved; the murder of Boden Lane’s ‘Bearded Lady’, for example, remains a mystery. Drink was behind many hideous tragedies – a bizarre ‘prank’ of pulling a pet cat across Attercliffe canal on the end of rope was in a bid to win beer! In this case the animal escaped and the owner drowned.

Three tales in Sheffield’s Shocking Past will resonate with the people of Heeley:

Two grotesque murders took place a fortnight apart in 1852. The first occurred in Cutler’s Wood, by the River Sheaf at Heeley Bottom – a child’s body was found with its head severed. Soon afterwards a travelling salesman was shot in the head near Midhill House, East Bank Road. The perpetrators of these terrible crimes were hanged at York and suffered the final ignominy of sharing a grave.

That same year, a four year old boy suffered an agonising death from burning at Ash Farm, behind the Ball Inn on Myrtle Road. The poor lad ran some distance towards home with his clothes on fire before collapsing.

In 1869, John Shortridge, a respected industrialist influential in the building of Wicker Arches and the introduction of horse-drawn trams from town to the Red Lion, Heeley, died in a carriage accident on Abbeydale Road. Shortridge’s grave is the one with the tall obelisk by the entrance to Heeley Parish Churchyard.

Sheffield’s Shocking Past, priced £12.95, is available from Waterstone’s, Sheffield Scene, Amazon and ACM Retro. For details, see www.acmretro.com and http://www.chrishobbs.com/.

From: http://heeleyonline.org/2012/06/18/sheffields-shocking-past-forgotten-tales-of-murder-mishap-and-gruesome-misdemeanour/

Website - Secrets of the past (Sheffield)

HERE’S a few things you won’t find on Chris Hobbs’ Sheffield history website: the Great Flood, Charlie Peace or anything about Bessemer, Brearley or Benjamin Huntsman.


“That stuff has been done to death,” he says. “I’m interested in history that’s new. If that makes sense?”

So, here’s a few things you will come across: the 1942 Beighton railway disaster (14 people dead, 34 injured and not a single paragraph in The Star because of wartime restrictions), the first-ever air raid on Sheffield (some 24 years before the more famous Blitz) and the city’s workhouse scandal – an 1882 cover-up where officials were suspected of stealing bodies for medical research.

Never heard of them? Don’t worry – that’s sort of the point.

“The mission has always been to feature things that have been relatively unreported,” says Chris, of Spring Hill, Crookes. “There’s no point me researching the Sheffield Flood because you can find that anywhere.

“This is for the things which have, to some extent, slipped by under the radar.”

There is some irony, then, that the website has very much not gone unnoticed.

Its huge collection of primary material and ‘well-fancy-that’ facts (who knew that a Sheffield United match – against Arsenal in 1927 – was the first football game ever broadcast on radio or that a murder at a Crookes laundry made national front-page news in 1922?) has proved something of a hit.

Founded as a hobby in 1999 (“it was an excuse to mess about with this new thing called the internet”), it now receives more than 80,000 page views a month while the 58-year-old father-of-two has just released his first book featuring a selection of stories he’s uncovered.

But perhaps most gratifying for the university technician is the sheer number of people who have emailed to say his site has solved historical mysteries which have confounded them for years

Like the naval rating who had been on board the train during that Beighton disaster but never knew what occurred.

“It happened during World War Two so, for morale purposes, it had been largely unreported,” says Chris.

“There was a paragraph in The Times which I came across while I was looking to see what had been reported on Sheffield over the years – and that’s all.

“This rating had got to the point where his family didn’t believe him so he said it was a relief to stumble on my website.”

There was also the story of John Raynes, a Heeley Victoria Cross hero. Chris found his dedication in the 1915 London Gazette and put it on-line. It explained how, during World War One, the sergeant-major had rescued a colleague from no-man’s land.

“Shortly after that a police officer who was researching VC heroes emailed saying he’d found the website useful,” explains Chris. “He invited me to a re-dedication ceremony at John’s grave in Leeds. It was a full ceremony – a band and the works. I remember his granddaughter saying to me it was all down to my research. That was lovely.”

Now, he hopes that book – a death-and-dastardly-deeds romp through Victorian Sheffield – will bring a few more tales back into popular conscience, while he plans to keep researching.

“I enjoy it,” he says. “It’s like doing a puzzle. It’s marvellous when I get emails saying I’ve helped solve family mysteries but I get a tremendous buzz out of doing this for myself.”

Visit Chris’s website at http://www.chrishobbs.com/ or buy Sheffield’s Shocking Past, co-written with Matthew Bell, at The Star shop from April 13.

From: http://www.thestar.co.uk/news/secrets-of-the-past-1-4409653