Industrial Sheffield at Kelham Island

The city of Sheffield had a great industrial economy based around steel, heavy engineering, cutlery and tool making that declined in the post-war era due to increased competition from Europe and Japan - it all but expired in the 1980s as Thatcher-led deindustrialisation took effect.  Free market fanatics inspired and applauded the project, taking inordinate pride in following up with a policy of having no economic planning of any sort over the following decades. The local authority-run, free admission museum at Kelham Island does an excellent job explaining and illustrating the scale of steel and engineering enterprise in the days when it was known internationally as “Steel City”.

The museum entrance is dramatically marked by the towering presence of the UK's last working Bessemer Converter used by British Steel until 1974. Invented in 1856 by Henry Bessemer for the conversion of iron into steel at a substantially lower price than hitherto. The first working examples were installed at Bessemer’s works in Sheffield in 1858. At the centre of the museum is the imposing River Don Engine - built at the John Brown Atlas Works (Sheffield Brightside) in 1904, a 3-cylinder 12,000hp steam engine designed to power the process  of armour plating by rolling steel backward and forwards in rapid succession. Hence the ability to reverse the driving wheel in an instant, which is demonstrated in a two minute gas-powered firing twice a day. It remained in use into the 1970s at British Steel River Don works before removal to the museum site in 1978. Described as the most powerful steam engine operational in Europe and still an awe-inspiring sound and motion experience! Watch the brief video at the end of the post to get a flavour.

Other moving exhibits include an impressive Crossley Gas Engine built in 1915, once employed in a rolling mill in Penistone - now powered by electricity for demonstration purpose. Crossley Brothers was formed in Manchester in 1867, building pumps and presses. Their most successful development was  building 4 cylinder gas engines. Enemies of the demon drink, they steadfastly refused to do business with breweries. In the upper gallery there’s a display of locally built Sheffield-Simplex cars - this business was active from 1907 to 1920.  Despite a reputation for innovation and experimentation, the company never broke through to the mass market and left little trace apart from these examples.  On the ground floor is a recreation of a Victorian street occupied by the premises of master cutlers at least one of whom is still working. The cutlery trade is represented by period examples of lavish displays of bladed items, cutlery and hand tools.

Stored alongside the museum car park is a 1951 built Diesel Electric 0-4-0 shunting locomotive designed for internal use at the Templeborough Steel Works in Rotherham. Constructed at the Sheffield works of the Yorkshire Engine Co. It has languished here since at least 2005 and obviously deserves a better fate but most local authority museums lack the resources to restore and display items like this. Sheffield native and Reform Party supporter, Mr. Christopher Harborne found £5 million pounds to slip into Nigel Farage's already well stuffed pocket. It will never happen but would be good if he could find some spare cash to help out the museum service in his old home town. It’s impressive that the city museum service still occupies a key position in cultural life in a time when resources have never been under greater pressure.

 

Natural Peas in Crosspool

In 2024 a Ghost Sign was revealed in the Sheffield suburb of Crosspool when a large advertising billboard was removed from a gable end at the neighbourhood shopping centre. It was a much faded version of what can be seen here.  A story of local reaction unfolded in the local press - elderly residents recalled seeing the original sign in their youth. As an exercise in graphic design it has to be said it’s very basic. But, perhaps its very simplicity spoke to the omnipresent popular yearning for  simpler times and a campaign to see it reinstated was widely supported. A year later the sign was restored to its former self, modestly promoting the virtues of tinned processed peas to the wider world. Follow this link to see how it was achieved. Not everyone was delighted, some felt it should have been preserved in its damaged condition, maintaining its identity as a Ghost Sign.  Others believed the sign had little merit and preferred to see the entire gable end as a potential space for Street Art. The last photo features the frequently elusive 51 bus, behind which the billboard can be seen as it was in 2007.

 

Harrogate - the wider picture

The invention of panoramic postcards was a nice but impractical idea. Much effort went into producing often genuinely startling wide angle views but the cards themselves, being twice the width of every other postcard, were exceptionally vulnerable and few arrived at their destination without sustaining some damage. Despite this the hunger for novelty drove their production and most surviving examples were retained as souvenirs. Many were then folded for convenience in storage which often, as in this example from the prosperous Yorkshire spa town of Harrogate, led to division into two sections. Urban scenes like this are relatively unusual but at their best can record a vast amount of period detail.  The back of this card identifies it as a “Panoramicard” printed and sold by the foremost High Street newsagent of the day, WH Smith, whose Harrogate shop dominates the left side.  Opposite is the Exchange Public House and Billiard Rooms adorned with hand painted signage promoting itself equally to adherents of Temperance and consumers of Malt whisky and Guinness stout.  WH Smith still exists in much reduced form having retreated in 2025 to train stations, airports and motorway services after selling off its High Street stores to private equity. They now operate under the undistinguished name of TGJones.

 

Eric Fraser - the Masher and the Bathing Belle

It’s the turn of the egregious Masher and the chaste Bathing Belle today. Perennially camera shy, the Masher was a popular subject for cartoonists in magazines like Punch and Passing Show who made fun of his over estimation of his appeal to the opposite sex. Sensing his attempt to transcend the barriers of class, they sneered at his sartorial efforts to pass himself off as a dandy. Here he is portrayed as a weedy cigar-smoking weakling leading a trio of decorous innocents into dangerous waters where aquatic frolics could soon go wrong. In the second image his roving eye directs his male gaze on to the most conspicuous  unattached females. The British comic postcard was a popular subject for collectors, though I suspect the numbers are rapidly dwindling. I find them hard to take thanks to the combination of clumsy drawing and coy innuendo.

Images of Bathing Belles are ambiguous figures, composed to project mild titillation while  embodying maidenly virtues. Victorian anxieties around uncontrollable passions triggered by glimpses of female flesh inspired a wide range of modesty-preserving costumes for the female swimmer. On postcards their expressions often suggest deep discomfort with the effort of flirtation. After the Great War attitudes and fashions changed to favour female exposure over concealment and postcards uneasily reflected that, whilst trying to avoid offending older generations who held to their puritan instincts. Many modern reproductions of Victorian swimwear can be found on eBay - perfect if you’re planning a John Ruskin-themed beach party. 

 

Eric Fraser at the Seaside

Eric Fraser designed and illustrated this ad for Guinness for publication in the summer of 1951 - the year of the Festival of Britain on London’s South Bank. A gallery of Victorian seaside characters has been assembled in a nostalgic exercise, celebrating the past.  A curiosity of the Festival iconography is the prevalence of Victorian associations and imagery in an exercise designed to embrace the excitement of the future. Most of these stereotypes have long receded into history but the Masher is still with us, though he has swapped the promenade for the manosphere and the dating app. The Punch and Judy Man and the Pierrot were key players in the world of seaside entertainment - a major activity in the first half of the last century, rapidly moving towards extinction by 1951. The concealed charms of the Bathing Belle had given way to a new era of exposure and the prudish Bathing Machine (beach hut on wheels, usually horse-drawn) had long since performed its final trundle along the English foreshore. Producers of vintage postcards captured all these characters at the height of their powers - some examples are posted below. Often they are incidental captures, minor parts of a much broader picture but occasionally a more imaginative photographer will focus on the documentary detail. The Masher was a figure of fun and more likely to turn up on hand drawn illustration postcards. This selection starts at Hastings with a Punch and Judy show of modest dimensions, then moves on to Scarborough, Millport, Clacton and other resorts where Pierrots and Minstrels take to the stage, to be followed by some more generic examples. In another post, the Masher and the Bathing Belle will be considered.

 

“This is not a museum …

… it’s a conservation and storage facility.” The first words of our guide on a tour of the Hawking Building at the Science and Innovation Park at the former RAF Wroughton airfield. The Hawking Building is a vast purpose-built warehouse box that, along with a number of old aircraft hangars, holds the reserve collection of the Science Museum. Over 300,000 objects, large and small have been moved in from their old home in Earl’s Court, most of which are stored on pallets or open shelving in carefully controlled temperature and humidity settings.  The tour is focused on “the grid”, a large open space on the ground floor mainly occupied by a spectacular display of road vehicles from bicycles and milk floats to trucks and buses.  Collecting policy is not to collect an example of every known vehicle but to look for items that represent a technological step change or have a strong association with an individual of interest or an important historical event.

Conservation is aimed at the preservation of exhibits in the condition when acquired. Making them safe is a priority, removing hazardous materials - where vehicles are concerned this involves extracting batteries, draining oil and petrol, and degreasing components to protect against further deterioration. Restoration is never undertaken, partly because of the frequently inordinate expense, partly because, in many cases, restored examples already exist thanks to individual and group efforts and not least, the problem of finding agreement on the chronological point in the long life of the object to which it should be returned.

In the first image we see the balloon gondola used by Swiss physicist, Auguste Piccard on his altitude record-breaking ascent of 16,201 m (53,153 ft) using a hydrogen balloon becoming the first human to enter the upper atmosphere.  This gondola was presented to the Science Museum in 1935. In a triumph of adaptive re-use, Piccard went on to convert his gondola into a vehicle for deep sea exploration.

There’s a group of vintage cars from the first decade of the last century, an era of experimentation with three forms of motive power - steam, electricity and petrol - battling for supremacy. Steam power was the first to be eliminated despite surviving just into the 1950s for heavy haulage.  Electricity foundered quickly due the weight of the batteries although it clung on in the form of lightweight delivery vehicles where lower speeds were more acceptable. The race was easily won by petrol and diesel, greatly assisted by the predatory instincts of the American oil barons of the period. Lithium battery technology has brought the electric vehicle back into contention although it remains locked in mortal combat with the descendants of the oil baronetcy and their political enablers.