Interesting View Of Sheffield.

[sando]

While sorting through loads of old documents and book collected over the last 35 years I can across this cutting from the Sheffield star from Friday March the 2nd 1956, it was found in the middle of a copy of Motor Cycle magazine from a similar date.

On the rear are the TV and radio listings for that date, interesting in the days of 24 hour multi channel TV that there only appears to be one channel with programmes running 5pm until 11pm.

[lysander]

That's how we lived in the UK in those days and even with just a single channel some people reckoned there was too much TV and it was ruining our society! Sheffield was, indeed, a dirty, filthy, smokey and smelly old place but we knew that ," where there's muck there's money".....In our defence we were always known as a "dirty picture in a golden frame".

[Unitedite Returns]

Under a loom at 13!

We were never that tolerant of youth in our day!

Far too soft by far!

[lysander]

Just to add to the smelly old Sheffield debate.... Post War, the City had some high wage earners in the steel works as well as some "Foundry Fodder" whose earnings were low ...but we did have full employment and a person could walk out of a job on a Thursday ( often pay-day) without a job and be back in full employment the next Monday morning. We also had employers who often failed to invest in new technology allowing our foreign competitors to gain a foothold in many markets, hitherto, solely supplied by us.

The Clean Air Act and other environmental legislation were necessary as was a tightening of safety regulations ,and no one should be worse off in full employment than receiving benefits. Our problems are less to do with wage levels and rather more to do with the politicians who saw the de-industrialisation of a country as something to be achieved,rather than, as Germany did, revitalising the ethos of production and industry. But they pandered to the "service" industries which ensured vast imports of goods from China and the growth of...the minimum wage in a country which had more chasing work than the work available!