The 'Steelworker' mural

[Sheffield History]

STEELWORKER

LOCATION

Angel Street, City Centre

INFO

The four-storey mural,commissioned by the City Council in 1986 to cover a gable end, is one of the first public art works in the city.

It is based on an image by artist Paul Waplington and uses 30,000 bricks of 18 different types. The mural pays homage to the achievements of Sheffield's great steel industries.

[Sheffield History]

Does anyone have any more info on this?

[lysander]

We have a statue for Sheffield's women involved in war work yet, apart from this, the only other memorial to the hundreds of thousands of Sheffield's male steel workers.in peace and war, is the Crucible Team somewhere in Meadowhall. Perhaps, someday, this omission might be rectified!

[Shef]

lysander, you don't think that Kelham Island, or the Sykes Gallery are sufficient memorial to the men who did the work? Or the current Sheffield metal industry?

The women's statue makes sense to tell people that these people existed. (And maybe bears a message to us all about how easy it is to sweep inconvenient truths under the carpet.) Nobody doubts that the men existed. 

Would a suitable memorial be to work with the Museums Service to tell the stories of some of the individual men involved?  To me, an important part of any memorial should be to emphasise the diversity of men involved, and that is not answered by most styles of monument.

 

[lysander]

Sorry ,Shef, I disagree with you. No one regards the work that our women did through two world wars more than I. In fact I have written about them in a published history. I am not sure what the "inconvenient truths" are especially to a generation whose Mums were the very same working women who also coped with food and clothing rationing, kept a home, kept their kids fed, worried about their husbands many of whom were fighting abroad and in my case very thankful to "Granny"

That's not to say that some public ,visible memorial to the thousands of men who also contributed to the Home Guard, Fire Watching isn't required.

[Shef]

lysander, sorry I had missed you answer.

If you have written about the topic of UK women and war then you probably know more than me about the efforts after WWII to  promote "a woman's place is in the home". Which presumably contributed to how the story of the Women of Steel got so forgotten. And then there were the "chaps" of Waterloo Bridge... 

It is easy to imagine finding support for, memorials for specific groups like the Home Guard, or the (not exclusively men) firewatchers. (Though I wonder if the time is already past when most people have any idea of the efforts involved.) I can see it is much harder to get people behind a single vision for a memorial to Sheffield's men more generally.

[lysander]

We could have an interesting debate... suffice to say that by the end of 1945 into 1947 the major priority was to ensure that the millions of returning, demobilised serviceman  (and women) had jobs into which they could return. This was complicated by the rapid changeover from a wartime economy to one where reconstruction had to take second place to earning foreign currency by our exports. Many wartime working women were just as keen to see a return of "domesticity" and to the old status quo of the "male being the bread winner". This lasted for a few years but the opportunity of some financial independence and of "pin money" jobs saw increasing numbers returning to work especially in light industry, retail and commerce.

Some working wartime "dilutees" never left the factories...My aunt, an overhead crane driver in one of the the drop forges at ESC, continued until she retired in the early 1970's ,aged 60...and she would have given a hearty belly laugh at the thought of a statue!