British Society of the History of Medicine- Biennial Congress Sheffield 2021

St Marys Hospital London: Corkscrew Charlie & other notables

Firth Brown Forge and Rolling Mills Sheffield in the 1950s

Work Experience in the City of Steel (age 9)

Which of us is to do the hard and dirty work and who the pleasant and clean?

John Ruskin

We descended steeply on foot past the soot-black facades of the City of Steel, crowned by its pall of smoke. We passed through streets scarred by dark and ugly gaps, like missing teeth, some fronted by wooden hoardings concealing the forlorn spaces left by homes destroyed in the great Sheffield Blitz of December 1940.

I loved to travel on the tram, bell ringing, top deck swaying, down the shiny ribbon of track. He preferred to walk and would not pay the few pennies for the fare. His hobnailed footsteps clattering, we hurried along the bank of the sluggish, sulphurous river coated in a layer of orange-brown foam, where no fish could swim. My nine-year-old hand was wrapped tight in the creased and calloused palm of the blacksmith.

We entered the (for me) unknown world of the Hallamshire Steelworks: an inferno where men worked glistening with sweat, clothes encrusted with inky-black coal dust and silhouetted by flames flickering from the roaring furnaces, highlighted in the glare of white molten steel pouring from titanic crucibles. Our eardrums resonated with the thunderous soundtrack of pounding, percussive rhythms from mighty steam-powered hammers, shaping the hardening steel.

Slight of build and quiet of disposition, Joe Dodd did not match my childhood imaginings of a ruddy-faced country blacksmith, hammering horseshoes to the murmur of white-clad cricketers on a sunlit village green. I stood transfixed as he donned his heavy flame-scarred leather apron and gauntlets, setting to work with hammer and clanging anvil in the fierce heat of the glowing forge. My ideas about careers were already turning elsewhere.

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