Sheffield tree protester pens 'brilliantly special' book about life as a cleaner
Sheffield tree protester Simon Crump has written an acclaimed new book about his experiences as a cleaner in the aftermath of the campaign. Chris Burn reports.
As the long fight to save Sheffield’s street trees from mass felling by the city council attracted national attention a decade ago, writer and academic Simon Crump became one of the campaign’s best-known figures.
The then-university lecturer would arrive at protests to protect threatened trees in a tweed suit as part of a disparate group of campaigners desperate to prevent the removal of thousands of trees. It became an escalating battle with the authorities as Sheffield City Council doubled down on the policy and attempted to get demonstrators jailed.
In 2018, Crump and another protester received suspended prison sentences after being found in contempt of court for breaching an injunction banning 'direct action' protests against the felling involving standing underneath threatened trees to stop contractors chopping them down, while he was separately among seven campaigners who eventually received compensation from South Yorkshire Police for wrongful arrests earlier in the dispute.
The protests was ultimately successful with around 11,000 trees saved from the chop, a public inquiry vindicating the campaigners and the council issuing a grovelling apology for misleading the public, media and courts over the issue and their claims that cutting trees down was a ‘last resort’.
But victory came at a cost to many, including Crump. With a court conviction to his name and after losing his job as a university lecturer during the pandemic, he moved out of Sheffield and started working as a cleaner – with his new experiences now resulting in the writing of an acclaimed new book called Post-It Notes From Underground.
Published by Hebden Bridge’s Bluemoose Books, it blends fact and fiction to describe the often-dismissive way Crump and his fellow cleaners are treated by staff at an unnamed workplace, with the title referencing the supposedly motivational but generally misguided messages anonymously left for them at the start of each shift.
A recent review in The Times accurately described it as “brilliantly special” and an “eccentric, charming, moving book” as it praised its deft combination of silly jokes and serious reflections as Crump deals with his perceived loss in social status, the ongoing consequences of his very public involvement in the tree campaign, an autism diagnosis and the death of his mother.
When asked about the glowing Times review, Crump deadpans: “Well, I only read it about 500 times.”
He says the review undoubtedly “really did help” with initial sales, with the book already now out in paperback after selling strongly in hardback.
The book is far from his first – as well as co-authoring a collection of eyewitness accounts about the tree campaign with fellow protester Calvin Payne called Persons Unknown in 2022 – Crump’s previous fictional novels included My Elvis Blackout and Neverland.
Crump, who lives in Haworth, says he is particularly proud of his latest effort which has been classified as ‘autofiction’; a blend of autobiography and fictional invention.
"It is a bit weird having yourself as the main character but it makes it a lot easier to tell the tale,” he says. "I think it's the first book I've ever written that sounds like me.
"I just wrote down what the voices in the head told me to wrote down, and then looked at it on the screen and tried to make it less worse. People say you need a voice in a book, and I’ve just been lazy and used my own.”
The book, which initially sprang out of a series of amusing Facebook posts he was making about his new life as a cleaner, includes a litany of unusual incidents from a frozen woodpecker ending up down Crump’s trousers to him struggling with the end of Covid facemask restrictions as it made it more difficult to silently mouth obscenities at rude office workers. So how much is fact and how much fiction?
“A lot more than you’d think is true. But the characters are made up or disguised and I’ve not named the factory. As a writer, you do all sorts of jobs. I fitted a lot of kitchens before I got a university job. I was really not trying to do this as some kind of tourist from the middle class.
"The group of lasses I worked with just accepted me for what I am, which is quite an eccentric old man. I just fitted straight in with them, they were lovely.”
The book all discusses how opinions of him at the factory changed when his involvement in the trees campaign received fresh media coverage.
Crump reflects on the tree campaign: "I still talk to some people involved and we talk about it like the good old days. But I moved away from Sheffield as a result of it. I made a rod for my own back because I was the cocky one in the tweed suit and then I was recognised as that. I was this posh bloke in a suit and I played up to it. Now I’ve been diagnosed as autistic, I know it is called masking. I’ve been masking my whole life.
"I can stand up in front of a group of people and and be all confident. Then afterwards, I have to go sit down. It was just like that with the trees. We'd all be shaking afterwards.”
He adds: “I got the autism diagnosis pretty much after I left Sheffield, and it was a complete surprise to me, and not to anybody else who knew me.”
He says: of the book: “Just don't treat people that you perceive to be doing not very important jobs badly; you're not defined by that, and you shouldn’t be defined by that.”
Simon Crump will be holding a free event about Post-It Notes From Underground at The Book Corner in Halifax on the evening of October 22. Click here to book tickets. For more information about the book, visit Bluemoose Books’s website.