Sheffielder Geoffrey Duke looks back on a happy VE Day street party - with jelly

Geoffrey Duke was a 13-year-old living in the Park area of Sheffield when VE Day arrived – and what a party they had.
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The 87-year-old still has vivid memories of that time when his family lived on Talbot Place, off Duke Street, where Park Hill flats stand today.

He says: “It was a cul-de-sac, bordered by the Shrewsbury Hospital almshouses.

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“The vicar there let us have all the tables and trestles to make the party and everything was all laid up and at that time everything was still rationed and it went on for many years.

“All the mums and relatives got busy and we got all the tables decked up with flags and bunting and was hung from the windows. They put on a lovely meal with lots of sandwiches.

“My mum, Dorothy, was a very good baker in those days and we didn’t have gas and electric ovens, it had to be cooked in the main fire oven.

“One of my vivid memories was having jelly after a long, long time, as gelatine wasn’t available during the War, but somehow some jelly had been produced. Someone must have put it away for a special occasion.

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“Talbot Place used to be the hub for all the children in the area, who used to go there for cricket or football or chasing, so all the children for streets around came and everybody contributed to it.

“I can see now all the mums dressed in their pinafore dresses, having done the baking and then brought things out. We had a wonderful time.

“Afterwards someone got a piano out on the road. We were singing all the usual songs such as We'll Meet Again and Run, Rabbit, Run and all the others of the time.”

Geoffrey remembers that the vicar brought out some of the pensioners living in the almshouses to join in as well and everybody had a good time.

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He says it may have been at that party, or on VJ Day when, late in the evening, some of the dads grabbed sheets and chased the children around, pretending to be ghosts.

He said: “Some of my friends with me at that time are no longer with us but I can still see their faces.”

Geoffrey, who went to Park School, did not go through the Blitz in Sheffield as he was evacuated for two-and-a-half years to Edingley in Nottinghamshire.

Howeverm he says it was a very unhappy time and in Easter 1942 his parents brought him home, as he was being mistreated.

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The vicar at the almshouses was Canon Ted Wickham, who was also the city’s chaplain for industry.

Geoffrey says he gave help and support to many of the Women of Steel when they were working for the war effort.

“He really was a very special vicar,” says Geoffrey. He later became Bishop of Middleton in Greater Manchester.

Geoffrey has a lovely later memory of Canon Wickham. He went on to do an apprenticeship at the British Steel site which is now Forgemasters, and Canon Wickham was a guest at the grand ceremony that Geoffrey and his workmates went to at the completion of their apprenticeships.

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“He saw me, got up from his seat, came forward and shook me by the hand,” he says. “It was a momentous occasion to remember him by.”

He later moved on to work for contractors and helped to convert many of the coal-fired furnaces to run on oil as part of the 1956 Clean Air Act that helped to clean up much of Sheffield’s industrial pollution.

Geoffrey married his wife, who was also called Dorothy, in 1957, and they had 61 happy years together, before he sadly lost her 18 months ago.

He still lives independently in Wharncliffe Side, Sheffield, and has support during lockdown from friends, neighbours and staff at Marks & Spencer in Meadowhall who have become his friends.

Geoffrey says: “It’s like the war effort, where people helped each other. I’m sitting at the other end of it now.”

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