Sheffield's women of steel star in new children's book by Theresa Tomlinson

The latest of her Time Slip Adventures series, Forged in Steel tells the story of three young children who discover they can travel back in time to meet for themselves the women who held up Sheffield’s steel industry amidst the chaos and bombings of a country at war.

Like the first book, this one was inspired by an iconic Sheffield statue, said the novelist, who writes both children’s and adult fiction.

“What happened was I wrote the first book, Meet Me by the Steelmen, a long time ago when Meadowhall was new and the statues of the steelmen were right there in the middle of the shops.

“That was published by Walker, who are a big national company. I think the book went very well with local schools in the Sheffield and Rotherham area but I think it just didn’t sell enough copies nationally and internationally, because the theme was so local.

“It got put out of print and I felt very sad about that but I had a lot of support from the schools library service. People, particularly teachers, kept asking for copies.

“They worked together with a smaller company called Award Publications, who decided to bring it back into print again.

“That’s available but there was a bit of a problem because I wrote that when the statues were in the middle of Meadowhall and they’ve been moved outside. Children might go and look for the statues and find they weren’t in the right place any more.”

Theresa decided to write a sequel about the statues and their current setting. She also wanted to write about the war but felt something wasn’t quite right.

Eventually, her sons pointed out the obvious solution – write about the Women of Steel statue outside Sheffield City Hall!

“I thought, I’ve thought of all sorts of other things and there it is, staring me right in the face!” laughed Theresa.

She said The Star was a great source of research into the women of steel.

One of her aims was to introduce children to the history of the steel industry.

The children in the story come to stay with their grandma in the school holidays and they visit places such as Sharrow, Millhouses Park, Ecclesall Woods and Abbeydale Industrial Hamlet.

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They also learn about the city’s Yemeni community, which was formed when the steel industry invited people to move here for work after the war, when the loss of life meant we needed workers.

Theresa explained that her interest in steel goes back to her own childhood in Carlin How in Cleveland.

“We lived next door to a steelworks. It was a strange place to live. There was an ironstone mine at the bottom of the valley and buckets of iron ore came up on overhead cables to the steelworks. We used to see the buckets going past our window.

“It was a very industrial village. For a child that was all quite exciting. In the evenings the sky used to turn red in the distance. That was becaus e they used to tip the slag on the other s ide of the works and it lit up the sky all around it. That always seemed to be a bit of a magical thing.”

Theresa, who now lives in Whitby, was in Sheffield for many years. A WEA history class she went to at Abbeydale Grange played a key role.

There she met a former steelworker, the late Bernard Callum. “He worked at Hadfield’s and told me a lot about the Hadfield works. He told me years ago about the Yemeni steelmen that came to Sheffield.

“My ideas for the stories do back to that local history group that I went to 20 years ago.”​​​​

Forged in Steel (Award Publications) is £5.99 in paperback.