I had the privilege of interviewing Doug Lightning, the last surviving fireman on duty the night the hotel was bombed in the Blitz, for my book, 'Forgotten Memories From A Forgotten Blitz'.
He asserts that no one survived. “There has always been a lot of speculation about what happened at Marples, and much of it has been wide of the mark – I know because I was there,” he recalls.
“I was the only regular fireman on Snig Hill, with Marples just around the corner. I went up there around nine or ten o’clock, and Marples was still there. They’d already dropped a lot of one-kilo incendiaries, and the place was already on fire. The next time I went, it had been hit, and it was down. Nobody got out of that at all.”
He continues, “My brother-in-law's wife used to go into Marples most nights of the week with her mother. They went in there on the night of the Blitz as usual. They knew it was burning above and had both had a lot to drink, so a lot of them went down into the cellar underneath.
“The bombs were dropping around eleven o’clock when her mother suddenly said, ‘I’m off’. The daughter wouldn’t come, but her mother walked home in the Blitz. Of course, the daughter didn’t turn up, and the next day, the mother went into town to see what was left of the Marples.
“She rang my brother-in-law, who was in the RAF; he got home leave and came back to Sheffield to see me. I accompanied him to the temporary mortuary up West Street, where many of the bodies were. This would have been a week after the Blitz.
“They showed us the bodies from Marples, and you’d never have known they were people. They were just little lumps, burnt away. The bloke in charge said, ‘There was nobody that came out’.
“Pictures appeared of people walking out, but that was actually a picture of an air raid shelter, and somebody had assumed they were coming out of Marples.”
Nearly 85 years on, and maybe we'll never know the full story. Doug Lightning was one of the interviews that appear in my 'Forgotten Memories From A Forgotten Blitz' book: https://dirtystopouts.com/products/forgotten-memories-from-a-forgotten-blitz
1. Devastation
The Marples Hotel devastation set against the scene from today Photo: Neil Anderson
2. Doug Lightning
Doug Lightning, who was a firefighter during the Sheffield Blitz Photo: Neil Anderson
3. High Street
The scene on High Street, Sheffield, after the bombs fell Photo: Neil Anderson
