The Weekly Machen
The first in a series of articles on the “home-front,” the following piece is an interesting accompaniment to “Sunday Night in London.” This article is included the expanded, second edition of Dreamt in Fire.
Saturday Nights in War Time:
Sheffield, “A Bright and Glittering Place”
by
Arthur Machen
November 15, 1915
Mr. Arthur Machen is spending his Saturday nights visiting the provinces and seeing how the great cities outside Loudon are living during the war. Saturday night, of course, is the night of the week in the Provincial centres.
The train rushes northward, ever northward through the heart of England. There is suddenly a bright patch on a tree, as if it had been whitewashed. Then the far hills appear all snowy under the dark lines of trees; the little, tinkling brooklets of summer-time have become swollen, rushing torrents. The lowlands are all under water; trees, hedges, bushes, fences rising out of the floods, strangely proportioned, the fences with too few tiers of rails, the trees with steins too short for their bulk. Then Sheffield, in the sunset lights and mists.
In the red flames of the setting sun, in the fury of its own furnaces, in the mists of the winter evening, in the fume of its multitudinous chimneys, Sheffield appears something strange and wonderful. The smoke rises up from the valley, and the evening comes down from the sky, and so all the buildings on the hills of the city, houses and towers and swarming streets, show like the battlements of a goblin castle, almost as if they were queer cloud-shapes that might presently be resolved and vanish away.
There are two men talking together, who have something singular in their aspect. And though Sheffield is a city that has become altogether modernised, there are yet left a few old nooks and corners in it; and so these two men are sitting in the snug bar of the Black Swan, a bar that might serve as a model for the bar-parlours of the great Pickwickian age. For in the Black Swan you sit warmly and at ease within the bar, not coldly without it as in our modern taverns, and the firelight dances on the many-coloured bottles, and glitters on the bright brass rails that run behind the seats. Also, the bar is shaped like a boat, and has a confusion of great beams in its ceiling, and a tendency to harbour odd-shaped cupboards in corners; I don’t know what more mortality can ask.
But as to the two men who are sitting side by side in this snug place; there is, I say, something singular In their aspect. They are middle-aged fellows, one with a medal on his waistcoat—“ah wanted t’go agen at start of it all, but that wouldn’t have me”—and they are having something hot. They say at decent intervals; “eh, missus, t’lemon is good” and have some more . . . lemon. But I can’t make out the queer bloom on their cheeks. “Carmine No. 3” it looks like; only it appears as if it had been annealed, or burnt into the flesh. And this, indeed, is the case.
They are hesitating and looking at the clock before praising the lemon, once more. They have promised to be home by half-past five, and then four hours sleep, and so back to work again by ten. They are munition workers. And “they reckon sixty-six hours a week hard work in peace time; now it is ninety hours a week.” “And sometimes a hundred or a hundred and ten,” adds the other. They are smelters engaged in the Siemens process. And that bloom on their cheeks? That comes from standing at a couple of yards distance from a furnace, which develops sixteen hundred degrees of heat It is trying work, they say; every now and again a smelter faints and has to be carried away to have cold water thrown on him. The younger man expresses his opinion that the only treatment for the smelter’s ills is beer. In this, of course, the man was mistaken, since very high scientific authority assures us that any form of alcohol is ruinous both to health and efficiency. True, the Germans, who are rather swillers than drinkers of beer, seem to have been tolerably efficient hitherto; but science cannot err.
The two men discuss the right age for the Army, and they decide it by the rule of football. A man cannot play football after thirty-five; much less, they argue, can he fight after that age. Then they reckon up their prospects for Christmas: “Christmas, Saturday; well, then off Friday night, on again first thing Sunday morning.” And so they go out to rest awhile before returning to their frightful furnaces.
I was told that I should find Sheffield very dull and comfortless. Not at all; it is infinitely more cheerful than London. There is a certain darkening of lamps, a certain caution about the illumination of the shop fronts; but to a Londoner Sheffield at night seems a bright and glittering place. The street lamps are “capped” so that no rays go upward; but a pure light falls on the roadway; not the brown fog and green fog which make London a place of nightmare and despair. They told me that there had been a darker regimen, but that it had been abandoned a few weeks ago; either because it was judged to be more dangerous than Zeppelins, or (as some thought) because it was considered useless to draw green blinds and put out street-lights in the town, while the great furnaces flamed out into the night. So the big hill streets of Sheffield struck me as gay. And they were full of people, and the shops were full, and the market was full, the cafés were full. There were a happy and a prosperous air on everything, and on everybody; a sense of plenty in the place that was very comfortable.
Indeed, they told me that the town was doing very well indeed. The smelters with the scarlet faces were earning five and six pounds a week each; in some households, where all were working at munition making the weekly receipts might amount to twenty pounds or more. Though Sheffield may have to go back to its raging fire and its molten metal very early on St. Stephen’s Day, I feel sure that Christmas will be observed with high festivity.
But it is a strange place. The strict use of “thou: and “thee” went out even of written English before Malory edited the “Morte de Arthur”—the Bible English is archaistic not the spoken or written English of its date—and still Sheffield says “Th’ast.” not “you have.” And it evidently has its own notions on other points of the English language. Yesterday morning, standing on the side of one of its hills, I asked the way to the Midland station. “Right forrad,” said the Sheffield man. “You mean straight down the hill?” said I. But he didn’t. He meant “take the first turning to the right.” And I really fail to see how “fight forrad” can mean “first to the right.”
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darklybrightpress.com 
Thank you – vivid and fascinating!
Thirty-five at the beginning of the War would mean born in 1879 – which also happens to be the publication date of the The Illustrated Guide to Sheffield and the Surrounding District by John Taylor, the only one I found in the Internet Archive. “Among other leading Commercial and General Hotels”, of which nine are named, we find “the Black Swan, Snig-hill” (p. 117) – with no further details. Elsewhere, we read “The number of trades carried on in Sheffield has increased very greatly during the present century. They now include the manufacture of iron, steel, Bessemer and Siemens-Martin steel ; armour plates, heavy ordnance, rifle barrels, shot and shell” (p. 201).
If the man with the medal was over thirty-five, when would he have fought? Omdurman, or the Second or Third Ashanti Expedition, the Boxer Rebellion, or is the Second Boer War most likely? (One might compare Winston Churchill’s early life: he was born in 1874.) I’ve read Great War memoirs about people who had fought in the Second Boer War.
Hmm… say, six pounds for 90 hours work – that’s less than a shilling four pence per hour – including working Sundays, including St. Stephen’s.
The Black Swan lasted in some sense until 2010 – after decades of a wild rather than snug history: see the Wikipedia article, “Boardwalk (nightclub)” – though my search results included a 25 October 2016 Sheffield Telegraph article noting “a brief spell as gay club Fuel and Twist” after 2010… I suppose – and hope – there may still be pub bars somewhere “that might serve as a model for the bar-parlours of the great Pickwickian age” – but how and where to find them?
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