Sheffield City Library, 22nd September 2022
It was entirely appropriate that the first date of my ‘tour’ to promote the publication of Fifty Forgotten Books was Sheffield City Library, as this was where Tartarus Press was given its name in 1989. I was an architecture student at Sheffield University at the time and, in researching at the library the very first Tartarus publication, The Anatomy of Taverns (a guide to Arthur Machen’s favourite pubs, published in 1990), I came across the following wonderful description of Sheffield in the First World War by Machen:
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 tha 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 . . .
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 furnace 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 cafes were full. There was 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 fires and its molten metal very early on St Stephen’s Day, I feel sure that Christmas will be observed with high festivity.
Elsewhere, based on his experiences of the red glow of the furnaces and apparent festivity, Machen referred to Sheffield, ironically and affectionately, as Tartarus (a minor region of Hell) – hence the name chosen for Tartarus Press.
The Sheffield City Library launch went well, with more than 40 attendees, and afterwards we retired for further refreshment and lively conversation to The Brown Bear on Norfolk Street. Built at around 1800, The Brown Bear predates most of the buildings in the surrounding streets. As there has been a pub on the site for over 200 years, it would certainly have been serving beer when Machen visited the city.
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