My Lord Mayor, My Lord Bishop, Ladies & Gentlemen,

I feel that I have every reason today to be a proud man, but I am not a comfortable one; and I am not likely to be until I am through with this attempt to do the impossible: to say, “Thank you” in a satisfying way. If my tongue could speak the feelings of my heart I should be satisfied, but it cannot. This is a moment when I would give something to be at ease and eloquent for five minutes. A few weeks since I asked the Lord Mayor what it would be fitting to say on this occasion; and he, kind man, said, “Tell them some of the things about yourself you have been telling me.” And I will, because they are also things about Sheffield.

I am a Sheffielder; but I am a Sheffielder in more than the conventional sense. I might, of course, have been born anywhere; but I doubt if I could have grown up anywhere else as I did in Sheffield. Let me explain: I was born in a back-yard house off Spital Hill, with a living room ten feet square, occupied by my father and mother and eight children. My playground was the Sheffield streets, and if I describe myself as a Street Arab it is not much of an exaggeration - as there was not room for all of us indoors; and my mother did other people's washing as well as looked after her own family! This is a staggering thought for me; she was a wonderful woman and I have a feeling this casket ought to be hers.

As a child I was sent to Holy Trinity Church School, behind the Wicker. Perhaps you don't think much of “behind the Wicker” as a school district: I didn't. But for a small boy who wants to see how things are done, and who is not literally compelled into school it was a regular Tom Tidler's ground. Later I went to the Board School in Woodside Lane. I have only vague impressions of either place as a school, but I have the liveliest impressions of the journeyings to and fro. At the bottom of Champs Hill, where now stands a grain warehouse, there was a cluster of workshops cutting files and grinding them and forging table or pocket blades. I can see my small boyish face poking its nose through the barred window frames, asking the workman for a forged pocket blade which might be rubbed into sharpness on the doorstep, and spitting on my fingers before I touched it for fear he had given me a hot one.

I knew in those days, with school looming at the end of the journey, that it was better to travel than to arrive; and whereas in Longfellow's 'Village Blacksmith' it is the children coming home from school who look in at the open door, I found it easier to do my to looking-in and loitering by the open door as I was going to school.

Of course I paid the usual penalty for being regularly late but my conscience, if I had a conscience, did not upbraid me. I feel now that if I had been disciplined by a careless hand into a nice obedient schoolboy I should have been damaged; and I have grown to be a firm believer in St. Paul's injunction – “Quench not the Spirit”. So the first thing I have to thank Sheffield for is that I was not bludgeoned into being a scholar: there are otherways.

I left school when I was barely eleven, and earned odd coppers in various ways. The job I liked best was taking workmen's suppers to the large East-end Works, and by this time I lived not far away in Carlisle Street. In those days a boy carrying his father's dinner or supper walked straight into the works without hindrance; without even waiting for a nod of recognition or assent from the gate-keeper. When the supper-carrier came out of the Works was his business; and in this way I spent hundreds of hours in the works before I worked there for wages. But I should add that it was not necessary to have a father, or to have anything whatever in the breakfast can or dinner basket to get past the gate-keeper into the Works: something tied up in a parcel to look like food and carried convincingly, was a sufficient passport.

When I began to work for wages there was nothing strange in the surroundings of the steelworks; I was quite at home and happy. The only thing I did not like were the long hours and the obligation to do as I was told; since that time I have often been occupied in evading one or other of these dislikes. When I was twelve years old the Factory Regulations turned me out of the melting furnaces, and my father had about made up his mind that I was not going to be strong enough to make a steel melter. This was disappointing. But I happened almost at once to get a job as bottle washer in a chemical laboratory, and there I learned what some people find it hard to believe – that delicate glassware and porcelain do come to bits in your hands.

The chemist was James Taylor, a man who had been as poor and forlorn a boy as I was. There are a few names a fond memory and a grateful heart sees inscribed with my own on this casket: one of them is James Taylor. Under his care and encouragement I was born again. He taught me how to get knowledge from books; he taught me how to think for myself; he taught me how to do difficult things with my hands, and in time, from his example and others I came to speak book English, and get a glimpse of the Arts and Graces of Life. I should say that my native speech is the Dialect, and I still speak it when I get a chance; but until I met James Taylor I spoke nothing else.

When in due time I came to occupy an elevated position in the works I had known best as a boy; when my job was to know what was happening where I was not present; and when I needed many pairs of eyes and hands, I found men whose suppers I had taken and men who had known me as a cellar-lad, all willing to be observers and share with me their own particular experience. No man, living or dead, doing the work I have tried to do, is so indebted as I am to workmen who have horny hands and grimy fists. The kindness they did me came from the goodness of their hearts; but it may sometimes have come from the thought that I was one of them, as indeed I was: and I like to think that I am still acceptable to them. Wherever my head may be, the roots of my life and my heart are in the works amongst the men who are doing things.

I have been described in the newspaper as “a self-made man”. If that is intended to say that my forbears were working blacksmiths beating wrought iron on the anvil into useful shapes, and steel-melters with trained eyes and skilled judgement doing laborious work for a bare livelihood, it is true enough. But if it means that by some miracle I have grown up independent of help and encouragement and care from others, then such words have nothing to do with me.

I have told you these things about myself because I want to claim before you to be Sheffield made, “both Haft and Blade” as the saying is. I have told them also because I should like you to realise that I am one amongst many, and as the recipient of this bewildering honour I represent others. And that is why I desire to feel sufficiently grateful to the few men and women who have taken care of me, and to the hundreds of men in the works who have been my confederates.

And now I should like to thank you my Lord Mayor, and the Aldermen and Councillors and the people of Sheffield whom you represent, for the Honour you have conferred on me. These are feeble words, but if I had the tongue of men and of angels, and I could speak jewelled words fit for a King's Ransom, they would mean, when all was said, what I mean when I say, “Thank you”.

SHEFFIELD June 6th 1939