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A Sheffield Turner’s Tale: One Person’s Life in the Sheffield Steel Industry
Sue Allott

A Sheffield Turner's Tale
Life with an Unsung Hero of Steel

 When the Sheffield steel industry dramatically collapsed in the 1980s the stories of its highly-skilled workforce were lost. People left the city in their thousands or disappeared into the army of unemployed. The part they had played in the building of the city became, overnight, unconsidered and unvalued. It has taken a generation for the city to begin to reclaim the stories of the men and women of steel.
This is the tale of one of them, Frank Allott, a lad from the east end of Sheffield who began his working life as an apprentice turner on the eve of war and rose to become Manager of the vast and complex Heavy Machine Shops at Firth Brown. In his forty-four years in the firm he acquired a unique range of experience and knowledge, appreciated by those he worked with not only in Sheffield, but in Canada, Turkey and Brazil.
Published: Feb 2020
Paperback: 222 pages
Price: £9.99
ISBN: 9-781913-425081
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A self-taught engineer and linguist, amateur singer and artist, and Football League linesman, he was widely known and loved not merely for his outstanding skills but also for his extraordinary humanity and humour. It is a portrait not only of a remarkable man, but also of the times in which he lived, the historic company he served and the city that made them both.
Reader Reviews...

Mary Buckley, Professor, Cambridge university
Beautifully written and hard to put down, this is an engrossing and touching personal story of a father’s encouraging relationship with his daughter and of his working life in different phases of Sheffield’s steel industry. Sue Allott traces the impact on one family’s life of how and why the steel industry grew and declined as they moved from the closely-knit community of back-to-back housing, to new council house and finally to a purchased semi-detached. It is an important economic and social history of industry and life whose details and emotions should not be lost.

It is also a compelling tribute to a father from a proud daughter. It is a must-read for all only children who were daughters who had loving fathers in the 1950s and 1960s who spurred them on. It includes delightful details of the early student exchanges to Russia, essential reading for anyone who was sent on one and for those who were not.

Derek Reed, economist
A Sheffield Turner’s Tale is a moving and hilarious mixture of social history and the biography of a remarkable man. The backdrop of industrial Sheffield from the 1950s to the 1990s will strike a chord with anybody who has memories either of the working class life and upward social mobility of the fifties, sixties and seventies, or of the economic wrecking ball of the Thatcher years.

As for the book’s principal hero, Frank Allott, his humour, integrity, intellectual curiosity and occasional cussedness, as he rose from the shop floor to weighty management responsibilities in the Sheffield steel industry, no doubt bore the stamp of South Yorkshire, but there’s enough in his character and in his story to make him immediately recognisable to anyone who grew up working class in any other corner of industrial Britain. It is the story of a man who was at once unique and yet emblematic of a time and place that, just a few decades later, seem like another world.



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From doomed East Prussia to Tunbridge Wells
Jane Bakowski

From doomed East Prussia to Tunbridge Wells
A young boy's escape across war-torn Europe

 Dieter Teubler was just nine years old when he and his family left their farm in Memelland for the last time. Along with thousands of other terrified refugees from East Prussia, their only aim was to head west as Stalin’s vengeful Red Army forces surged in from the east. The perilous journey, which included a thirty-hour trek across cracking ice on a frozen lagoon, took five months and left the young boy with horrific images of death and suffering which would haunt him for the rest of his life.
With their mother Erna, Dieter and his younger brother and three sisters eventually found refuge in the quiet seaside town of Laboe on the German Baltic Coast. But their day-to-day struggle to survive in a country still reeling from the impact of war continued long after the war ended in 1945. Food was scarce, many local people resented the huge influx of refugees and the family was almost penniless.
Published: July 2020
Paperback: 116 pages
Price: £7.99
ISBN: 9-781913-425166

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However the persistent dream of a fresh start in America would change the young man’s life in a way he could never have envisaged. He had intended to spend time in England simply to learn the language, but the appearance of a young national tennis player from Tunbridge Wells would turn his world upsidedown. In 1960, he and Susan Waters were married, and the country boy from East Prussia began a new life in the heart of middle England.
Now a father of four and with twelve grandchildren, Dieter Teubler’s dramatic story of loss and renewal continues to resound amid the human challenges of a new century.
Reader Reviews...

livesinprint

If I Remember Rightly
Roger Ordish

Roger Ordish was a producer in what was then called ‘Light Entertainment’ firstly with B.B.C. Radio and then for thirty years with B.B.C. Television.
For twenty years he was the only producer of the hugely successful ‘Jim’ll Fix It’ programmes. Then in 2012 the shock revelations of Savile’s misdeeds changed everything.
The Dame Janet Smith inquiry on Savile cleared Roger of having ‘turned a blind eye’ to Savile’s paedophilia but in his own words “Despite having frequently topped the combined B.B.C/I.T.V. audience charts, the very existence of the programme has been airbrushed from the B.B.C.s Kremlin balcony”.
From memories of wartime in Kent, Roger goes on to describe working with such names as Bruce Forsyth, Kenneth Williams, Michael Parkinson, Paul Daniels, Helen Fielding, Terry Wogan, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, with delightful anecdotes about Edith Evans, Sammy Davis Junior, Gina Lollobrigida, John McEnroe and Princess Margaret and others. In 1968 he was one of a trio of B.B.C. producers, who posed as the Albanian entrants for the Eurovision Song Contest in a hoax that dumbfounded their boss.
Published: April 2020
Paperback: 190 pages
Price: £9.99
ISBN: 978-1-913425-11-1

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Roger Ordish was a television producer for thirty years, producing ‘Parkinson’, ‘Wogan’, ‘A Bit of Fry and Laurie’ ‘Paul Daniels Magic Show’ and many other successful shows.
Reviews...

 Tim Waterstone, founder of Waterstone's Bookshops.
If I Remember Rightly arrived yesterday, and I started reading it this morning, at 6.30 am, over my first-of-the-day mug of tea. Thereafter I couldn't put it down, effectively reading it all through at one sitting.Roger - I really loved it. And, perhaps more importantly, really admired it, and indeed, from it, you. We were such close friends as teenagers, and it is a real pleasure for me to now realise, more fully perhaps than I had before, what a wonderfully rich and rewarding career, and life, that you have led. Your description of it absolutely holds the reader. And you write so well - the 'voice' is delightful - sometimes very funny indeed - (my absolute favourite of all your wonderful anecdotes being the little Ken Dodd piece) - sometimes unexpectedly vulnerable and exposed. Ace stuff, all of it.So well done, my friend.
livesinprint

Blackbird Flying
Cate Collinson

On being a stroke survivor
Shortly before the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, Emma goes to work as normal. Walking to the toilet, she closes the door. After a moment, she realizes that her right side is numb.
She wakes three days later to find herself in a bed at University College Hospital.
After two months at U.C.H., Emma is moved to Charing Cross Hospital. She has been told by the Almoner that there is a good chance she will get herself well again but that’s not how she feels about it. ‘I’m twiddling my thumbs in here,’ she says. She wants to go home. Meanwhile, Mark is fearful of his feelings. He knows things will never be the same but he agrees to take her home. When they get there, he tells her what he’s been doing to the house and shows her the shower down on the ground floor and the steps with a banister to the garden. Then he says suddenly, ‘I’m off.’
He doesn’t arrive home until midnight and the following morning he is gone.
Published: Oct 2019
Paperback: 146 pages
Price: £7.50
ISBN: 9-781912-419920
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This is the story of Emma’s fight for recovery. She visits another hospital, King’s, where she has physiotherapy twice a week and speech classes for half-an-hour each week. Then she finds speech classes in Farringdon, twice a week. She goes to pottery and to singing at Southwark College. Later, she rides in the Stroke Association Bike Ride 1996 to mark almost ten years since she had her stroke. It’s a story of courage and hard work told with verve and feeling by new author Cate Collinson.
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