Welcome to The Cunningham Society
Like many children of my age, I left school at fourteen and started to work in the cutlery trade, which was slowly and painfully recovering from the worst slum the world had ever known. Sheffield at that time had changed little for generations past. Huge steel firms lined the banks of the River Don, clusters of factories and hundreds of tiny workshops manufactured myriads of knives, spoons and forks, silverware and tools within a stone's throw of the city centre. Tramcars clanged and swayed along smoke-filled valleys and soared up the seven hills, linking together hamlets and villages, which hitherto had been so remote that they had developed their own particular patois. My education was limited by illness and early school-leaving age, and instead of the airy classrooms of an art college, my style has been nurtured in hot noisy cutlery works and the cobbled streets, corner shops and pubs of mighty industrial city. Some of the Sheffield I knew as a boy was destroyed by enemy action, and much more suffered a similar fate in the 'constructive demolition' programmes of the post-war years.
George Cunningham
