A survivor of the Sheffield Blitz during World II has told how an incredible stroke of luck saved her life
Ruby Gascoigne owed her life to a tiny mouse who scared her into shutting up the sweet shop early. A few hours later the store was blasted to bits during the blitz of Sheffield in World War II. The city centre store would normally remain open until 8pm as it was near a cinema and families would grab some snacks.
Ruby once explained: “The nights were gloomy and eerie in the Black Out. The window could only show a very small light to denote being open.
“Around 6.15pm I was scared as a mouse was running around the shelves. I wasn’t staying to do with the mouse, so I took a chance and locked up to go home” Ruby had only just got home when the sirens went and Sheffield was bombarded for nearly nine hours.
“The next morning I went to find out about the shop. Apparently it had been wiped out with a land mine in the first hour of the raid. The air raid shelter I should have gone in with the shopkeepers was demolished.”
Amazingly the tin of cash she’d put under the counter was intact. As a result of being out of work, Ruby ended up working in Sheffield steelworks and on her first day was left in tears at the baggy boiler suit she had to wear. To stop the tears stayed up all night making alterations.
Her daughter in law Lisa Gascoigne, 55, said: “She never wore trousers again all her life. “
Her son Kevin Gascoigne, 68, “Mum would share her stories all the time with us and the mouse story was her favourite. But her fear of mice continued all her life.
“Only a few years ago before she died she shot up to my brother’s house and refused to go home because there was a mouse. We teased her and told her it was that one who saved her life coming back to visit.”
He told how his mum joined the fight for a statue to the women of steel. “She was determined she would not die until the statue was built. When it was unveiled she was really proud, all of them were proud. It was a fantastic day. It gave her a new lease for life.”
Ruby would often talk about her time in the steelworks and how she was teased by her male colleagues because she was so innocent and young.
“In the blackouts they would fill those old fashioned condoms full of water and leave them hanging from the roof, so when they ran through the factory to get to the shelter they’d be banging into these condoms.”
Or they’d use poles to move the blackout curtains pretending to be ghosts. But in the end she quite liked working there,” he said. Ruby ended up working in the lab making steel for the Mulberry harbours, portable harbours used off the coast of Normandy for D-Day in World War II.
She ended up married to her sweetheart Frank Gascoigne, after both his parents, air wardens, were killed in the blitz. He died aged 64 in 1984.
Ruby, who died aged 94 in 2018, almost didn’t marry Frank after he got too jealous of all the men who knew her.
“Because Ruby had worked in Steelworks with lots of men, they were forever saying hello to her in the cinema queues, ‘you all right Rube?’ Kevin explained. “He was upset about it and she told him ‘either you get your head round it now or we are over’. It cleared the air and they went on to five children together and were very happy. “