‘I’m very sad and I don’t know why’

The footage is grainy, but the building is unmistakable. Three Union flags flutter in the breeze high over Banners department store on Attercliffe Road. The sky is bright but the weather looks cool. It’s Wednesday, 27 October, 1954. A banner emblazoned with the words “Attercliffe welcomes our Queen” stretches from one side of the building to the other. 

In the next shot, a boy in a pram — aged about two or three and wearing a red beret — waves a Union Jack of his own before a series of small traders raise flags above their shops. Everyone has flags, but some have more flags than others. The front of W. T. Flather Ltd’s factory is covered in so many it’s difficult to count them all. 1950s cars the size of boats and chunterning trucks thunder past — followed by a horse and cart.

Sheffield obviously wasn’t going to do things by halves. A full military parade makes its way up Fargate towards Pinstone Street while excited crowds of children and spectators line every street in the city centre. At half past twelve, nervous-looking dignitaries rush out of the Town Hall to meet the royal party. Judges, clergy and military men bow, curtsy and salute.

The half-hour long film, shot by Master Cutler William Ibberson, then follows Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip to Hillsborough stadium, where they parade in an open-top Land Rover in front of the packed stands. She is only 28 and has been Queen for just over two and a half years. Philip is 33. It is the first of many visits they will make to Sheffield. 

It is undeniably moving to look back at the astonishing footage the day after the Queen’s death at the age of 96. To compare the young woman in the film with the frail old lady in the last press photograph taken of her on Tuesday forces us to confront our own mortality — and that of those we love.

Thinking about her life also makes us ponder all the ways our country — and Sheffield — has changed over the course of her reign. In 1954, memories of the war and Sheffield’s part in it were still strong. The city was known for its famous industries across the globe and its place in the world was secure. The steel factories that had withstood the Blitz would go on to power its economy for much of the next half century. Now, its future is far less certain. Over the next 70 years it is likely to change beyond all recognition again. But to what?

At Sheffield Cathedral on Friday afternoon, people stand in sunshine and rain in front of a small collection of flowers propped up against the church wall. Inside, two books of condolence are opened while a steady stream of people light candles or sit in quiet contemplation in the pews. The sense of unquestioned deference may have gone but for many a deep respect remains.

One man — wearing a brand new England football top and proudly sporting a “Forged in Steel” tattoo across his inner forearm — tells me he is too emotional to speak, but does so anyway. “I just wanted to pay my respects,” he says. “My mum couldn’t be here and she would have wanted to bring some flowers down. She always told me to respect the Queen.”

Jane Rhodes, 38, who works at nearby Sheffield Hallam University, has dashed up to the cathedral on her lunch break to look at the floral tributes. “I’m very sad and I don’t know why,” she tells me. “I was watching the news last night and just wanted to go and hug my mum. I feel a real sense of loss. It’s a weird feeling.”

For some the emotion was too much. Two women fight back tears as they speak to me. One says it’s “the end of an era” while another implores me not to ask her why she had come for fear of making her cry. “I just want to write on here thank you for being our Queen because she was perfect,” she tells me, motioning to the card she’s brought to go with her flowers. “She deserves everything.”

Others I speak to are more ambivalent. Some seem more interested in taking pictures. One woman tells me she was interested in the “social history” of the moment but had no particular respect for the Queen or the institution she represented. “They did a lot of bad things as well,” she says. “But the media won’t be interested in that at the moment, will they?”

For most, however, it was a chance to mark a period of great national significance and pay respects to a figure who had been a constant presence in most of our lives for the last 70 years. The esteem in which the Queen was held never seemed to waver, but the same cannot be said for all the members of her family. For how long will the institution she led continue after her death?

One man — dressed in a kilt — had come in for the cathedral’s midday service, which he says normally attracts around a dozen people but today had swelled to more than fifty. Afterwards he had been waiting to sign the book of condolence but gave up as it was taking too long. “Everyone wants to read what everyone else has written,” he tells me.

The condolence books themselves are a combination of moving words and very neat writing. Sunder Singh-Bal thanked her for her service to the country and for being a “constant throughout challenging times”, while Frances Dommett called her “a guiding light in my life”. People from around the world have left tributes too. One, from Gerhard, says he remembers the Queen passing through his hometown — Geisingen in Germany — on her first state visit to the country in 1965. He signs off “in Liebe und Bewunderung” (in love and admiration).

Back outside, another woman remembered meeting her at a Buckingham Palace garden party, as a result of her husband serving in the Household Cavalry. “She was as near as you are to me,” she says, her husband vigorously nodding at her side. They haven't bought flowers though — there were “too many after Diana”, she tells me. “They’d probably get nicked,” adds her husband.

And two men who had come to Sheffield on a day trip from Matlock tell me they remember watching the coronation in 1953 as boys of seven and nine. “We were invited into a rich farmer’s house to watch it on a tiny nine-inch television,” one of them tells me. “There must have been fifty people crowded around this TV.”

“It's a real tragedy,” says the other. When I question to what extent the death of a 96-year-old woman can ever be a tragedy he takes my point — and says she did live much longer than his own mother, who died at 77. What he means, I think, is that it’s a tragedy for the nation. “She’s been ever present throughout our lives,” he continues. “Through the bad times as well.”

As the afternoon went on the floral tributes slowly grew. Writing in The Guardian on Friday, the journalist Jonathan Freedland said that for a lot of people, the Queen’s death would prompt memories of those they had loved and lost over the last 70 years. One Sheffield family wrote a card to the Queen that also referenced their nan, who died last year. “You were both the same age and she would have loved to meet you,” the note read. “We all feel a great loss for you today and send you all our love always.”