Monthly Archives: June 2026

Non-Pots

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Former Attercliffe Non-Political Club, Attercliffe, Sheffield (2023)

Citu, the company responsible for the Waterside development which plans to transform Attercliffe after decades of decline, is respectful of the historic heritage of the area [FIRST LOOK: Attercliffe Waterside – Citu], yet some landmarks inevitably have to be sacrificed.

The Attercliffe Non-Political Club built a particularly distinctive landmark at the junction of Effingham Road and Attercliffe Road, an eye-catcher on the approach to town from the bottom of Staniforth Road, but it’s gone.

The working-class Attercliffe community supported a range of distinctive working-men’s clubs from its Victorian heyday to the end of the twentieth century and a while after.  A politically committed workman in Attercliffe, Carbrook or Darnall had a choice of joining the Radical, the Liberal or the Conservative WMCs:  the Conservatives, prompted by Disraeli, cast themselves as the friends of the working man in opposition to the business-oriented Liberals. 

I won’t speculate why Attercliffe never had a Labour Club, but it certainly supported a thriving Non-Political Club, the “Non-Pots”, for those whose honest priority was drinking cheap beer and having a good time.

The history of these eminent organisations is patchily recorded.  The Carbrook Conservative WMC has left records dating back to 1880.  The Attercliffe Liberal Club opened in 1882, and I’ve tracked the Radical Club back at least to 1888.  The Attercliffe Non-Political Club doesn’t appear in the street directories until 1913, but it may have operated earlier elsewhere.

The Attercliffe Liberal Club carried on until Covid and closed in 2020.  The non-partisan Darnall Victory Club, founded after the First World War, closed in 2022.

The Non-Pots building was at 450 Attercliffe Road from 1913 to 1920, and from 1921 it moved round the corner to 429 Effingham Road.  The damage that building sustained in the Blitz wasn’t fully reinstated until 1950.

There are no further planning applications involving the Attercliffe Non-Political Club in Sheffield Archives after 1959, so I’m at a loss to know when the distinctive grey brick corner building with its copper roof actually opened.  Graham C, a contributor to the Sheffield History forum, suggests that the concert room moved downstairs after 1966. 

After the Non-Pots club closed, the building became a gay club, “Rockies”, and then the “Dancing Dollar”.  Latterly it was a bathroom showroom until its demise in 2025.

The history forums are very useful for recording the Non-Pots’ place in late twentieth-century show-business history.

The club was an early supporter of Charlie Williams (1927-2006), the ex-Barnsley professional footballer who paved the way for black comedians to be accepted by British audiences.  Charlie continued to show up at the “Non-Pots” even when he was appearing in The Comedians at the London Palladium, and Graham C records that on nights when Charlie returned to Attercliffe members who couldn’t get served at the crowded club bar would bring beer in from the Sportsman Inn up the road.

A younger performer who served his show-business apprenticeship at the “Non-Pots” and other places was Paul O’Grady (1955-2023).  He told Paulette Edwards on BBC Radio Sheffield, “I used to love working there. I used to do two Sundays a month in Rockies.”  The fact that Lily Savage came to Attercliffe needs to be commemorated, otherwise the next generation might not believe it.

Whatever structure arises at the corner of Attercliffe Road and Effingham Road, I hope it carries blue plaques to honour two fine performers who were held in deep affection by the people who lived in Attercliffe before – and indeed after – the terraced houses were swept away.

Brisbane’s cathedrals

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St Stephen’s Old Cathedral, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
St Stephen’s Roman Catholic Cathedral, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
St John’s Cathedral, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

Brisbane, like all the major cities of Australia, generated two major Christian communities – Anglican and Roman Catholic – from its earliest days. 

It began as a convict settlement in 1824.  Settlers arrived in the 1830s, and the site was declared free in 1842.  Queensland was separated from the colony of New South Wales in 1859, with its capital only a few miles north of the border, by which time the Catholic Archdiocese and the Anglican Diocese, both of Brisbane, were established.

The Catholics quickly raised what is now Old St Stephen’s Chapel, a simple stone cell designed from afar by the great pioneer of the English Gothic Revival, Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812-1852), consecrated in 1850.  It was formally designated Brisbane Cathedral in 1863, the year that the foundation stone of its intended successor, also St Stephen’s, was laid. 

The British-born Benjamin Backhouse’s planned grand cathedral proceeded no further than its foundations, and Backhouse’s associate, Richard George Suter, designed a simpler nave which was consecrated in 1874.  Nothing more was built until after the First World War.

Meanwhile, the Anglicans had opened St John’s Pro-Cathedral in 1854, but hastened slowly to start their cathedral.

The British architect John Loughborough Pearson (1817-1897) began work on St John’s Cathedral, for a site bordered by George, Elizabeth and William Streets in 1885.  He had been commissioned to design Truro Cathedral in Cornwall, which was begun in 1880 and took thirty years to build.  Pearson’s plans for Brisbane were approved by 1889, but work had yet to start at the time of his death.

His son, Frank Loughborough Pearson (1864–1947) was appointed to revise his father’s plans, but the intended site was taken over by the state government and Frank Pearson had to further revise the design for the eventual site on Ann Street.  Phase 1, the east end and first bay of the nave, was completed in 1910, after which work stopped for over half a century.

Meanwhile the Catholic Archbishop James Duhig (1871-1965), characterised by his church-building projects as “Duhig the Builder”, proposed a grandiose Baroque Cathedral of the Holy Name, designed by the Sydney practice of Hennessy & Hennessy for a different site to St Stephen’s.  Their 1925 drawings depict a showy version of the London St Paul’s Cathedral, intended to be the largest sacred building in the British Commonwealth.

Construction started, to a toned-down design, in 1927 and eight years later Archbishop Duhig consecrated the main altar of the crypt.  After that nothing else was built.  The architect Jack Hennessy successfully sued the Archidiocese for unpaid fees in 1949-50, and the site was sold in 1985 to property developers who erected Cathedral Place in place of the cathedral.  A heritage-listed retaining wall is all that remains.

The Anglicans hardly had better luck for decades, even after Field-Marshal Viscount Montgomery of Alamein laid the foundation stone for Phase 2 of St John’s in 1947.  That project, for two further nave bays, was eventually built in 1965-69, and the final Phase 3, two more nave bays, a porch, the west front and three towers and two spires was completed in 1989-2009.

Later, at the very end of the twentieth century, the earliest surviving church building in Brisbane, Old St Stephen’s, was rededicated.  It contains a shrine to Australia’s first Catholic saint, St Mary McKillop (1842-1909).

Brisbane has two fine cathedrals, each the result of redesigns and changes of site, and – like the federal capital Canberra – a cathedral-that-never-was.

God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform…

He treasures up His bright designs,
and works His sov’reign will.

[William Cowper, 1731-1800]