The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #26320 Message #3564289
Posted By: Jack Campin
04-Oct-13 - 01:35 PM
Thread Name: British Grenadiers-why is tune called Sheffield?
Subject: RE: British Grenadiers-why is tune called Sheffield?
This is from a biography of James Montgomery:
http://www.cyberhymnal.org/bio/m/o/n/montgomery_j.htm
When Montgomery was five years old, his family moved to the Moravian settlement at Gracehill, near Ballymena, County Antrim. Two years later, he was sent to the Fulneck Seminary in Yorkshire. He left Fulneck in 1787 to work in a shop in Mirfield, near Wakefield. Soon tiring of that, he secured a similar position at Wath, near Rotherham, only to find it as unsuitable as his previous job. A trip to London, hoping to find a publisher for his youthful poems, ended in failure. In 1792, he gladly left Wath for Sheffield to be assistant to Mr. Gales, auctioneer, bookseller, and printer of the Sheffield Register. In 1794, Gales left England to avoid political prosecution. Montgomery took the Sheffield Register in hand, changed its name to the Sheffield Iris, and continued to edit it for 32 years. During the next two years he was imprisoned twice, first for reprinting a song in commemoration of the fall of the Bastille, then for giving an account of a riot in Sheffield.
That gives a fairly strong hint about who might be responsible for the name.