A wonderful example of a recruitment leaflet produced by Hattersley Sons & Co. Ltd. of Haworth has just been uploaded to our Flickr archive. Click on the image to see more. The item was donated by History Society member Mollie Binns.

Keighley Library officially re-opened on the 17th August 2007, following a £1.1 million refurbishment carried out between February and August that year. Keighley Library is a Grade 2 listed building and was the first public library in England to be funded by Andrew Carnegie. It includes beautiful murals on the walls painted by Alex F. Smith. The Local Studies Library on the first floor is an amazing resource to be cherished by the town.

Happy birthday to the Bronte Parsonage and Museum which first opened its doors on the 4th of August 1928. The house was built in the 1770s as a place of residence for the minister at the adjacent St Michael and All Angels church. It was occupied by the Bronte family from 1820 to 1861. The building was gifted to the Bronte Society by Sir James Roberts in 1928 and the Society moved its museum from the upstairs of what is now the tourist information centre at the top of Main Street in Haworth. This is how the event was recorded exactly one week later in the Keighley News. The cutting is from a scrapbook of clippings collected by journalist, photographer and editor George Crowther, many of which are available on the History Society’s Flickr account.

One of the albums in our Flickr digital archive is a copy of the musical score for the “Cliffe Castle Gavotte” (a dance piece), composed for piano by German composer Franz Behr. It was commissioned by and dedicated to Henry Isaac Butterfield (the owner of Cliffe Castle at the time). It is presumed to have been written between 1885 and 1886. Keighley local history enthusiast Loraine Petyt asked local musician David Boddy to record the piece and she has made the recording available on her Vale’n’Dale website – have a listen here!