Month: April 2022

The History Society has a stall at next weekend’s Bronte Vintage Gathering just outside Cullingworth. Please come down and see us on either Saturday 7th May or Sunday 8th May. We will have a sneak preview of some of the “Ten Tales of Transport” we are telling as part of the Keighley Transport Festival in June, as well as details about what the History Society gets up to and how to join.

You can find out more about the Bronte Vintage Gathering, which is run to raise funds for Sue Ryder Manorlands, on their website: http://bronte-vintage-gathering.co.uk/

‘In Motion’, the Keighley Transport Festival, is happening across the town on Thursday 2nd and Friday 3rd June 2022. It is free entry to all the participating sites and events run from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

The History Society is mounting an exhibition featuring “Ten Tales of Transport”. One of the stories we are telling is “Postcards from an Electric Avenue” which tells the tale of the electric trams that ran between Utley, Stockbridge and Ingrow between 1904 and 1924, illustrated by dozens of picture postcards from that time. You can see the exhibition upstairs at the Civic Centre, but this particular Tale will also be available to view at St. John’s Church in Ingrow on both days.

This newspaper cutting is taken from the Keighley News of Saturday 29th April 1922. It talks of the arrangements for the opening ceremony of Keighley Hall, built in the French town of Poix-du-Nord, in gratitude for the support given by the people of Keighley following the First World War.

“At Poix-du-Nord – the little French town in the war-devastated region, for which Keighley has undertaken to stand as a sort of godmother – great preparations ae going forward for the opening of the Keighley Hall, the public building which is being paid for out of the adoption fund specially subscribed by Keighley people. The opening takes place on Sunday, June 5, and a number of representative Keighley citizens, including the mayor and some of the members of the Town Council, have accepted invitations to be present and participate in the proceedings.”

The building was designed by Keighley architects W. H. & A. Sugden. In the end, the inauguration was attended by Councillor James Longton (Mayor of Keighley 1921-22), Alderman Albert Smith, Councillor W. A. Brigg, Councillor G. A. Calverley and Samuel Clough, amongst others.

Keighley established links with Poix-du-Nord after the First World War. In 1920, under the scheme of the British League of Help for Devastated Areas in France, Keighley ‘adopted’ Poix-du-Nord and raised over £4,000 by public subscription for a civic hall, which opened in 1922 and was named Keighley Hall. There is also a street in the town named after Alderman Ferdinand N. Binns (Rue Ferdinand Binns), a former Mayor of Keighley (1918-20), who was awarded the Order and Cross of the Legion of Honour for his efforts to promote good relations between the two towns.

Regular visits between the two towns were exchanged by the branches of the International Brotherhood Alliance (founded in 1905) up until 1938. The town was visited again by the Mayor and Mayoress of Keighley (Mr and Mrs J. E. Brownbridge) between Friday 30th May and Sunday 1st June 1969.

The clipping is from a scrapbook of cuttings covering the mayoral year 1921-22 which is held in the History Society’s archive. The illustration of Keighley Hall is from the cover of the programme for the opening which was loaned to the History Society by David Seeley in July 2019.

This postcard of Haworth was posted to Aylesbury on 26th April 1905. The photograph was taken in the early 1890s. We estimate this because there is no sign of the school buildings built on Butt Lane in 1896. Ivy Bank Mill with its chimney is in the foreground, just over the bridge. Haworth Parish Church is on the crest of the hill in the distance. The postcard was published by A. E. Hall of Haworth.

The colour image shows a similar view from roughly eighty years later and is taken from a postcard published by the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway Preservation Society, photograph taken by R. Higgins.

Both postcards are from the private collection of History Society member Tim Neal. Tim’s entire collection of approximately 600 postcards can be seen on the History Society’s Flickr site.

History Society committee member Tim Neal is giving his talk on local artist Stan Boardman at the Methodist Church Hall, Greenside Lane, in Cullingworth this Wednesday (27th April). Stan grew up in the Fell Lane area of Keighley in the 1920s and committed many of his memories of that time to canvas fifty years later in the 1970s. He also worked as a sign painter in the town (amongst many other jobs!).

Visitors are welcome to attend and there will be a charge of £1.50 on the door. The talk starts at 7.30pm with doors opening a short while before. Please note this talk is organised by Cullingworth Local History Group and is not a Keighley and District Local History Society event.

The purpose-built Keighley Co-Operative Society Central Stores on Brunswick Street were officially opened on 24th April 1886. The new stores succeeded the shop on Low Street as the Society’s main Central Stores. Brunswick Street, which used to run parallel to Hanover Street, was demolished to make way for the new town centre shopping precinct in the 1960s.The idea of the new Central Stores started a few years earlier and their creation meant buying up and demolishing fifteen cottages, a van house, a large workshop and a yard – at a cost back then of £2,650.

The architect was David Weatherhead of Keighley. The building was 32 feet high, with a frontage of 46 feet and a depth of 36 feet. The Tailoring and Shoemaking Departments had moved onto the site as early as 1884.The opening was celebrated with a lantern lecture (the PowerPoint of the day!) given by Hargreaves Jackson on ‘Co-operative Thrift, as Exhibited in the History of the Halifax Flour Society’. At various points the Central Stores included the selling of groceries, meat, fish, fruit and vegetables, boots, shoes and clogs, clock, watches and jewellery, and furnishings; as well as housing a restaurant.

The illustration is from ‘Half a Century of Co-operation in Keighley – 1860-1910’ by Joseph Rhodes, published by the Keighley Industrial Co-operative Society Ltd. in 1911. The black and white photograph is a queue for margarine outside the Central Stores in 1917, from the Bill Parker collection held at Keighley Local Studies Library and released in 2004 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Keighley public library.

The two colour photographs are of Brunswick Arcade, part of the Airedale Shopping Centre, that was built over Brunswick Street in the 1960s. The photographs were taken in 1986 and are from a set of slides donated to the History Society by centre manager Steve Seymour.

The Bronte Cinema on Victoria Road in Haworth opened on 21st April 1923, with 778 seats across its stalls and circle. The venue staged concerts and performances as well as the regular film screenings. It closed on 29th July 1956 and is now a warehouse.

The exterior photographs were taken by History Society member Tim Neal in April 2020. The interior photograph was taken by Mike Higginbottom in 2016 and was featured on his blog (www.mikehigginbottominterestingtimes.co.uk/). It used here with Mike’s kind permission. The Lilywhite postcard shows the back of the cinema just over the wall, in this photograph taken around 1930 from Hebden Road.

This Easter Communion Service card was produced for St. Peter’s Church in Keighley. Possibly from the 1920s, the vicar at the time was John Wood.

John Wood had served as a curate at Holy Trinity Church in Bingley followed by a period as curate at St. John’s Church in Ingrow. A history of St. John’s written in 1943 has Wood arriving on 26th September 1910 under Reverend Charles Frederick Askew (vicar from 1906 to 1911) and departing on 19th December 1912 when the vicar was William Thompson Elliott. He moved on to Keighley Parish Church and its daughter church All Saints. In 1917 he succeeded the Reverend D. E. James as vicar of St. James’ Church in Cross Roads with Lees, later becoming vicar of St. Peter’s.

St. Peter’s Church was located at the junction of South Street and King Street. The church was consecrated in 1882. Its stone came from Woodhouse Quarry, its pews were of pitch pine and it could seat 850. Its activities included men’s and women’s help societies, Bible and singing classes, a Band of Hope, Church Temperance Society, Mothers’ Union and even a savings bank. St Peter’s was demolished in 1956, although its congregation continued until 1975 to use its former Sunday School, in Kensington Street. The site is currently occupied by Enterprise Car Rental.

The Easter Communion card was donated to Keighley and District Local History Society by Sonia Bown in February 2022. The main photograph is from a 1950s postcard published by Lilywhite Ltd.

Great to be back in the magnificent Local Studies Library last night – and a terrific talk by Irene Lofthouse on local landowners Rachel Leach and Anne Lister. Thanks to Irene and to everyone who joined us in person or on Zoom.

Cliffe Castle was officially opened as the new venue for the town’s museum on Tuesday 14th April 1959, when benefactor Sir Bracewell Smith handed over the title deed to the building to the Mayor and other representatives of the town council. At the same time a portrait in oils of Sir Bracewell, by A. R. Middleton Todd, was unveiled. The History Society has in its collection a copy of the programme that accompanied the reopening.

Cliffe Castle is a Victorian mansion, built as Cliffe Hall at the height of Keighley’s industrial prowess by architect George Webster for local lawyer Christopher Netherwood. It was purchased by the Butterfield Brothers in 1848 to serve as the family home and was used as a summer home by Henry Isaac Butterfield from 1878, who set about having it redesigned as a Gothic castle by architect George Smith. At this point it was renamed Cliffe Castle. It then passed to his son, Frederick Butterfield, until his death in 1943. Many of the original pieces of furniture and ornaments were taken away or auctioned by Henry Isaac Butterfield’s granddaughter, Countess Manvers (1889-1984), when she inherited the house in 1943.

The park and house were bought by Sir Bracewell Smith (Keighley-born hotel entrepreneur and Lord Mayor of London), and they were presented to the town in 1950. Sir Bracewell then set aside a trust fund of £100,000 (later increased to £120,000) which paid for a complete adaptation, restoration and ongoing maintenance of the building. The alterations were designed by Sir Albert Richardson and Mr E. A. S. Houfe, Architects of London, who also supervised the reconstruction work. One of the key changes was the introduction of the main hall – the octagonally shaped Bracewell Smith Hall – for use on ceremonial occasions and as an exhibition room. This meant demolishing various service rooms such as the kitchen, larder, servants’ hall and butler’s pantry. Other work included the refurbishment of the reception and dining rooms, to exhibit appropriate museum collections. Other structural alterations included demolishing one of the castle’s towers (the Nursery Tower) and reducing the height of the remaining one (both for safety reasons).

The Heritage Lottery Fund contributed £3.5m towards a £4.5m regeneration project for the park grounds in the 2010s. The work included the recreation of the Victorian glass palm house with adjoining new cafe, replacement aviary, and pond and water features. Other elements restored to their original splendour included ornate gates at the Skipton Road entrance, two Italianate marble fountains which last worked in the 1970s, and decorative streetlights, including a cast-iron dolphin lamppost (made to the same design as those on the Thames Embankment in London). The bandstand was given a new lease of life and heritage-style seating and waste bins and urns were added. The work was recognised in 2018 with a Green Flag award, a Platinum award from Yorkshire in Bloom, and a BALI National Landscape Award (for Regeneration Schemes over £500k).

A major restoration project inside Cliffe Castle reached fruition in March 2019. The large stained-glass window halfway up the Grand Staircase had originally been designed by the Powell Brothers of Leeds and was installed in 1878. At the centre was a panel depicting Henry Isaac Butterfield, his wife Marie Louise, and their son Frederick, all wearing Elizabethan costume. The portraits in the remaining nine panels were destroyed and replaced with plain glass in the 1940s, in accordance with the will of Sir Frederick Butterfield. When the house became the museum, these were enhanced with small roundels featuring portraits of Queen Victoria, her son Prince Albert Edward, Mrs Judge Roosevelt and Mary Butterfield, which had been relocated from their original positioning in Henry Isaac Butterfield’s boudoir. The 21st century work on the glass was undertaken by Jonathan and Ruth Cooke Ltd., and included removing the existing glass for careful cleaning and repair, and the reinstatement of full colour panels replacing the plain glass. No records from Powells remained, so the new colour panels were designed inspired by the existing Butterfield family panel rather than being exact reproductions of what had been there initially. At the same time as the glass was restored, work was carried out replacing the stone tracery by Stone Edge Ltd.

The image accompanying this article is a Lilywhite postcard of Cliffe Castle from the early 1960s, with the cover of the booklet celebrating the 1959 reopening and two images from the booklet showing the Bracewell Smith Hall and one of the reception rooms before items were added.