In June 2022, the History Society received a generous donation of thirty five programmes for productions given by Keighley Amateur Operatic and Dramatic Society over a span of almost fifty years.
The collection ranges from “The Yeomen of the Guard”, staged in 1909 by the Keighley Amateur Lyric and Dramatic Society (one of the two societies that came together in 1913 to form the Keighley Amateur Operatic and Dramatic Society), to “White Horse Inn” in 1958, which was the first production by Keighley Amateurs not to be performed at the Hippodrome Theatre (which had closed in 1956).
Nearly every single programme between those years was included in the donation and it’s taken Tim Neal of the History Society nearly two years to scan over 1,500 pages that make up all the programmes. Each booklet is between 32 and 52 pages long, and contains details of the production, photographs of the cast, and dozens of adverts for local businesses, and each booklet serves as a valuable time capsule for that period in the town’s history.
Each programme can be viewed in its entirety on the History Society’s Flickr site.
