WE PRESERVE AND SHARE
Happy Yorkshire Day 2024!
For one day only (Thursday 1st August 2024), the History Society is celebrating with a display of the town and surrounding area’s history in one of the shops in the Airedale Shopping Centre. If you get the chance, please pop in to say hello.
We are in the unit between Clarks shoe shop and Clinton’s card shop from 10 am until 4pm today.
Come and have fun in Keighley, as we celebrate Yorkshire Day Keighley style.
Lots to do for children of all ages organised by Keighley Town Council.
No visiting Mayors this year but visiting Princesses and Transformers with all sorts of activities going on in the Airedale Centre and on Church Green and Market Place. See our Calender Event for more details
KDLHS will again be holding our Gallery of Photographs and information about the town. We will be there to talk to you and discuss everything Keighley. Come and join us.
We’ve just uploaded to the History Society’s Flickr site all the scans from the programme for “Oklahoma!”, produced by Keighley Amateurs in 1956. This production was significant because it was the last show of any kind performed in the Hippodrome Theatre in town. In fact, the theatre had officially closed a few months earlier but reopened especially for this show. After that the theatre closed for good and was demolished in 1961 as part of the town centre redevelopment.
The programme is part of the Joy Rundle Collection, donated to the society by Jane Eaman and Mark Rundle in 2023. It contains details of the show plus dozens of adverts for local businesses from the time.
A massive thank you to Angela, Gina and Janet at Keighley Local Studies Library for hosting the History Society yesterday and giving us a comprehensive guide to the different collections held in the archive. Over 20 society members attended and many examples of photographs, postcards, guides and other documents were made available for us to look through.
And they gave us tea, coffee and biscuits! 🙂
As well as being an introduction to the archives for many members, several members were also able to get answers to their own specific queries.
The History Society is looking forward to arranging further such sessions in the future. If anyone has any suggestions for which particular archives you might like the library to bring out for us to look at, please let us know.
A big thank you to Colin Neville, curator of the Not Just Hockney website, who gave his fascinating, well-researched and richly illustrated talk on Keighley School of Art to the History Society last night.
And thank you to everyone who came along (despite the England match!) or who joined us on Zoom.
Next month’s talk will be by Tim Neal, marking 120 years of Keighley Library, on 14th August 2024 at 7.15pm in the Library.
A reminder that July’s monthly meeting will be on Wednesday 10th July 2024. It will be held upstairs in Keighley Library.
The guest speaker will be Colin Neville, curator of the Not Just Hockney website about artists from the local area. His talk is entitled “Keighley School of Art” and will outline the history of the School, from its origins in the Keighley Mechanics Institute, founded in 1825, to its demise as an independent institution in the 1950s. He will also present illustrated profiles of some of the most successful local artists associated with the School, including Silsden artists Jack Clarkson, Dorothy Wade, and Augustus Spencer, as well as artists from Keighley and Haworth, including Joe Pighills, Frances Watson Sunderland, Annie Hugill, Frank Roper, Allan Laycock, George Demaine, and Alex Smith.
Colin says: “For over eighty years, the Keighley School of Art (later renamed Keighley School of Art and Crafts) was regarded as one of the most progressive and successful in the West Riding of Yorkshire. This was largely because of the strong-minded and talented people involved in its history and development. People like Walter Smith, the first Head of the School: one of eleven children from a working class background, Smith was a passionate advocate for the role of art in the lives of ordinary men and women; local mill owner, Sir Swire Smith: art lover and philanthropist; he had a significant influence on securing national funding and recognition for the School; Tom Butterfield: a talented artist himself, as its Head he successfully steered the School through the last years of the 19th and into the 20th century with his progressive and humane leadership; and Alfred Rodway, the School Principal 1927-1939: another committed and determined character who oversaw a big expansion of craft courses at the School during the late 1920s and 1930s.”
As well as speaking, Colin will have a selection of some of his books on local artists available to buy on the night. The books cost ÂŁ5 each (cash only please). A lot of his books are also available to browse in Keighley Local Studies Library.
Anyone is welcome to attend the meeting. Entry costs £3.50 (free if you are a history society member). The meetings are upstairs in the local studies library of Keighley Library on North Street. Doors open at 7.15 pm, the meeting starts at around 7.20pm and Colin’s presentation will begin at 7.30pm. We finish around 8.30pm. Please use the side entrance to the library on Albert Street if you are arriving after 7pm.
Anyone is welcome to come along and if people wish to join the society they can pay in cash on the night (membership for the rest of 2024 costs ÂŁ15 or ÂŁ20 for a couple living at the same address). History Society members also have the option of joining the meeting via Zoom.
As you may have read about in the newsletter, the History Society has arranged a members-only session at Keighley Local Studies Library for Saturday 13th July, from 10 am to 1pm.
Members of the Library staff will give us a brief overview of the Local Studies Library and then let us look through some of the archives they hold. These will include the collections of the Keighley Photographic Society, collections from the ‘BK’ archive (a serial code notation that includes trade posters, carte de visite, family photo albums and the collections of some notable Keighley figures like Dr Scattery), and a taster of the Ian Dewhirst Archive that is still being worked on.
There are around 30 places available. Tim Neal has sent an email to members (please check your spam folders in you haven’t seen it). To book a place please reply to Tim’s email. We will allocate places on a first-come first-served basis. We are asking for ÂŁ2 per person attending to cover costs.
A big thank you to Pam Brook who came along to the History Society’s meeting in the Library last night to give her talk on “Material Worth: Textile Innovations in the Aire and Worth Valleys”. She covered the history of cotton and wool weaving in the area from individual hand-looms above cottages, through water and steam powered industrial mills, to the synthetic fibres of modern day, touching upon many local firms along the way.
And a big thank you to everyone who came along. There were around fifty of us in the Library and an additional 15 people joined in on Zoom, so a terrific turnout.
Next month’s talk (on Wednesday 10th July) is Colin Neville talking about some of the fascinating artists who came through Keighley School of Art.
Read of the D-Day experience of a man who chose to settle in Keighley after World War II and became one of our local leading actors.
In amongst all the recent publicity, TV programmes and Commemoration Events it has come out that 50% of 16-24 in UK had little or no idea what D-Day was and why it was important. Even with all that is going on in the media they may still not know, as they get their news from “Socials” and the algorithms will probably not point them in the direction of D-Day information.
KDLHS Preserve and Share in order that people can learn from history. So if you see this can you please explain to your young adults and make them understand.
D-Day is not a story. It is not an old film. It is not a Xbox game.
It was real. It happened. Over 100,000, mostly under 24, people no longer existed after the Normandy Landings and that was only on the Allies side.
Without D-Day and the Normandy Landings the UK would, almost certainly, be under Nazi control today with all that it would have entailed. Get them to think of the effect this would have on their lives today.
D-Day was the start of stopping the horror, (the same horror that is going on today in some countries), in France, Belgium, Denmark, Holland, Italy, Greece, Spain, Austria, Poland, Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, Albania – To name but a few. Full list on:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German-occupied_Europe
and the UK was meant to be next…..