Tag: Haworth

Article on next week’s meeting

Great coverage of next week’s History Society meeting in this week’s Keighley News. The meeting focusses on largely-forgotten crime writer Austin Lee, who was born in Cowling and educated at Keighley Boys Grammar School. During the 1950s and 1960s he published various whodunnit novels, many featuring amateur detective Miss Flora Hogg (including ‘Miss Hogg and the Bronte Murders’, with some very evocative descriptions of Haworth in the 1950s).

Speakers will be writer and journalist Sharon Wright, Bronte Parsonage Principal Curator Ann Dinsdale, and History Society committee member Tim Neal, talking about how they became converts to Lee’s cause. There will also be a small display about Austin Lee, courtesy of Keighley Local Studies Library.

The meeting is on Wednesday 13th August 2025, at 7.15pm in the Keighley Civic Centre on North Street. All are welcome to come along. Entry is £3.50 or free to History Society members. History Society members can also join the meeting via Zoom if they prefer. The meeting ends around 8.45pm.

Bronte Parsonage Visit

We’d like to say a massive thank you to Ann Dinsdale and the team at the Bronte Parsonage Museum for making us feel so welcome during our exclusive visit last Friday (20th June 2025). Nineteen members of the society went on the visit, and we were given free rein to explore the museum (with the incredibly knowledgeable and friendly staff on hand to answer all sorts of questions), look around the temporary exhibition ‘From Haworth to Eternity’, and we got to see some rare, moving, exciting and recently acquired items in the collection that don’t often see the light of day, brought out by Ann in the museum’s collections library. All that and a glass of bubbly too!

Full Steam Ahead

While we undertook our first proper Zoom Speaker’s Meeting in February with a little trepidation, unsure of how people would respond, I think after the second we can say they are successful.

We have to thank Graham Mitchell for bravely and very successfully taking on his very first Zoom meeting, where he was in control of the screen.

Graham told us all about the dealings of the early attempts at bringing Train-lines to the District, some successful and some not. Along with his narrative on the wheeler’s and dealer’s , he showed us the step-changes that the Railways brought to the Villages, Towns and people in general. Graham presented the narrative along with many detailed maps and rare old photographs, as part of his very smooth presentation.

We were glad to see so many of our regular’s and pleased to welcome many new faces. There were 24 people attending in all, two of these actually joined the Society during the presentation.

We are now building up the a programme for the Zoom Speaker’s Meetings for the rest of the year, so keep an eye on the calendar for details.

We have been asked if it would be possible to view the meetings at other times? While we are looking into this, it will probably not be possible when we have outside Speaker’s.

Many thanks to all involved.

Joyce Newton – Chair