As many of you will know, Keighley Library is 120 years old this year. It was the first library in England to be financed by the Scottish American billionaire and educational philanthropist, Andrew Carnegie and is an architectural gem of the town. It opened its doors on 20 August 1904 and to celebrate this milestone, staff are launching a programme of events for the next 12 months. All details will be published in due course on this web site.

To start the programme, however, the library was fortunate enough to host a talk given by the Keighley & District Local History Society with a very fine speaker, committee member, Tim Neal. Tim had done a great deal of research from the Society’s own archives and local contacts. He also spent a lot of time looking at the Keighley Local Studies library history archive.

The talk was lavishly illustrated with a slide presentation that made the most of the archive records used and reflected the thoroughness of Tim’s research as he concentrated on key dates and developments in Keighley Library’s history up to the present day. However, if this all sounds a bit dusty bookish, I can assure you that the audience thought very differently and speaking to a few of the fifty-five audience members afterwards, it was clear that Tim captured and stimulated interest not just in Keighley’s library but in the development of libraries in general that also reflects changes in culture and society and of course in technology. Similarly, and in true Dr Ian Dewhirst MBE fashion, we were also treated to humorous anecdotes and observations of the strange and wonderfully quirky.

This quite brilliant and entertaining talk, we are pleased to announce, will be repeated later this year on 30^th November at Keighley Library on a full day of 120 years’ celebrations, please look out for more details in the future. In the meantime, we should like to thank Tim Neal and Joyce Newton, committee members, and all those who supported the event.

If anyone is interested in pursuing the library history of the district itself, copies of Bob Duckett’s fully illustrated recently published book, “150 Years of Bradford Free Libraries 1872-2022”, is still available for sale in libraries at a modest price of £9.99. It is also available for reference and loan within Bradford Libraries, (Bradford Libraries, 2023, ISBN 978-1-7390826-0-4).

Keighley Local History Society is very popular in the district and has a lively programme of events and talks with an excellent web site that is updated regularly, showcasing an online archive with thousands of images: www.keighleyhistory.org.uk

Keighley Local Studies Team