The Men of Worth Project have been busy creating a Remembrance Trail in Oakworth and the launch event will be at Oakworth Community Hall on the 30th of October. About 100 A3 boards will be installed by volunteers on lampposts around Oakworth on 28th October 2025 and they will be on display until the end of November.
The boards will be positioned near to the former homes of each man. People who read their brief stories on the boards can visit The Men of Worth Project website and/or use their phones to scan a QR Code on each board to go to the website to read their whole stories. We hope it will give people a sense of where these brave soldiers lived, before going off to war, never to return.
Andy Wade, project director states:
“One hundred A3 boards will be seen on lamp posts around Oakworth from the end of October until the end of November. People who read their brief stories on the boards can use their phones to scan the QR Code on each board to go to the Men of Worth Project website where they can read their whole stories. We hope it will give people a sense of where these brave soldiers lived their lives before going off to war, never to return.”
Keighley Mayor, Councilor Chris Herd, responeded: “Keighley Town Council is proud to support the Oakworth Remembrance Trail, ensuring the bravery and sacrifice of our local service people are remembered where they lived. This project, in partnership with Men of Worth and the Army Cadets, honours their legacy and brings our community together in respect and remembrance.”
For More information on the Men of Worth Project please see the website Men Of Worth
‘Meeting the Meat Demand’ with Karl-Heinz Wüstner.
Over the summer, the History Society was presented with the opportunity for a talk by Karl-Heinz Wüstner on German immigration to West Yorkshire. With all of our regular slots already filled (and the budget pretty much used up), our solution was to book Keighley Local Studies Library for an extra talk on the afternoon of Wednesday 1st October. The talk, entitled ‘Meeting the Meat Demand’ will start at 2.30pm and will finish around 4.30pm (time for the talk plus discussion at the end). There is a charge of £2 per person (fee applies to members and visitors).
Karl-Heinz Wüstner is a retired high school teacher from Ilshofen, Germany. As a local historian he has studied labour migration and conducted research on trade and craftsmanship in the Hohenlohe region of Germany for many years. He is a committee member of the Historical Society for Württemberg-Franconia and chairman of a local museum that exhibits painted furniture. He writes books and articles, and has given talks at numerous conferences and seminars.
Karl-Heinz Wüstner: “The continuing industrialisation of Yorkshire in the 19th century created many additional jobs in wool mills and factories. Industrial centres grew rapidly and the large number of newly arrived workers needed to be fed. German immigrants in particular took advantage of these circumstances. As butchers, they not only offered meat, but also produced a variety of tasty sausages, meatloaf, rissoles and many other products that could be eaten either cold or warm after brief heating. With the introduction of takeaways, also offering hot meals, they broke new ground in food supply and thus established new eating habits.
“Quite a number of such pork butchers settled in the up-and-coming town of Keighley. A whole series of butcher’s shops with more than thirty female and young employees dominated the streetscape. Names such as Andrassy, Pfeiffer, Hofmann and Schneider may still be remembered by some today.
“I will try to explain why the butchers and their families left their homeland and how they were able to succeed as immigrants. I will explore the important role they played in the development of the towns and cities, as well as their personal fates.”
Article and Photos by Tim Neal, Keighley & District Local History Society.
For the last two years, Keighley Local Studies has put on a series of lectures on family and local history by Jude Rhodes, professional genealogist, local historian and accomplished speaker. Jude has covered topics as diverse as back-to-back housing, nursing history and one place studies and a history of mental health and asylums. Each talk has been fully illustrated with a power point presentation and library staff have put out displays of related original documents, gathered from the wonderful Keighley Local Studies’ archive that covers the Keighley district.
By popular demand, Jude is back with us starting in September on a topic close to our hearts, please come along, refreshments are provided. Details on the attached poster.
Keighley Local Studies has a full programme of talks and events for Autumn/Winter, and details of these will be available on this site, on social media and in the library shortly, please look out for them.
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, a programme of events has already been launched for the year ahead 2024-2025 with regular updates on this site.
It is with great pleasure that we would now like to invite you to a day of celebration on Saturday 30th November when we will look at the development of the library, its founders and influencers. As you can see from a packed programme, there is something for all the family and we look forward to seeing you there.
Back-to-back housing was the topic of Jude Rhodes’ talk this week, the second in the series of illustrated presentations by this wonderful speaker and although these houses are still all around us in their later improved incarnations, back-to-back history continues to surprise us.
Back-to-backs were first mentioned in Bermondsey as early as 1706 and were built in Birmingham and Nottingham in the 1770s, Manchester and Liverpool in the 1780s. Leeds began to build them in 1787 and has the most back-to-backs in the country. Keighley’s own early workers’ housing was centred around West Lane at Westgate, including the Pinfold area, its terraced early back-to-backs include Leeds Street and Turkey Street, see illustrations.
The early back-to-backs houses usually consisted of a kitchen room with 2 bedrooms on the floor above and a cellar place for coal. Houses at the rear were usually accessed by tunnels from the street. They were popular for cheap rents and running costs but were unsanitary with shared middens and water supply, small windows and generally a lack of ventilation with subsequent damp. There was much overcrowding and Jude illustrated this with 40 Birmingham houses sharing 3 privies, that’s potentially 160 people. Piles of human and other waste were added to make “midden heaps” that were cleared into the rivers, becks or streams by the Night Soil Man or left to pile up in the yard before spilling into open sewers, basically ditches with water running through if the gradient was good, if not then waste was left to stagnate, producing poisonous and noxious fumes. Water from rivers, becks and streams could so easily carry typhoid and dysentery, such was the pollution before proper sewerage systems.
Bye-laws and the Public Health Act of 1875 tried to improve workers’ housing and improved back-to-backs were built. These were referred to as “byelaw terraced” housing. These houses had to meet minimum standards of build quality, ventilation, sanitation and population density. Significantly, this type of housing made up over 15% of the United Kingdom’s housing stock in 2011 and gentrification has taken place for some, as at Chimney Pot Park in Salford.
The overcrowding, insanitary conditions and deterioration of much early housing caused concern, not least amongst employers who required healthy workforces to fill their factories and mills. The Brigg family of Calversyke Mill in Keighley built better back-to-back housing in Lynum Street, however their hopes to build a model village like Sir Titus Salt in Saltaire was prevented due to the inadequacy of the water supply there. Later they sold extensive land around Guard House that enabled the building of Keighley’s first 136 Corporation houses at Guard House in 1928 with gardens, space, light and sanitation. James Lund of North Beck Mill built houses near his gift to the town of Lund Park and some of his houses, post 1878, remain in Calton and Chelsea Streets. Robert Clough of Clough Mills built houses in what is known today as the “Jewel Box” area of Keighley, called after the names of five streets: Opal, Diamond, Ruby, Pearl and Emerald. The list of house planning millowners goes on though not for model villages.
Slum clearance began in the 1930s and went through stages up to the 1970s. In Keighley, much early housing was cleared when the Housing Act of 1930 allowed for compulsory purchase of the proven inadequate housing for demolition. Jude highlighted the destruction of community in the process, however, and some members of the audience noted Parkwood in the 1960s. Not everyone wanted to leave their homes, improvement yes, not demolition and rehousing. Stories from the audience included a de-lousing procedure for inhabitants of “slum dwellings” before access to alternative housing was permitted. Dr Ian Dewhirst MBE in “A History of Keighley”, page 132, highlights the loss of “landmarks in the folk-geography of generations: the Bay Horse Inn and the Angel… the picturesque Quaker meeting-house in Mill Street; the pinfold where stray livestock had been impounded; hump-backed Quebec Bridge, scene of many a Saturday-night brawl…”
Time marches on sometimes leaving shock waves in its wake as in the final fact Jude noted, that her “all time dream home”, her former grandparents’ back-to-back in Leeds, where they struggled to live comfortably, is today not even affordable to her. How things change.
Jude Rhodes is an Associate of the Association of Genealogists and Researchers in Archives (AGRA), specialising in Yorkshire history. She is she explains, “passionate about using local history with family history, this provides the exploration of who our ancestors were, why they lived in a particular place and how they were part of their community at a given time”.
Thank you to all who attended, please find an earlier blog with future talks listed into next year. Please note these are free events and also a place booking is required for that on the 11th December 2024, Christmas Family Traditions and Crafts, contact Keighley Local Studies. Poster with details is with this blog.
Jude highlighted some resources and museums during her talk, here are some mentioned below revealing the back-to-back history experience:
For building plans, OS maps, photographs, town plans, Borough records, and at least 2 in depth studies on the housing of workers and employers, please see Keighley Local Studies Library, North Street, Keighley keighleylocalstudies@bradford.gov.uk
National Library of Scotland online collection of town maps and plans for England and comparative recent aerial photographs for study https://maps.nls.uk/os/
