Earlier this year ‘The Men of Worth Project’ was awarded a grant by the ‘National Lottery’s Heritage Fund’ for a wonderful project. The funding is to add more names to the Borough of Keighley Roll of Honour.
The Roll commemorates those that served and gave their lives in the First World War.
A fitting tribute, as this year Keighley will celebrate the centenary of the original book and of our wonderful Borough of Keighley War Memorial, which was unveiled in Keighley’s Town Hall Square on 7th December 1924, in a ceremony that was attended by several thousand people.
For the past 23 years, Keighley’s Men of Worth Project has researched local people who served the country in wartime. Over the years, Andy Wade and Ian Walkden and the project’s volunteers have worked hard, dedicating many hours to making sure that the stories of those who served are not forgotten.
The group share their expertise in many ways: from helping families research relatives, creating displays, attending commemorations and contributing many articles to the Keighley News. They are also regulars at the local shows and galas in and around Keighley and attend the Haworth 1940s weekend. The group have also been instrumental in saving local war memorials from destruction.
You can find out more about their work on their website at www.menofworth.org.uk and they now also have a whole area dedicated to researching local women who served during wartime.
In 2021 the project received the ‘Queen’s Award’ for voluntary service, an honour that marked the group’s dedication to research and many years helping people from all over the world.
The library has fully supported the lottery funding bid and has worked with the Men of Worth Project over many years, the group have hosted many exhibitions in the library and attended our local and family history open days each year.
Keighley library has had the honour of holding the beautiful original Roll of Honour since it was handed to the library in December 1924. In 1998, Bradford Council facilitated the creation of a Supplementary Volume, after a successful campaign by the relative of Private Henry MacDonald, so that his name could be added to the Roll. MacDonald was shot at Dawn in 1916 for cowardice but was later pardoned in 2006 along with over 300 other British and commonwealth soldiers who had also suffered a similar fate.
The Supplementary Volume was created with room to add many more names and after many years of research the Men of Worth have gathered a list of over 100 names of potential candidates to be added. Lottery funding has enabled an independent panel of local people to decide on each candidate and their merit for adding to the Roll. So that now 100 years on these forgotten names, names that did not get added for a variety of reasons, will finally be added to the Keighley Roll of Honour.
The project will culminate with an event this Autumn to mark this important centenary and an unveiling of the updated roll, with copies of the roll of honour to be sent to local schools and groups.
Over the next few months, we will be featuring some of the Men of Worth’s blog posts on the project as well as some of the biographies of the people who will be added to the roll of honour.
Angela Speight, Keighley Local Studies & Archives Assistant
Busy, Busy, Busy is the motto this year with lots going on to tell you about.
The transfer of North Bierley Union Records from our archives at Keighley to West Yorkshire Archives Service at Bradford took place late last year. This was a large Poor Law Records collections associated with the main Bradford Workhouse situated at Nab End Clayton. As it covered the Bradford area, we all felt the collection was best served at the Bradford Archives Office. This transfer has allowed Keighley some much needed room to add to our collections.
You may be aware that we were closed for collections week from Monday 12th February this month. This time gives us the opportunity to spend time in the archives, tackling jobs we cannot address when we are open to the public.
This week we have spent time moving and reorganising the archives into a continuous numerical run enabling archives to be found quickly and efficiently. Since we were last able to update our records, we have had over 50 new collections deposited with us bringing our total of numbered collections up to BK709, the rest of the large collection being Township and Borough archives. Work on these collections is ongoing with accessioning, sorting and listing taking place and we hope to add them to the digital searchable Catalogue at West Yorkshire Archives Services very soon. https://www.wyjs.org.uk/archive-service/our-collections/search-our-catalogue/
The Diary of John Kitson on display as part of the Brontë Parsonage 2024 exhibition The Brontë Web of Childhood.
Explanation panel for The John Kitson Diary. BK463
In January we had the pleasure of visiting the Brontë Parsonage to deliver an archive on loan. The Diary of John Kitson (BK 463) will be on loan to the Brontë Parsonage for a year and will be on display as part of a year long exhibition, ‘ The Brontës Web of Childhood’ which explores what life was like for the young Brontë children.
We were very fortunate to have a preview of the exhibition and found it fascinating and look forward to working with the Parsonage in the future. More information on the exhibition can be found here. The Brontës’ Web of Childhood | Bronte Parsonage Museum
Carnegie Visit
This year on the 20th of August Keighley library will celebrate 120 years since opening in 1904. Keighley library holds the honour of being the first library in England to be funded by Andrew Carnegie and what better way to start off our library’s celebration than a visit from Sharron McColl and Frank Connelly of the Dunfermline Library, the first Carnegie library in the world. Dunfermline are celebrating their 140th anniversary and it was great to welcome them. Mrs Carnegie (Irene Lofthouse) was here too to greet our guests and help show off our wonderful library. Gifts were exchanged and we discussed how the two libraries could share links and work together on events throughout the year. Our visitors then signed our original visitors’ book from 1904.
Frank Connelly from the world’s first Carnegie Library, in Dunfermline, signs Keighley Carnegie Library’s original Visitors’ book from the opening in 1904.
Keighley receives a new collection
Finally last week we accepted the donation of a wonderful collection to Keighley Local Studies Library.
Jan Perkins and David Kirkley ran the Keighley Schools’ Heritage Group for many years and we had the pleasure of working with them both. They attended many of our Heritage Open Days and people from far and wide came to look at their magnificent displays and reminisce about their Keighley school days. David sadly passed away last year and was a great loss to the local history community. Jan has decided to pass their collection on to us and we collected it last week during collections’ week. The collection will be known as the Keighley Schools’ Heritage Collection, we will be working through the collection and hope to have some of the collection on display soon. So, watch this space.
Over the last couple of years Elizabeth Edwards, Professor Emerita of Photographic History at De Montfort University in Leicester, and until recently Andrew W, Mellon Visiting Professor at the V&A Research Institute, London, has been making periodic academic study visits to Keighley Local Studies Library. Elizabeth is the author of the ground-breaking study, The Camera as Historian, and generally hopes to raise awareness of library photographic collections that she feels have been much neglected in academic and heritage circles. Elizabeth generously offered to write a blog for us and in so doing, gives us a brief but fascinating insight into these valuable collections, their regional and national importance, and the vital role played by libraries in the development of local history.
The Camera as Historian
Among the local studies treasures in Keighley Public Library is a set of 6 bound volumes of photographs. That they are little known is the result of the almost total neglect of the photographic holdings in local studies libraries more generally, despite the distinguished social historian Raphael Samuel referring to them as the lifeblood of local histories. Certainly, many local historians have used the photographs productively in their work. But to really appreciate what is at stake, we have to think about the photographs collectively, as an assemblage, which came into being with a clear purpose, and with work to do in civic society.
This is where the 6 volumes come in. While they are just part of a larger collection of historical photographs in the Library, they represent a cornerstone, both as a collection and more especially as a purpose. They are described from the outset as a ‘photographic survey’ – as embossed on the spines of the volumes. They were donated to the new Library in 1911. However, their genesis was a couple of years earlier, in 1909, when Keighley Photographic Association formed a sub-committee to undertake a photographic survey.
They were inspired, according to an article in the Keighley News, by Birmingham MP Sir Benjamin Stone who was a keen amateur photographer. In 1897 he founded the National Photographic Record Association to which he hoped that local photographers and photographic societies would contribute, creating a national record of ancient buildings, folk customs and so forth. Stone seems to have been something of a thorn in the flesh of the photographic world with his pronouncements on how photographs should look and what they should do. He hated forms such as pictorialism (as practised by Keighley’s famous photographer of the early 20th century Alex Keighley) which he, Stone, referred to as ‘fuzzigraphs.’ So while many surveys give lip-service to Stone, most went their own way, working and thinking locally, bringing local knowledge and networks to bear on their production. For all the razmataz, Sir Benjamin’s national association failed because he tried to turn into a national centralised archive, something that was profoundly local, tied to local desires and local civic and civil society.
Writing about the photographic survey movement, which emerged in the 1890s, has tended to characterise it as nostalgic, ruralist, conservative – anxious about the loss of the ‘old ways’. In 2012 I published a book The Camera as Historian which argued against this position. Instead I suggested that the surveys were driven not so much by a sense of loss, but one of local dynamism, and a fear not of a direct fading away, but of a future that had no sense of its past. These sentiments resonate through Keighley’s survey photographs, recording as they do, civic and national events from wars to elections and charity events, street scenes, the demise of horse-drawn trams, the advent of electric trams, the modernisation of factory plant, slum clearance, everyday life and much else. They also copied older photographs, many of which map civic society in the modern town – the postmasters (and one postmistress), the chiefs of the local constabulary, the medical officers, and local teachers – people who made up the infrastructure of the town. Consequently, Keighley’s survey is concerned not with the quaint and picturesque, but with the changing face of a modern industrial town.
Unfortunately, I didn’t know of the Keighley survey when I finished the manuscript for that book about 15 years ago. If I had it would only have reinforced my argument. Because it really stresses the ways in which local identities were being played out. Yes, one can make arguments about who was doing the photographing (the expense of photography meant that most photographers came from the broad middle classes) but it would be a mistake to narrowly define them and reduce them to that. They were photographing in the contexts of a broadly liberal, non-conformist, philanthropic environment, where photographic skills in relation to survey were seen as a contribution to the civic and civil body. The photographs in the albums trace the presences and life experiences of a multitude of Keighley citizens and their families if one cares to look – and think. It has the feeling of a collective being.
The Library itself is an important player here. It was seen as the proper place for the survey albums, which were added to until about 1936. And Keighley is not alone here. A good many of the surveys were donated to public libraries or in some cases, such as Norwich or Dundee, were the result of a direct collaborative relationship, commission even, between public libraries and photographic clubs. I have become so interested in the role of public libraries in the development of local history, and more broadly, in a sense of local identity and local particularities, that they have now become part of my current book project. This explores the role of photography in an increasing, yet dispersed, sense of the past, which is manifested through everything from picture postcards, illustrated guidebooks, or the management of ancient monuments (the extensive visual presence of Kirkstall Abbey in west Yorkshire narratives is a good example here), to family albums, and even cigarette cards – and a multitude of photographic places in-between. And Keighley will most definitely be playing a major role in that argument.
Elizabeth Edwards has generously donated her book, The Camera as Historian, Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination, 1885-1918, (Duke University Press, 2012) and it will shortly be available for reference in Keighley Local Studies library.
Some publications by Elizabeth Edwards
Photographs and the Practice of History: a short primer. (London: Bloomsbury, 2022)
What Photographs Do: the making and remaking of museum culturesed. E. Edwards and E. Ravilious. (London: UCL Press, 2022) available as open access free download: https://www.uclpress.co.uk/products/192312
Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums (Oxford: Berg, 2001)
Anthropology and Photography: A long history of knowledge and affect (Taylor & Frances Online, 30 Nov. 2015)
Photography, Anthropology and History: Expanding the Frame, ed. C. Morton and E. Edwards (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009)
Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture, ed. Chris Gosden, Ruth B. Phillips, E. Edwards (Oxford: Berg:Routledge, 2006)
International Women’s Week in Keighley Local Studies Library was celebrated with another popular talk by Irene Lofthouse in full costume. Over 50 people ignored any remaining difficulties of ice and snow to hear about some of the inspirational women of Keighley at the turn of the century.
Margaret Winteringham (first British born female MP in Parliament, child and family welfare campaigner); Rachel Leach (early Dalton mill owner and business woman); Lady Ethel Snowden (campaigner, speaker for women’s rights, ILP member, BBC Board of Governors); Frances Smith (mill worker, councillor, champion of child welfare and public health and first woman director of the Co-op Society Ltd); Margaret Pickles (a Keighley Guardian, a member of the Keighley Union Relief Committee who championed better conditions for the poor and taking children’s upbringing outside the workhouse environment) were just some of the women brought vividly to life by this entertaining actor-historian Irene Lofthouse, who, we are proud to say, does much of her research here in Keighley using our renowned Local Studies’ collection. Our holdings include the Lady Ethel Snowden Library, Down Memory Lane articles by the late Dr Ian Dewhirst MBE, news cuttings, local histories and archives, including a large collection of resources on local mills and their owners. Please see our leaflet guides on this site.
Women in Publishing
Keighley Local Studies also put on a display about women in publishing with reference to an excellent online article on the British Library website by Dr Margaretta Jolly, Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex. This examines the progress made by women in the world of publishing, alongside women’s suffrage and rights’ movements that inspired publications such as the Spare Rib magazine and the establishment of Virago press whose archive is now held at the British Library. The article also notes the emergence of greater diversity in the industry to be inclusive of the working class and also minority ethnic representation with a look at Margaret Busby OBE Hon. FRSL, the youngest and first black woman director of a publishing company. There is plenty online about Margaret Busby who is a patron of Independent Black Publishers and was appointed Chair of Judges for the Booker Prize in 2020. Her latest book New Daughters of Africa (ISBN: 9780241997000), an international anthology of writing by women of African descent, is available from Bradford Libraries.
There is a great reading list attached to this article but check out the following sites for more information:
We also featured the emergence in Bradford of two female Asian publishers at Bradford based Fox & Windmill, Habiba Desai and Sara Razzaq.
This is the first independent book publishing company for British South Asian writers, established in 2021. Their inspiring collection of short stories and poetry from British South Asian writers, Into the Wilds, bridges the gap in the publishing industry for writers from a different background.
The printing industry itself was also covered with reference to another article about women’s experiences in the printing industry today but also the first woman to have her own printing press and to employ and to train the first young women in the industry, Emily Faithfull (1835-1895). Emily, a vicar’s daughter, trained as a printer and typesetter and launched the Victoria Press in London in 1860. Its aim was to promote women’s rights to skilled and decently paid employment. The Press printed The English Woman’s Journal, considered the first British feminist periodical, edited by activist-poet Bessie Rayner Parkes. Emily was appointed publisher-in-ordinary to Queen Victoria in 1862. The full article can be read at the following site: https://www.printweek.com/briefing/article/women-at-work-the-push-for-gender-diversity-in-print
Keighley Local Studies also holds a small selection of 19th century broadsides (single sheets of commentary, song or poetry) and previously has collaborated with Piston, Pen & Press an AHRC-funded project that aimed to “understand how industrial workers in Scotland and the North of England, from the 1840s to the 1910s, engaged with literary culture through writing, reading and participation in wider cultural activities”. Check out their web site for more information please:
It just goes to show that inspirational women are everywhere, should be celebrated and their struggles and achievements recorded. We are pleased that Bradford Libraries and Archives on their bookshelves, displays and in their Local Studies’ departments can share in their journey past, present and future.
It is true that local history is only a second behind national current affairs. Given today’s volatile political climate and workers’ unrest, an examination of early 20th century history, is not the antiquated process that the notion of progress might lead us to hope for in 2023.
Keighley Library holds a small but important collection of ILP records (BK11) and also the Snowden collection that includes the libraries of early ILP members: Lord Philip Snowden and his wife, Lady Ethel Snowden, so we thought that we would look into these important and still very relevant local connections for this anniversary year.
The national Independent Labour Party was led by Keir Hardie who became its first chairman and had its inaugural meeting in Bradford at Laycocks’ Temperance Hotel, Albion Court, off Kirkgate on 13 January, 1893. Its foundations were rooted in the turmoil in the Bradford textile trade which was facing competition from France and rising foreign tariffs on British goods. This had led to greater local competition and an intensification of machine led production with pressure to produce more by fewer workers for the same wages. The Manningham Mills strikes of 1890 and 1891 saw powerful links forged between the ILP and local trade unions that the Liberal and Tory parties had failed to make. However, most importantly from an historical perspective, the ILP’s critical eye, focused as it was on established politics in such challenging times for lower paid workers, helped to lay the foundations for the growth of the “working class” affiliation with the less radical Labour Party that was emerging under Ramsay MacDonald and ultimately that party’s much greater political success in replacing the Liberal and Tory norm at both local and national levels of government.
In Bradford today, the founding meeting of the ILP is still marked by the large mural on the north side of Leeds Road near the city centre on the wall of the Priestley Theatre in Little Germany.
The ILP in Keighley
Keighley is joined with Bradford in its reputation as being part of the heartland of Labour politics at the Party’s time of emergence. In fact, in the 1890s, Keighley had one of the largest ILP branches in the country.Nevertheless, it seems that the politically dominant Liberal elite in Keighley was able to deter the political success of the ILP in the town.
The 1880s-1890s were full of discontent for working men and women in Yorkshire but despite this, the established party of choice, the Liberal party, still won elections – the largest single group on the Borough Council from 1882-1908. Furthermore, in spite of early electoral successes by 1900, consisting of four ILP town councillors and three School board members (both including Philip Snowden), ILP representation on the Council declined so that from 1904 to 1912 there were no Keighley town councillors for the ILP.
One argument could be that the successful influence and patronage within other areas of the town’s community life: employment, culture, education, religion and temperance were such, that voters could not ultimately be persuaded to embrace the ILP’s more radical politics. Liberal leaders such as Sir Isaac Holden, Sir John Brigg and Sir Swire Smith had brought much success to Keighley, both as employers in successful and expanding industry but also socially and culturally. They were instrumental in the establishment and success of the Mechanics’ Institute, its popular and nationally successful technical education for young working men and women and also the establishment of a Carnegie Public Library for all in 1904. Keighley’s sizeable Irish population also backed the Liberals at a crucial time in Keighley because of the staunch Liberal Home Rule policy. It is also worth remembering that the ILP in Keighley had fewer funds than either Bradford’s ILP branch or Keighley’s Tory and Liberal parties that relied less on the coffers of lower paid workers. One more point is that voting was still restricted to women who were ratepayers and heads of the household and that excluded many potential radical votes from single working women, paid little within poor working conditions, many in the textile trade. Lady Ethel Snowden was to do much to support women’s suffrage and Philip Snowden also became a champion of this cause.
Another argument might run that as a smaller town than Bradford, there was perhaps less room for independent opposition in such an economically, socially and culturally interconnected town. The Liberal elite were employers, sometimes landlords and held good standing within Keighley’s Non-conformist and temperance led community. Minority radicals would have had to have the mesmerising charisma of John Wesley to pull in supporters who would be going against the grain of such family and communal loyalties. Keighley, as a small town, also appears to have had some class fluidity for the educated and skilled working men. David James, former Bradford District Archivist and Labour historian, points out that some Chartist sympathisers had also been able to do well and gain influence within various organisations in Keighley and that this had also subsequently somewhat clipped their radical wings, (David James, “Local Politics and the Independent Labour Party in Keighley” in Keith Leybourn and David James (eds), The Rising Sun of Socialism 1991), p.106.
However, despite the ultimate failure of an early political conquest in Keighley, the influence of the ILP, as in Bradford, was still a pervasive one. It endured and promoted an alternative political option to Liberalism and Toryism in frustrating times for those working people, particularly with skill and education, and it offered a means of publicly active criticism, not least through its growing relations with developing trade unions. Finally, and again in the words of David James, above all, “…it sowed the seeds of a successful independent working-class political party, though it was the Labour Party that was to reap the harvest.” (ibid., p.118).
Lord Philip Snowden, Chancellor of the Exchequer for the first Labour Government
Although he never became Keighley’s MP, it was in Keighley that Philip Snowden was to cut his political teeth.
Born in Cowling in 1864 to cotton and worsted weavers from Ickornshaw, his parents were staunch Methodists and members of the Temperance society. It was an upbringing that was to shape his later political career.
“I was brought up in this radical atmosphere it was then that I imbedded the political and social principals which I have held ever since”
Philip was one of three children but unlike his two elder sisters, due to the shrewd saving of his father, he did not enter the local mill to work at the aged 10. Instead, Philip who was a bright child stayed on at school and attended the newly established board school from 1874, becoming a pupil teacher in 1877.
His interest in politics started when his family was forced to move to Nelson on the closure of Cowlings mill in 1879.Taking up a job as a clerk in an insurance office in Burnley. His early leaning however, were to favour the Radical Liberal ideals of his father.
In 1886 he won a competition to join the civil service and started to work as excise man. Over the next few years he travelled the country working in Liverpool, the Orkneys and Aberdeen. However, his civil service career was cut short when in 1889 whilst at Plymouth he sustained a back injury that that left him paralysed. He returned home to Ikornshaw to be nursed by his widowed mother and over the next few years he learned to walk again but walked with a stick for the rest of his life.
Whilst convalescing he put his frustrations into reading and began to read widely on the subject of socialism. Between 1892-1995 his leaning went from the Radical Liberal to moving over to the Socialism of the Independent Labour Party.
His contribution to local politic in Keighley was a significant one, he joined the Keighley ILP in 1895 only a few years after its formation and he became editor of the Keighley Labour Union Journal in 1898. By 1899 he was a Labour councillor and School Board member. His journalistic abilities along with his fine oratory skills made him popular figure and he drew large crowds to his speeches. At the Labour Church and he went on to tour the nation giving talks on socialism.
Philip was now making a name for himself with in the Labour moment, one of the big four alongside Keir Hardie, Ramsey MacDonald and Bruce Glasier. He served as chairman of the National Administrative Council of the ILP.
The early 1900s saw his gradual withdrawal from the Keighley political scene and his attentions tuned first towards Leeds and then west to the Lancashire. Local politics had shown its limitations, and he became of the belief that real social change could only be achieved through entry to parliament. His attempt to stand as the ILP candidate in Keighley in 1895 had been thwarted by lack of funds. He did not give up and after two failed attempts at Blackburn in 1900 and in Wakefield 1902, he was eventually elected as Labour MP for Blackburn in 1906.
It was also around this time that he met Ethel Annakin a young school teacher, feminist and socialist. Like minded and both ambitious for their political causes they married in Otley in 1905, against his mother’s wishes. A leading suffragist it was Ethel that was to convert her husband to the cause. He was also becoming a recognised expert on economic issues and advised David Lloyd George on his 1909 peoples budget.
The couple were travelling when war broke out and they found themselves on the other side of the Atlantic. Snowden’s opposition to the Fist World War was contrary to the Labour Party’s patriotic support and he found himself once again aligned with the left and the anti-war ILP. Such views were against the grain at the time, saw him defeated at the next general election in 1918.
In 1922 he was elected as the Labour MP for Colne Valley. Only two years late in 1924 the first Labour Government was formed, and he was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer under Ramsey MacDonald. He went on to reprise his role as Chancellor in 1929 as part of the second Labour government.
It was when he continued as chancellor 1931 under the National Government that he met with controversy. After he introduced a budget that had been rejected by the previous labour cabinet, he was expelled from the Labour party.
Struggling with ill health he did not stand in 1931 instead he given a peerage. They became viscount and Viscountess Snowden of Ikornshaw. Philip turned to journalism in later years, but he suffered from increasing ill health and died on 15th May 1937.
The town had obviously made an impact on her husband for it was to Keighley library that Lady Ethel Snowden gave his 3,000 strong collection of books along with his writing desk. Her books joined those of her husbands on her death in 1951.
Bradford and District Local Studies 