Homely fun in the Grove Mills canteen in 1948 as Wilfred Pickles apparently records his popular radio programme ‘Have A Go’.
In fact, this photograph is not quite what it seems – Wilfred and the Crown Film Unit were making ‘Golden Fleece’ for the Ministry of Labour, a film to encourage recruitment for the textile industry.
Robert Clough (Keighley) Ltd had been chosen as a location, and a hundred employees were given a Friday off work that August so they could take part as extras.
The film featured a simulated ‘Have A Go’. Contestants were actor Gordon Littman and real-life spinners and weavers Maggie Feather, Anne Davidson, Lorna Metcalfe and Marjorie Leach, together with Clough’s long-serving chief clerk, Arthur Smith, and overlooker Donald Lee, who “stoutly maintained that his firm made the finest cloth in Yorkshire”.
‘Have A Go’ came to this area for real in 1949, when a programme recorded in Haworth Parish Church School formed “the burning topic of conversation in the village”.
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