THESE members of Haworth’s Bridgehouse Wesleyan Methodist Chapel have dressed up for a “gypsy concert” in the 1920s.
Their conductor, Irvine Bland, sits third from the left on the front row.
Bridgehouse Wesleyans were thriving at the time, running a Mutual Improvement Society and a library of 620 books, and with 129 scholars and teachers on their Sunday School registers in 1925. Fancy-dress concerts were quite common. Entertainers at a ladies’ effort in 1924 wore “silk and satin dresses, crinolines, lace caps and poker bonnets”.
Sadly, Bridgehouse was to go the way of so many local places of worship. The chapel itself was demolished in 1964, when worshippers moved into their adjoining Sunday School building, which also housed the Haworth Employment Exchange. When this in turn closed down, Bridgehouse Wesleyans could not survive without the income it had guaranteed, and their final services were held in 1974.
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