A SMALL boy sits on a large horse in Keighley in about 1932.

When this photograph was first published nearly 20 years ago, it prompted some useful information from a reader, the late Mary Riley.

The little boy was called Roy Mason, and his mother was holding the reins, “no doubt in Currie’s Engineering shop yard where the horse was stabled”.

The man was Billy Kay, with his wife Alice on the left.

Billy Kay was “a great character, well known in the carting business in Keighley. He had been badly crippled as a young man by being kicked by a horse on his hip”. Nonetheless he “carried iron ore and casting to all the different factories in the town”.

Horses in the 1930s still provided a common means of transport – even after the Second World War the LMS Railway Company still kept 21 horses at Keighley – used largely by coal hauliers and foundries and still proudly groomed and decorated for May Day and gala processions. Billy Kay “never missed a gala procession and went to Skipton and Bingley Show and had won many prizes over the years”.