THIS was how Cliffe Castle looked at the time Keighley-born Sir Bracewell Smith presented it to the town in 1949.
Alas, it was found to be riddled with dry rot, and only opened as a museum and art gallery ten years later, after a drastic reduction of its larger than life features.
Built between 1875 and 1880 by textile magnate Henry Isaac Butterfield on the site of a more modest Cliffe Hall, this "modernised Tudor castle in the Victorian era" was filled with treasures, from vases looted "from the summer palace of the Emperor of China after the capture of Pekin" to composer Rossini's bed, a pair of candelabra formerly owned by Lord Byron, and a malachite fireplace exhibited at the Crystal Palace in 1851.
Ironically, Henry Isaac Butterfield spent much of his life elsewhere, having a residence first in Paris (shelled during the Franco-Prussian War) then in Nice, where in 1891 he was awarded a banner of honour in the "Battle of Flowers"!
Even towards the end of his life - he died just short of 92 in 1910 - he preferred to spend winters in Devon.
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