THE former Eastwood House – popularly called the Mansion House – is seen here decorated for Coronation Day in 1902, when 30,000 visited Victoria Park to admire the building and lawn lit "on a scale of dazzling splendour" by 1,177 gas lamps and 5,133 candle buckets.

The weary man sitting on his ladders looks as if he has just put most of those lights in place!

The elaborate porch on the left formed the entrance to Keighley's original museum, opened in 1899. This soon accumulated a varied collection, largely by means of donations. Colonel Sugden of Oakworth gave a "stuffed crocodile form the River Nile" and Herbert Smith the skull of a hippopotamus, while Isaac Bailey's "gift of curiosities " included South African assegais and relics of Waterloo and the Franco-Prussian War.

There was a run of "stones from inside of horses". When Messrs Rowntree and Co Ltd offered "14 samples of cocoa with leaves and pods of cocoa trees", the mayor was deputed to ensure that these did not "take the form of an advertisement".

The Victoria Park museum would continue for 60 years until its contents were transferred to Cliffe Castle.