THIS snapshot, on the back of which its amateur photographer scribbled “At drill, 1902”, shows children exercising in the playground at Stanbury Board School.

The photographer – who took hundreds of small views, most of which have faded badly – was Jonas Bradley, headmaster of Stanbury Board School from 1890 to 1920. He was a prominent local figure, a lantern-lecturer, early member of the Bronte Society, freemason, president of the Haworth Ramblers and pioneer of nature study in schools.

“Every Friday afternoon when it is suitable weather,” one of his school girls wrote in 1906, “we go out for rambles into the fields. We take with us boxes and lenses, also a note book”. Stanbury schoolchildren were encouraged to undertake such projects as compiling a birds-nest map and sending exhibits to a nature study exhibition at Regent’s Park.

In 1901, a newspaper sub-editor was impressed by their “newly-hatched tadpoles, insect larvae, pond-snails, water weeds, fossils, flowers of alder, hazel, snowdrop, cleat, etc.”