BOTH these men, photographed above Long Lee in the later 1930s, contributed in different ways to the local life of their period.
On the left, Edgar Slater’s unobtrusive hobby was collecting flint implements on the surrounding moors, and he lectured to the Keighley Naturalists’ Society on Local Evidence of Prehistoric Man.
After his death in 1942, his collection of some 400 scrapers, knives and arrowheads found a home in Cartwright Hall at Bradford.
William Coleman, on the right, farmed at nearby New Laithe, where he kept 3,000 poultry in glass-fronted cotes “full of sunlight and freely-circulating air” which he had himself designed.
He served on Keighley Town Council from 1909 until 1922 as an outspoken Independent. He considered electricity detrimental to health and never touched alcohol, tobacco, meat, sugar or chocolates.
He was a supporter of a then-popular keep-fit cult called Mazdaznan, lending one of his fields as a summer camp where devotees holidayed in “seven caravans and a colony of bell-tents”.
His obituary in 1952 called him a “quaint local personality”.
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