Preparing girls for Christian citizenship (From Keighley News)

Preparing girls for Christian citizenship

7:23am Thursday 30th April 2009

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Recent Memory Lane photographs, showing children’s day on the Monday of Keighley’s wartime Wings for Victory Week in 1943, have prompted Mrs Connie Hensman, of Fell Lane, to unearth her own mementoes of the Wednesday of that same week, when Her Royal Highness the Princess Royal marked a fundraising indicator in the Town Hall Square.

Mrs Hensman was a member of the Keighley Girls’ Training Corps which provided a guard of honour for the occasion. Her pictures represent both of the local freelance photographers who supplied the Keighley News, when circumstances permitted, at the time — William Speight recorded their parade in Lord Street while George A Shore took them standing at ease in the Town Hall Square.

Notice the photographer hugging his camera in the foreground. Had George Shore snapped his colleague?

The Keighley company of the Girls’ Training Corps had been formed in 1942. Its ideal of “preparing the girls for the duties of Christian citizenship” was tempered by the practicalities of their liability for future conscription into war work or the Armed Forces. By the middle of Wings for Victory Week, Keighley had already raised £897,520.

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