“A SEA of Happy Faces” ran the caption of this crowded photograph when it appeared in the Keighley News at the beginning of 1958, showing some of the 650 children who, together with 250 adults, attended that year’s Saturday afternoon carnival and gala of the Conversaziones.

Lost here in the crowd are the Keighley Mayor and Mayoress, Councillor and Mrs WE Walton, and members of the organising committee.

The programme included dancing, a traditional Grand March round the Municipal Hall, a fancy-dress competition, a display by the Irene Ogden School of Dancing, and entertainment by Ronald Cryer from Bingley, billed as “the television magician and puppeteer”.

Harry East, who contributed a weekly humorous feature to the Keighley News, captured the 1950s flavour: “Crowds of children, the boys vastly outnumbered and nervously clustering near the exits, monopolised the hall and surged in gay abandon, doubtful of the steps but confident in new frocks and shining hair as the band led them through old-fashioned sequence dances . . .”