THE little girl with the doll was Betty Edmondson, of Oakworth, who must have been one of the first children to be photographed in Keighley around the middle of the 19th century. She is looking rather fearfully at the unfamiliar camera.

She thought the photographer had given her the doll to keep, but it was only a prop he used when taking portraits of children.

On the right sits her older sister Jane, who brought her up after their mother died. She has put on her best clothes for the occasion, and is holding what could be a Bible, another favourite photographic prop of the period.

By 1870 Keighley had six photographers, including William Cooke in Skipton Road, who called himself an artist-photographer and whose Latin catchphrase was “Arte & Labore”.

So many photographers might suggest the existence of many mid-Victorian Keighley views but, with rare exceptions, such is not the case. Their stock-in-trade was the small carte-de-visite portrait, on the backs of which their sitters seldom wrote names and dates, resulting in whole albums of sadly unidentified local faces.

Not until the late Victorians and the formation in 1889 of the Keighley and District Photographic Association were serious attempts made to record the town itself.