MIKE Armstrong, of Laycock, has supplied this grainy snapshot with a story behind it.

“My wife’s side of the family came over from Italy in 1905,” he writes, “and made probably the first real ice cream in town at the bottom of West Lane, from the cellars of a stable in Leeds Street.”

Here is Antonio Minchella, who “went selling his ice cream from a handcart around the Keighley streets after a long and hard shift at Hattersley’s.”

An earlier Italian ice cream maker features in 1901 in the diary of Dr William Scatterty, Keighley’s medical officer of health, who had to investigate some beer and Blackpool rock suspected of containing arsenic, and some questionable ice cream from Dominic Dagostini’s. On analysis, the rock and ice cream were quite alright, though arsenic “in notable extent” was found in the beer!

By the 1930s, the Bronte United Dairies were making ice cream in Temple Row, to be followed after the war by Meddocream in St John Street, Silsden, and for many years Leeda’s Ice Creamery in Alice Street.