IT is always entertaining to read the letters of Christopher Ackroyd of East Morton, but I must take issue with one of his claims last week.

He states “the amazing Sir Isaac Holden, who invented textile machinery and the Worth Valley Railway.”

To ‘invent’ is to originate or create something new and it is often difficult to credit ‘inventions’ to any single person.

For example, in 1829 Isaac Holden developed an improved version of a Lucifer match, actually invented three years earlier by chemist John Walker. Holden never patented his ‘invention’.

Similarly Holden worked with Samuel Cunliffe Lister to develop the square motion wool-combing machine, patented by Lister in 1848. The ‘invention’ of this machine became the subject of a lifelong dispute between the two men.

As for the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway (KWVR), no single person was responsible. The railway came about because the dominant political and financial force in the valley, namely the wealthier mill owners – Merrall, Craven, Butterfield, Greenwood, Feather, Hattersley, Sugden and Sir Isaac Holden – together with legal help from the Midland Railway Company, proposed a bill to Parliament in 1861 for the construction of a railway between Keighley and “the Vale of the Worth”.

The mill owners were no longer prepared to pay for slow and expensive horse-haulage of coal from either the Midland Railway at Keighley or the Leeds and Liverpool Canal at Stockbridge Wharf.

It can be argued that the single most important KWVR director was not Isaac Holden but Richard Shackleton Butterfield, of Woodlands House in Haworth, who provided £10,000 (about £1m today) to have the railway serve his own Bridgehouse Mill with coal. It was double what Messrs Craven and Sugden had been prepared to pay for an earlier proposal that the railway should run via Springhead, Lumb Foot and Stanbury.

The construction of the KWVR cost £105,000 (£10.5m today), nearly three times what had originally been quoted, and many original mill owner directors sold their shares at a loss between 1867 and 1880.

The main purchaser was the amazing Sir Isaac Holden who served as KWVR chairman until 1880, when the directors sold the entire KWVR to the Midland Railway Company for £60,000 (£6m today).

Although this was less than the KWVR had cost to build, it was still a handsome offerand it’s clear that Sir Isaac and the remaining shareholders were well satisfied with the deal.

Sir Isaac Holden was indeed a supreme example of the 19th-century ‘self-made man’ – an extremely successful businessman, and a respected radical MP who fought for the final abolition of slavery, electoral reform and Irish home rule. He was not, however, the ‘inventor’ of the KWVR.

GRAHAM MITCHELL KWVR chairman, 1987-99