Ian Dewhirst

AN INTERESTED crowd watches the library stone-laying ceremony on the building site in its early stages.

THESE are some of the 12,000 local Sunday School children who crowded along one side of North Street on August 9, 1902, waiting to watch a procession of 30 historical tableaux to commemorate the Coronation of King Edward VII.

WHEN HER Royal Highness and Princess Royal visited Keighley during fundraising Wings for Victory Week in 1943, her itinerary included the Woodbine Day Nursery in Skipton Road, which catered for the children of mothers on war work.

IN THE bleak aftermath of the Second World War, Keighley’s Westgate Infant Welfare Clinic was still distributing orange juice, cod liver oil, dried milk and vitamin tablets for babies.

NEARLY 800 mothers with their babies packing the Municipal Hall at the end of October in 1908 formed a unique Keighley gathering, hosted by Mayor Robert Clough, who is standing slightly to the right of the centre.

It is safe to assume many of the boys who listened to those Empire Day addresses were willy-nilly destined to uphold their ideals of service and duty all the way to the ultimate sacrifice in the Great War.

This was what the Keighley News of the time called a ‘striking scene’ on the Town Hall Square, when upwards of 5,000 Keighley schoolchildren celebrated Empire Day in 1909 – a day later than originally planned because of rain!

Children of Worth Village Primary School prepare to dance round a maypole about 1940.

Epitomising those musicians who for generations upheld a lively local tradition, the late George S Sugden – uncle of Keighley’s stage and television star, the late Mollie Sugden – sits at the organ of the former Upper Green Congregational Chapel.

The Edwardian tranquillity of a Worth Valley Sunday, together with the immaculate turnout of its churchgoing young men, is evoked in this view of Marsh Wesleyan Chapel, from an imaginative ‘art nouveau’ postcard produced by some enterprising local photographer or stationer.