Earlier this year ‘The Men of Worth Project’ was awarded a grant by the ‘National Lottery’s Heritage Fund’ for a wonderful project.  The funding is to add more names to the Borough of Keighley Roll of Honour.

The Roll commemorates those that served and gave their lives in the First World War.

A fitting tribute, as this year Keighley will celebrate the centenary of the original book and of our wonderful Borough of Keighley War Memorial, which was unveiled in Keighley’s Town Hall Square on 7th December 1924, in a ceremony that was attended by several thousand people.  

For the past 23 years, Keighley’s Men of Worth Project has researched local people who served the country in wartime. Over the years, Andy Wade and Ian Walkden and the project’s volunteers have worked hard, dedicating many hours to making sure that the stories of those who served are not forgotten.

The group share their expertise in many ways: from helping families research relatives, creating displays, attending commemorations and contributing many articles to the Keighley News. They are also regulars at the local shows and galas in and around Keighley and attend the Haworth 1940s weekend. The group have also been instrumental in saving local war memorials from destruction.

 You can find out more about their work on their website at  www.menofworth.org.uk and they now also have a whole area dedicated to researching local women who served during wartime.

In 2021 the project received the ‘Queen’s Award’ for voluntary service, an honour that marked the group’s dedication to research and many years helping people from all over the world.  

The library has fully supported the lottery funding bid and has worked with the Men of Worth Project over many years, the group have hosted many exhibitions in the library and attended our local and family history open days each year. 

 Keighley library has had the honour of holding the beautiful original Roll of Honour since it was handed to the library in December 1924. In 1998, Bradford Council facilitated the creation of a Supplementary Volume, after a successful campaign by the relative of Private Henry MacDonald, so that his name could be added to the Roll. MacDonald was shot at Dawn in 1916 for cowardice but was later pardoned in 2006 along with over 300 other British and commonwealth soldiers who had also suffered a similar fate.   

The Supplementary Volume was created with room to add many more names and after many years of research the Men of Worth have gathered a list of over 100 names of potential candidates to be added. Lottery funding has enabled an independent panel of local people to decide on each candidate and their merit for adding to the Roll.  So that now 100 years on these forgotten names, names that did not get added for a variety of reasons, will finally be added to the Keighley Roll of Honour.

The project will culminate with an event this Autumn to mark this important centenary and an unveiling of the updated roll, with copies of the roll of honour to be sent to local schools and groups.   

Over the next few months, we will be featuring some of the Men of Worth’s blog posts on the project as well as some of the biographies of the people who will be added to the roll of honour.

Angela Speight,  Keighley Local Studies & Archives Assistant

News from the Archives

Busy, Busy, Busy is the motto this year with lots going on to tell you about.

The transfer of North Bierley Union Records from our archives at Keighley to West Yorkshire Archives Service at Bradford took place late last year. This was a large Poor Law Records collections associated with the main Bradford Workhouse situated at Nab End Clayton. As it covered the Bradford area, we all felt the collection was best served at the Bradford Archives Office. This transfer has allowed Keighley some much needed room to add to our collections.

You may be aware that we were closed for collections week from Monday 12th February this month. This time gives us the opportunity to spend time in the archives, tackling jobs we cannot address when we are open to the public.

This week we have spent time moving and reorganising the archives into a continuous numerical run enabling archives to be found quickly and efficiently. Since we were last able to update our records, we have had over 50 new collections deposited with us bringing our total of numbered collections up to BK709, the rest of the large collection being Township and Borough archives. Work on these collections is ongoing with accessioning, sorting and listing taking place and we hope to add them to the digital searchable Catalogue at West Yorkshire Archives Services very soon. https://www.wyjs.org.uk/archive-service/our-collections/search-our-catalogue/

In January we had the pleasure of visiting the Brontë Parsonage to deliver an archive on loan. The Diary of John Kitson (BK 463) will be on loan to the Brontë Parsonage for a year and will be on display as part of a year long exhibition, ‘ The Brontës Web of Childhood’ which explores what life was like for the young Brontë children.  

We were very fortunate to have a preview of the exhibition and found it fascinating and look forward to working with the Parsonage in the future.  More information on the exhibition can be found here. The Brontës’ Web of Childhood | Bronte Parsonage Museum

Carnegie Visit 

This year on the 20^th of August Keighley library will celebrate 120 years since opening in 1904.  Keighley library holds the honour of being the first library in England to be funded by Andrew Carnegie and what better way to start off our library’s celebration than a visit from Sharron McColl and Frank Connelly of the Dunfermline Library, the first Carnegie library in the world. Dunfermline are celebrating their 140^th anniversary and it was great to welcome them. Mrs Carnegie (Irene Lofthouse) was here too to greet our guests and help show off our wonderful library. Gifts were exchanged and we discussed how the two libraries could share links and work together on events throughout the year.  Our visitors then signed our original visitors’ book from 1904.  

Frank Connelly from the world’s first Carnegie Library, in Dunfermline, signs Keighley Carnegie Library’s original Visitors’ book from the opening in 1904.

Keighley receives a new collection

Finally last week we accepted the donation of a wonderful collection to Keighley Local Studies Library. 

Jan Perkins and David Kirkley ran the Keighley Schools’ Heritage Group for many years and we had the pleasure of working with them both. They attended many of our Heritage Open Days and people from far and wide came to look at their magnificent displays and reminisce about their Keighley school days. David sadly passed away last year and was a great loss to the local history community. Jan has decided to pass their collection on to us and we collected it last week during collections’ week. The collection will be known as the Keighley Schools’ Heritage Collection, we will be working through the collection and hope to have some of the collection on display soon. So, watch this space.