Today’s article, by Antony Ramm, forms part of a series of posts inspired by Unearthed: The Power of Gardening – an exhibition in partnership with the British Library’s Living Knowledge Network, at Leeds Central Library from 10 September – 29 October 2025.

A previous article in this series, by Becky Bavill, justly brought to light the life and career of Robert Dawes, gardener at the Temple Newsam estate. Today’s piece touches in turn on the brief connection between Temple Newsam and a very famous gardener indeed – Percy Thrower.

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Even those of us with only a slight interest in gardening have likely heard of Percy Thrower, not least owing to his lengthy spell as gardener (1974 – 1987) for the popular BBC children’s magazine show Blue Peter. So it was for that reason that, while flicking through Roderick Floud’s An Economic History of the English Garden (Penguin: 2020), I was struck by this passage

[Thrower recalled] how, in the 1930s, he and other young gardeners [concluded] that ‘the future lay in the public parks’ as private estates, hit by high taxation and the economic depression of the inter-war years, reduced their gardening workforces. Thrower [subsequently] soon found work with the City of Leeds Parks Department. (Floud, p. 175)

This was not a story I had previously come across, sparking some further searching to find out more information. Neither our library catalogue, nor the index records of specific references in books, newspaper/journal articles held in our Local and Family History department produced any results, however.

Eventually I realised the obvious answer: check the footnotes in the Floud book itself! That led me to Percy Thrower’s autobiography, My Lifetime in Gardening (Hamlyn: 1977), a book which, happily, we had a copy of in the stock belonging to our old Information and Research department (now amalgamated into the Local and Family History department).

And there it was, on pages 56 to 60 of My Lifetime in Gardening: the full story of Percy Thrower’s time working for the City of Leeds Parks Department and, crucially, the specifics about where he worked: the Temple Newsam estate, which had been, in 1922, sold by its current owner Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax, to Leeds Corporation (now Leeds City Council). Thrower takes up the story

[Temple Newsam] is part of a large estate which formerly belonged to Lord Halifax but had been taken over by the City of Leeds whose parks department, at the time of my joining them, were engaged in the considerable operation of transforming it from a private garden into a public park. (Thrower, p.57)

We learn further details of Thrower’s time in Leeds, including the location of his “digs” during his employment (Halton), his impressions of life in the “industrial North” in the 1930s (“exhausting, nerve-wracking”), his memories of “the sad period of the death of George V”, and, most importantly, his appreciation for all he learnt before leaving for another position with the Borough of Derby Parks Department in 1937

At Leeds I was able to acquire much valuable knowledge in growing under difficult industrial conditions.

In truth, even with Thrower’s time in Leeds clearly teaching him much, the period occupies only four pages in an autobiography of 175 pages total. Anyone with a wider interest in gardening and gardening history will, however, enjoy the whole book – it’s currently available for loan and can be reserved for collection at your local library.

Snippets of information about Leeds and its past like this one are exactly the sorts of fairly random slices of knowledge our staff record in the aforementioned index of references in books and newspaper or journal articles – something we’ve added to in this occasion, meaning any future customers or researchers who approach us for information about Temple Newsam and Percy Thrower can be immediately directed to the correct resource. We’ve also updated the catalogue entry so that it includes keywords like ‘Leeds’ and ‘Temple Newsam’.

Thankfully, really, as there seems to be little in the way of other sources exploring the same story – there is only a general reference to Thrower’s time in Leeds on his Wikipedia biography and there are no images on our photograph archive Leodis for Temple Newsam during this period, for instance. (All the images in this article are taken from Leodis but show earlier or later periods in Temple Newsam’s history). The only visual evidence of Thrower’s time at Temple Newsam, in fact, seems to be one small image in My Lifetime in Gardening – even then, the image is rather small and is frustratingly placed over two pages!

Visit Leeds Central Library to experience Unearthed: The Power of Gardening – an exhibition in partnership with the British Library’s Living Knowledge Network, at Leeds Central Library from 10 September – 29 October 2025.