This week on the Secret Library we welcome Orla Kennelly from the Norfolk Heritage Centre. Orla kindly agreed to write a section for our blog focusing on the circus manager and performer, William Darby – aka Pablo Fanque. Darby was born in Norwich, but is buried in Leeds; Orla’s section looks at Darby’s early years, while our part concentrates…
Category: Leeds History
A.R. Turner’s Ironmongery Catalogue: The Communication of History
Part II in a loose trilogy of posts exploring (some) meanings behind the study of local history. Part I is here and Part III is here This article is also #17 in our People of Leeds series by Antony Ramm, Local and Family History, Central Library “How much history can be communicated by pressure on a…
Alf Mattison: A Hidden Figure
by Rhian Isaac, Leeds Central Library I was inspired to take a closer look at our Alf Mattison Collection after I heard Professor Malcolm Chase from the University of Leeds deliver a talk a few weeks ago to a busy room about this fascinating but somewhat shadowy figure. This was a man who despite his…
Ralph Thoresby and the Ducatus Leodiensis: A Curated Display
by Antony Ramm, Local and Family History, Leeds Central Library There are still five days to enjoy the fantastic series of events we’re holding for our 2016 Library Fest. Among that panoply is a display celebrating the life and works of Ralph Thoresby – in particular, the 300th-anniversary of his Ducatus Leodiensis. That book – often referred…
Secrets of The Palm 2: The Future Foretold
Leeds Libraries Heritage Volunteer Tony Scaife follows up his previous post with another delve into the pages of The Palm, the old Central High School magazine of the 1920s. Prompted by the city of Leeds’ Tercentenary in July 1926, two articles written by schoolboys for The Palm seem almost prophetic, dealing as they do with…
Secrets of The Palm: An Insight into Early Radio Broadcasting in Leeds
This week’s post is by Tony Scaife, a Heritage Volunteer based at the Local and Family History Library. He’s been indexing volumes of The Palm, the magazine of the old Leeds Central High School, which inspired him to delve a little deeper into the city’s early radio days… In 1901, the groundbreaking Central High School (CHS)…
Christmas and New Year in the Territorial Hospitals, 1917
by Ross Horsley, Local and Family History, Leeds Central Library Within three months of the outbreak of the First World War, Leeds had already seen its first influx of injured soldiers. These made their way to Beckett’s Park to what would become the city’s largest military care centre, the 2nd Northern General Hospital. At its…
An Armley Ghost Story for Christmas
by Ross Horsley, Local and Family History, Leeds Central Library “The ghost that turns up, annually, on the stroke of midnight on Christmas Eve is largely the invention of Charles Dickens and his imitators in fiction. But ghosts do prefer to visit their familiar haunts on dark winter nights – and, for some, Christmas appears…
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