A Brief History of the Leeds Jewish Community: Part 2

The second part of a four-part series exploring the history of the Jewish community in Leeds. See our dedicated page for all entries in this series, plus other articles on related subjects. This week, we’re looking at the importance of religion and welfare in Jewish Leeds society… Places of worship held a central role in…

West Leeds Girls’ High School Jubilee Magazine

This week’s Secret Library Heritage Blog article has been written by Local and Family History’s Josh Flint and will be the first in a new series. This new series will be on treasures from the Local and Family History collection about Armley. This first Armley treasure is the 50th Jubilee of the West Leeds Girls;…

New Armley Research Guide

This week Josh Flint will discuss the new Local and Family History Research Guide on Armley. This Research Guide will be of great use to anyone with an interest in the history of Armley and how that history is represented in the Leeds Central Library Collection. This article will examine interesting images highlighted in this…

Secrets of the Palm 3: What to Do on a Wet Thursday Night in Harrogate

Leeds Libraries Heritage Volunteer Tony Scaife delves once more into the pages of The Palm, the magazine of the old Leeds Central High School, which is archived in the Local and Family History Library at shelfmark L 373 PAL. In late August of 1920, four Central High School boys decided to go On a Holiday, leaving a record of…

On John Lucas, 18th-Century Leeds and Foot-ball

by Antony Ramm, Local and Family History, Central Library With the football European Championships now well underway, this seemed like a perfect time to draw attention to one of the lesser-known treasures of our collection: the handwritten manuscript of John Lucas’ Memoranda Book. Born in 1684, Lucas was primarily known as a schoolmaster in his…

Ethelwynne in the Spotlight

Last Friday, we published a sombre but moving post entitled A Leeds Schoolgirl Reflects on WW1. Now, blogger Maureen Jessop has sent a more lighthearted little update our way. Take a look at the photo below (which, like last week’s poem, comes from the Leeds Girls’ High School magazine) and see if you can work out which of the…

A Leeds Schoolgirl Reflects on WW1

As part of Dying Matters awareness week, The Secret Library investigates the story behind a powerful poem on the subject of death and loss. Our Heritage Volunteer Maureen Jessop discovered the piece while reading and indexing the magazine of Leeds Girls’ High, the school that stood in Headingley from 1876 until its merger with Leeds Grammar School in…

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…