Arthur Whitehead

Textiles stalwart and councillor

ARTHUR WHITEHEAD died on October 6 at the age of 91. His passing ended a rare link with the textile industry of yesteryear. Here, his son Andrew pays tribute. THE DEATH earlier this month of my father Arthur Whitehead - from a Gildersome mill family and a former Morley councillor - breaks another link with the textile industry which once defined the area.

With his passing, there are no longer any Whiteheads who worked at Whiteheads’ mill.

He was 91 and had for the last few years been living in Easingwold near York, but the greater part of his life was spent in Gildersome and Morley.

He married a Gildersome girl, Margaret Graham - born in Glasgow, her family moved to the village when she was a child - in the local Baptist Church in the coronation summer of 1953.

His grandfather Willie Whitehead, who began his working life as a loom tuner, established the mill just over a century ago. According to family folklore, he borrowed money from an aunt who had inherited it after (accidentally) giving her husband disinfectant to drink.

In the 1920s, the business

moved to purpose-built premises at Deanhurst Mill on Gelderd Road - a small worsted mill in an area more noted for shoddy and mungo manufacture.

Joseph Whitehead, my grandfather, was the main force behind the mill’s success.

He was a typical, strong-willed tyke and chairman of what was then the Gildersome Urban District Council.

His wife, Ethel Brooksbank one of the first women graduates from Leeds University - was every bit as formidable.

Both served as magistrates in Morley and they were also active in Gildersome Cricket Club - and I remember as a child going with my father to see the occasional game at the ground at the back of Street Lane. My father and his twin brother, Bernard - older than him by 10 minutes - were born in

Wibsey in Bradford and moved when very young to College Road in Gildersome, at the back of the family mill. They went to Gelderd Road Primary School and Batley Grammar School; my father took a two-year wartime degree in the textile department at the University of Leeds.

During the war, he trained as a pilot in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He was still there when the war ended. On his return, he qualified as an accountant and worked in the family firm; so too did Bernard, who had a flair for design. I remember visiting Deanhurst Mill as a toddler, and being assailed by the deafening clackclack of the looms and delighting in tumbling around among the cloth off-cuts.

When my parents married, they moved to Bruntcliffe Lane in

Morley. My father was elected to the council - he was a Liberal.

I was born at Morley Hall maternity home in 1956 and my brother Malcolm came along three years later.

In 1960, the family moved back to Gildersome to Hilly Croft on Gildersome Lane, which like most of the more imposing buildings in the area had been constructed decades earlier with mill money. At about that time, Joseph Whitehead took his family by surprise and sold the mill.

It continued to make fine worsted cloth for a while longer but my father left the business and went on to a highly successful career in carpets. On retirement, he worked as an investment adviser to a leading enterpreneur. And by a curious twist of fate, that took him back to Gildersome’s mills. He tried against the odds

in the 1980s to devise a recovery plan for the village’s last working mill - Booth’s Mill, also known as Moorhead Mill, which specialised in cloth for billiard tables and army uniforms.

That failed, and the mill closed - and with it a tradition of textile manufacture in Gildersome which stretched back over two centuries. I have in my home in London the mill’s wind-up ‘clocking-in’ clock and a batch of time cards.After 60 or so years in Gildersome and Morley, my parents moved to Hunmanby Gap on the coast near Filey.

My mother very sadly died three years short of their golden wedding anniversary.

My father then moved first to Huby, and for the last few years he has shared a home in Easingwold with a childhood friend and distant cousin, Betty Richards.

Arthur’s interests included painting in the style of Bridget Riley and tapestry. He enjoyed good health almost to the end.

Friends have described him as a true gentleman - courteous, contented, kind and wellgroomed. My father wasn’t religious, but he - and I - have rekindled a link with Gildersome Baptists in recent years.

I’ve made my career as a BBC journalist and, when reporting on a visit to Martin Luther King’s Baptist church in Atlanta, happened to mention my family’s roots in Gildersome’s Baptist tradition. The minister David Newton was listening and got in touch. We’ve stayed in touch since and he passed on the congregation’s good wishes when my dad celebrated his 90th birthday - it was great to maintain that Gildersome connection.