Window on a lost world of life in the Dales
ITS 77 houses had not a single telephone between them, and the nearest railway station was miles away, but in the summer of 1913, a tiny Dales community could claim to be at the vanguard of 20th century technology.
It was the local postmaster who had conceived the idea of generating electricity from the beck that ran through the village – and when the first lights were turned on, Kettlewell, with just 300 residents, became the smallest settlement in the country to be wired to the mains.
But Percy Inman had another string to his bow. From his little Post Office and general store in the centre of the village, he commissioned some of the earliest photographs of Upper Wharfedale. Some 400 glass plates, left behind when his family sold the shop and forgotten for decades, are now being restored for a public exhibition.
Opening a window on a lost world of games on the village green, and of Dales farming before it was mechanised, they will be the centrepiece of a local history project that has attracted £10,000 in Lottery funding. No one knows why Mr Inman had the pictures taken, nor who was behind the camera, said Geraldine Newman, the secretary of the Upper Wharfedale Arts and Literature Society.
“There is absolutely no documentation with the photographs,” she said. “They span quite a long time but they’re undated and we don’t know who is in them.
“But of course there are people in the area who might have information, and part of the project will be to find as much as possible.”
One of the pictures shows Mr Inman himself, in Sunday best of suit, bow tie and straw boater, sitting between two other men – one in a tam o’shanter and with a walking crook – beside the maypole on the village green. Behind them can be seen Manningham House and the Temperance Inn.
Another shows what appears to be a sale of manual farm equipment outside the Blue Bell, an inn that still stands in the village.
But the photographer’s remit was not confined to Kettlewell itself. Across the dale in Arncliffe, the ivy-covered front of the Falcon Inn reveals it to have been run by Marmaduke Miller, a local artist and engraver, as a “six days licensed house”.
The pictures were donated to the history group by a local resident, Matthew Roberts, whose family had bought the corner shop from Mr Inman generations ago.
“They were absolutely fascinating and they’ve never been exhibited, so we thought we ought to do them justice and put them in an exhibition by themselves,” Ms Newman said. “That’s when we conceived the idea of asking for some Lottery funding because they needed cleaning up and because we thought we could involve as many people as possible, through music and creative writing around the pictures.
“The big question is why they were taken. We don’t know if Percy just had an abiding interest of capturing the history and the scenery up here, or whether they had a commercial purpose.”
Mr Inman was renowned as an early entrepreneur of the Dales, having managed to persuade enough wealthy businessmen with links to Kettlewell to finance a local electricity supply company. It came at a time when its fortunes were on the wane, having lost the lead mines on which its economy had been based – and with them around half the population.
It had become known instead as a health resort for the wealthy industrialists of Bradford, especially during the summer months.
The old pictures do not record the moment at which the first lights were turned on and, according to a contemporary report, the maypole “looked strangely modern with a circle of electric globes around the top”.