By Joshua Robinson – 

Huddersfield Local History Society is proud to present its Journal for 2024-2025, illustrated with 86 pages of articles, book reviews, obituaries, and information about the Society, it’s a good read for anyone interested in the history of the district and beyond.

The Journal’s front cover has illustrations relating to the history of Standard Fireworks, and inside is an article by Huddersfield University student Emma Knutzen tracing the history of the firm from its beginnings in a drapery business to a global company.

This year is the 100th anniversary of the unveiling of Huddersfield’s War Memorial in Greenhead Park and the 110th anniversary of the
start of the First World War. Anne Brooke‘s piece asks why the Memorial took the form it did with its absence of names, and why it wasn’t completed until six years after the Armistice. In search of Lindley’s war dead and their lives before the war, David Verguson explores the mystery surrounding one particular inscription, and going further back in time, Richard Hobson focuses on the impact of the English Civil War on local men who fought in it.

Berlie Zetlich’s illustrated article tells the story of Meltham-born photographer Annie Powell. Born in 1859, Annie, already working as a photographer, emigrated to Lowell, Massachusetts in 1891. Her agricultural scenes taken around Almondbury provide a stark contrast to her later photos of life in urban Lowell. Alan Brooke and Stephen Cook go in search of Honley naturalist Arthur L. Littlewood whose scrapbook of bird illustrations has only recently come to light.

David Griffiths reflects on Huddersfield’s connections to slavery and its abolition, going on to provide a ‘glimpse’ of life on a Jamaican plantation, based on a letter preserved in the West Yorkshire Archives. Furthermore, in an article which that illustrates the global nature of ‘local’ history, Tobias Leech examines the ‘difficult history’ of Sir John William Ramsden’s holdings in Malaya.

Almost every year the Journal commemorates the lives of members who greatly contributed to their knowledge of the district’s history, and this was certainly true of Jennifer Stead (1939-2023) with an obituary by Society chair, Cyril Pearce. However, Jennifer’s own memories of growing up in Berry Brow also appear in the Journal for 2024-2025, taken from correspondence – much in the form of emails – carried on over a number of years with a distant cousin.

The Huddersfield Local History Society Journal is produced annually, priced at £5. It can be found in local bookshops and will soon also be available for purchase from the Society’s website (https://www.huddersfieldhistory.org.uk/).

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