Fishing For Postcards

This week’s postcard comes from the collection of my great-uncle, Fowler Beanland. It shows the Mechanics’ Institute in Keighley, a building with which he would have been very familiar. It was built in 1853, a few years before he was born, and burnt down in 1962, a couple of years after he died. He no doubt studied there while learning his trade as an iron turner. The card is from David Beanland, who, despite the salutation, was Fowler’s nephew rather than his brother.

Thursday 1st - Saturday 3rd October 2026

 

Monday 28th September - Wednesday 30th September 2026

 

Safely To The Other Side

 

Another way to cross the River Mersey is the method I’ll be using later today: travelling through the Mersey Tunnel. The Queensway Tunnel - the one I’ll be using - was constructed in 1934, the year before this fine old picture postcard was sent. Built at a cost of £8 million, it was the world’s longest road tunnel for the first fourteen years of its existence. A masterpiece of twentieth-century civil engineering, it will hopefully get me safely to the other side.

Ferry Across The Mersey

 

Later this weekend, I will be crossing the River Mersey. To celebrate, here is a photograph taken during a trip across the river more than seventy years ago. Later this year, I hope to make a slightly longer water crossing to be reunited with my brother. For now, we will have to be satisfied with this memory from all those years ago, captured during our “Ferry Across the Mersey.”

The Uses Of Zion

 

Coming across this old photograph - which I must have taken forty or more years ago - I was initially unsure of the exact location, as most northern towns and cities had a Mount Zion Chapel. I eventually narrowed it down to a building on Westfield Terrace in Sheffield, which has had a colourful history: it has served as a chapel, part of the old Royal Hospital, offices and, more recently, apartments. Fine buildings should have many uses; it is good to see them adapted over time.

Municipal Pride

The third element of my Dewsbury triptych is the rather beautiful Dewsbury Town Hall, built in 1886 by local architects Henry Hottom and George A. Fox. It dates from a time when municipal pride was competitive, and local towns tried to outdo one another in the scale and beauty of their public buildings. For a town of its size, Dewsbury would take a lot of outdoing!

Dewsbury Top And Bottom

 

The second of my Dewsbury triptych celebrates that moment - which all photographers know well - when you suddenly catch sight of an alignment of objects or an idiosyncratic collection of shapes, and snap away with enthusiastic abandon. Your companions look at you as though you’ve taken leave of whatever sense you had - but you have spotted a top market and some mannequin bottoms.

Stone Heroes

When brothers Robert and William Machell built their new mill in Dewsbury in 1874, they chose to incorporate four finely carved stone portraits into the fabric of the handsome Cloth Hall Mill. Two depicted themselves - upper right and lower left - while the others portrayed the then Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli (upper left), and Richard Cobden, the former radical Liberal MP for the West Riding. I stopped to say hello to all four while walking around Dewsbury last week.

Rooftops And Chimneypots

 

I remember taking this photograph half a century or more ago, at a time when there was an outcry against TV aerials as despoilers of urban landscapes. I was always rather fond of them - there was an idiosyncrasy about them that is sadly lacking in their modern equivalents. Add a decent collection of chimney pots to the scene, and you almost have a work of sculpture.

Reversing Requires Remark Methinks

Is there anything better than an old picture postcard - with a dramatic scene of waves breaking over the Blackpool seashore on one side and a cryptic message on the other The card appears to have been sent by my grandfather, Albert Beanland, to his brother, Fowler Beanland. The message reads, “Methinks remark requires reversing.” Make of that what you will.