This picture of Thornton Square in Brighouse is from a vintage postcard published in the early 1920s. It had only been called Thornton Square for a few years when the postcard view was taken. It was named after Robert Thornton (1836-1918), who gifted the town a clock, a fire engine, and a place in the record books for being the oldest Mayor in England at the age of 78.
Wanting a suitable illustration for the 1st of May, I turned to my collection of political vintage postcard and find a fine portrait of Philip Snowden MP. Snowden was as full of contradictions as a chocolate teapot - converted to socialism after researching a speech he was due to make on the evils of socialism, eventually becoming Labour's first Chancellor of the Exchequer and then being expelled from the Labour Party for his support of the National Government in 1931.
I seem to remember taking this photograph from somewhere up Beacon Hill Road in Halifax in the early 1970s. The rooftops created a kind of geometric pattern of the type you would get in school text books when you were required to calculate the angles. The TV aerials added a Mondrianesque quality. Stone and steel, slate and chimney pots: a Halifax skyline.
I'm a desktop kind of chap. I don't hold with these new-fangled laptops or the tablets you can settle down in an easy chair with. Give me a good, old-fashioned wooden desk any day of the week, the kind you can pile real books on, not to mention a bang-on-the-keys typewriter as well. Here's my desk from 57 years ago: I can remember it as if it was only yesterday.
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