1930s Photo Album Kettlewell and Burnsall

Today we are having a look at the earliest photos from the 1930s photo album I bought from an antiques store. Today it doesn't really matter that I don't know the family who put the album together, because they don't appear in any of today's selection. I'll make up for it in the next article...

These photos were all taken in two villages along the River Wharfe in Yorkshire. I haven't been to either of these villages myself, that I can remember, so it's as much a journey of discover for me as it is for any of my readers. Anyway we have yet to arrive, for we are simply "near Kettlewell"

In any other year I would have been in the car and off to have a look at these places, no doubt taking a few of my own photos. However, as we currently sit in the Coronavirus lockdown, this isn't possible. I'll look at it as a challenge for happier times. I'll be looking to identify the original location and if it has changed beyond all recognition to take some photographs to illustrate what has happened over the last 90 years.

This is something that hit me only after I had been through the album myself. There are no babies in the family. The youngest child would be around six or seven in 1930 so that even if they were still alive they would be in the second half of their nineties today. The likelihood is that no one shown in the albums still survives. If by any chance one or more of the family's children still survive, I would love to meet them and go through the album with them. Wouldn't that be something?

Now that we are actually in the village itself, I'd be expecting to still be able to view this scene - though perhaps on a slightly more level plane. It is likely this was taken on a Kodak Box Brownie camera. Many cameras of the day had no viewfinder. You simply pointed the camera at the required scene and squinted along the top of it, or the side of it. Plenty of scope for tilting it a little bit. Lots of scope for looking in the wrong direction and missing your intended subject altogether! Anyway, for added interest, just let me point out that this is Kettlewell's Village Hall and it was the location for the WI in the movie Calendar Girls.

St Mary's church Kettlewell is mostly a rebuild of 1882-1885, although the west tower (the tower - there is only the one...) is a survivor of a previous church and dates from 1820. Pevsner wasn't all that interested in it I'm afraid though this approach up the lane to a lych gate looks attractive enough.

And here is the River Wharfe itself. One of Yorkshire's major rivers it flows for 65 miles from its source in Langstrothdale near Beckermonds to its end as it flows into the mighty River Ouse, which at 129 miles - all within a single county - stops the Wharfe from getting above itself. I haven't yet found out when the current bridge at Kettlewell was built. It takes the B6160 road over the river. I doubt it is the same one that the Abbot of Fountains Abbey paid over two shillings to repair in the mid 1400s.

A few miles south of Kettlewell the B6160 touches the River Wharfe again at Burnsall. The album contains just two photographs of Burnsall, so I've tagged them onto the end of this article. The bridge dates from 1609 but what we see today is mostly, or perhaps entirely, of an 1884 restoration after flooding damaged the original.

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