Manchester House, Percy Inman's shop in KettlewellManchester House, Percy Inman's shop in Kettlewell
Manchester House, Percy Inman's shop in Kettlewell

The real All Creatures Great and Small: New exhibition of fascinating early 20th century photographs of Dales life

An incredible treasure trove of photographs capturing life in the Dales in the early 20th century is to go on display to the public.

Members of the Upper Wharfedale Arts and Literature Society have spent the past two years researching the Percy Inman Collection - a series of glass plates which offer an insight into life in the Grassington and Kettlewell area from the late 1800s to the 1930s.

Inman ran Manchester House, the post office and village shop in Kettlewell, and he commissioned photographs depicting typical local scenes to sell as postcards to visitors. The 400 plates were then forgotten about before being rediscovered by the store's later owners, the Roberts family.

They will now form part of the Presenting the Past exhibition at Grassington Town Hall next month, an event supported by a National Lottery Heritage Fund grant.

The group have harnessed the talents of local writers and musicians to create a book and even songs and poems to accompany the exhibition.

"They depict very specific shops, pubs and places in a small area, mainly in the early 1900s. They also have people in them - which was unusual then as it was such a long process to take a photograph. They really do capture the landscape and the history," said curator Geraldine Norman, whose home village of Arncliffe is featured.

"We also took modern photos of the same scenes, and it's amazing how little has actually changed. Maybe in 100 years' time people will be running the same exhibition based on our new archive!"

The plates are now stored in the county archives at Northallerton, but the digital images will be available online as part of the project.

Stand-out shots for Geraldine include a picture of a Mr Jacques, the sexton of the village church in Kettlewell, who was also a lead miner and photographed sitting outside his cottage. A local doctor who examined the image pointed out that it was clear the elderly man was actually blind, possibly from his years working in the dangerous industry. Another evocative photograph features dancing at a sheep fair in the same village.

Most of the local pubs are included, including The King's Head at Kettlewell and The Falcon at Arncliffe, and there is a picture of children sitting in a charablanc on an outing to Buckden.

"In the pictures of Arncliffe you can see the bus stop and village shop, which have both gone. The dates probably range until the 1930s, as some become quite modern."

The 1930s is the period in which the TV series All Creatures Great and Small, which is currently being filmed in Upper Wharfedale, is set, and Geraldine expects visitors to enjoy seeing agricultural scenes from the same era that James Herriot's creator, vet Alf Wight, would have spent working on Dales farms.

"Our project has produced a lot of material that is in effect the ‘real’ All Creatures story. The oral histories include farmers and farm workers telling stories of their lives on Dales farms in the 1930s and 40s; the photographs include shots of farms and animals of that period too. There are pictures of the locations used by the TV crew as they really looked in the 1930s. We are playing dance music of the period which locals danced to in the 1930s.

"Alf Wight would recognise so much!"

What has surprised her is that few people in the photographs have been identified as ancestors of families still living in the area today.

"We would like to find relatives, as so far nobody has really come up with any specifics and it's a question we want answering. We don't have many names. Yet the dale was a very fluid society - families were always moving in and out, and even farmers moved long distances from places like Wales. It wasn't the stereotype of generations living in the same place, and there's also a pattern of emigration to Australia and New Zealand."

Presenting the Past is open on weekends at Grassington Town Hall from April 30 to May 8.