Yorkshire House Histories: An Edwardian semi in Bradford's middle-class suburbs where television history was made in 1929

In 1929, the first television broadcast from outside London was made – and the unlikely setting was a room inside the Georges’ home, then occupied by Sydney and Dorothy Wright. The Wrights were movers and shakers of the day in early 20th-century Shipley – Dorothy stood in local elections in 1923 and Sydney, from a prominent mill-owning family, was a radio enthusiast who worked at Christopher Pratt & Sons furniture store in Bradford.

It was only three years previously that Scottish inventor John Logie Baird had patented the world’s first television set, and in 1929 the BBC decided to broadcast television programmes, with the Baird Company licensed to make them.

When the BBC looked beyond the capital, a series of coincidences brought them to Shipley. Baird’s technical advisor, Harry Barton-Chapple. was a former electical engineering lecturer at Bradford Technical College,and he knew Sydney Wright, who was president of the Bradford Wireless Society and able to supply his own radio receiver and loudspeaker. The production ‘crew’ headed to Bankfield Drive to make broadcasting history.

It wasn’t until 1930 that they could transmit sound and vision at the same time, so the Shipley transmission was two minutes of each. A reporter from the Bradford Telegraph & Argus was invited to witness the occasion. The broadcast was of a profile of the Prince of Wales’s face.

The newspaper’s photographer took an image of the living room where the broadcast was made from, but when Lynn’s attention was drawn to Bankfield Drive’s role in the story, she realised by the position of a door that it was actually one of the bedrooms.

Sydney’s work at Christopher Pratt’s meant he was able to arrange for Bradford’s transmitter to be erected at the shop, and an aerial was strung between two mill chimneys which have since been demolished.

In a serendipitous twist, the Georges’ eldest daughter, Maya, studied broadcast journalism at university, having grown up in the house where the concept was nursed. By 1932, the Wrights had moved to Stockport, where Sydney began a career in police radio.

Nab Wood in 1910 was respectable and fairly exclusive. As Shipley industrialised, more housing was built for mill workers, with landowners like the Rosse, Crompton-Stansfield and Wainman families selling off farmland for building. Although the Georges don’t know which developer built their street – the earliest houses date from 1903 – they did discover that Dorothy Wright’s father, a Mr Kendall, was a Saltaire builder with a road named after him.

Owners changed frequently in the first 20 years or so, though from 1960 until the Georges’ arrival their house had been occupied by just one family. Their two major renovations have uncovered and enhanced the various period features.

"We were attracted to the house because the people there before had only done it up around the time they moved in, so a lot of the Edwardian features were untouched, such as the stained glass windows, skirting and internal doors. The staircase had been boarded over in the 1960s so we ‘unboxed’ it. We built an extension two years ago, but we had to use reclaimed stone and it all had to match up. Next door were modernising at the same time so they donated some of their original doors to us,” said Lynn.

Interesting quirks include a panel for the servants’ bells, and a fold-down wooden table in the utility which Lynn believes the maids would have used for their meals. The front-facing rooms have ornate coving, suggesting they were used for the family, unlike the servants’ bedrooms. They were less fortunate with fireplaces, finding only a solid marble surround from the 1960s rather than any original hearths.

"This street took quite a long time to build, and it was during a period of expansion for Shipley. We did a bit of research before the television link, so we already knew about Dorothy Wright and her politics – she was a popular woman. Our street Whatsapp group was how we found out that the house had been in a T&A article, and although the rooms didn’t match up at first, the name Wright seemed a bit of a coincidence. I eventually realised it was our house.

"When we moved in, there was a big shed which had electricity in the garden, and we now think this was where Sydney’s radio club held their meetings and stored equipment.

"There were two owners before the Wrights, but the trend back then seemed for people to not stay for very long. They are big family houses and these days you are considered a newcomer to the street if you’ve been here less than 20 years! The houses are double-fronted and they were built for middle-class owner-occupiers.”

Lynn’s research of old newspaper articles threw up another intriguing link to the house – a court case in the 1930s involving a family who lived there from a religious sect that did not believe in medical intervention. When the wife fell ill, a doctor was summoned only shortly before she died, and a judge later questioned their actions, suggesting they had called him merely to get a death certificate.

"We haven’t been able to find much else out about the occupations of people who lived here. Sydney’s family were upholsterers and his brothers worked in the family business, but he seems to have been slightly different.”

Lynn, who works in media and IT, is now hopeful that her home’s place in history will be recognised, at least on a local scale.

"I’d like to get a blue plaque. It’s a piece of history and we only discovered it by chance. John Logie Baird’s grandson Iain lives in Shipley and he has visited now – he said he’d walked past several times and always wanted to knock on the door!

"We’ve gone from not knowing much of its story to being inundated with history. A few decades ago, you wouldn’t have got ordinary people like us living here. My husband, a postman of 30 years, has black British heritage and we are not typical English middle-class.”

The Yorkshire House Histories series is now behind The Yorkshire Post’s Premium content paywall

If you would like to nominate your home to appear in House Histories, email [email protected]

The first house we featured was a Salt mill workers’ cottage in Saltaire and the second was a converted barn beside an Anglo-Saxon church in the village of Ledsham, near Castleford