Yorkshire Folk on Holiday

Today’s speaker was Christine Leveridge who’s talk was called Yorkshire Folk on Holiday.

Christine is a local historian and a Deltiologist ( Someone who studies and collects postcards ) She is originally from Dewsbury but lives in Liversidge now and this is her seconded talk for us.

She gave an interesting and nostalgic trip back to the early 1900s, when people would go on holiday during Wakes week in Yorkshire, the factories would shut down the last week of July and the first week of August. Post cards were a way of capturing your time away, you would pose for a picture with a group of people and given a number then you would pick up your postcard at the end of the day after it had been developed. There were interesting postcards of Bridlington, Scarborough, Filey and Whitby and sometimes she compared the postcards then with recent postcards of the same place to see how it had changed.

Christine finished with the story of When Scarborough was bombarded by German battleships in 1914 at the start of WW1, 18 people were killed and images of the destruction were used as propaganda to rally the British people to support the war effort.