Pub quiz trivia time! What links Wood Street in Huddersfield to both Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket" and this Pulp album cover?

I had my fingers crossed that the 50th anniversary of the 1852 Holmfirth Flood in 1902 might have prompted a newspaper journalist to seek out eyewitness stories from survivors and indeed that's what happened. huddersfield.exposed/s/78222

This short thread has once again sent me on another fruitless search to find the source of Betjemen's alleged description of Golcar as like a "Provence of the North".

Not a street name, but a special shout out to the residents of Nether Shitlington 💩 Over Shitlington 💩 and Middle Shitlington 💩 (all between Huddersfield and Wakefield) who collectively decided to rename their respective villages in the 1920s (presumably on the grounds of embarrassment)

Very pleased to have rooted out another eyewitness account of the 1852 Holmfirth Flood -- this time from George Hirst, the son of Mary Hirst whose Bible was salvaged several weeks after the flood on 21 April with the rusty imprint of her reading glasses inside. huddersfield.exposed/s/78157

From 1934, aka "the good ol' days when you could blow local landmarks up to make way for quarries" 💥

Hats off to Oldfield & Studdard of Kirkgate, Huddersfield, for this terrible pun in January 1934! Interest in Nessie had started to grow after a sighting in July 1933 by George Spicer and his wife. A few months after this advert appeared, the famous (hoax) "Surgeon's Photo" was taken.

"FFBRUARY"

If you have ancestors buried in Undercliffe Cemetery, Bradford this newly launched database created by the Undercliffe Cemetery Charity might be of interest. Details in the photo below. #FamilyHistory #WestYorkshire #Cemetery

The start of 2026 has filled me with a mild panic that it'll soon be the 175th anniversary of the Holmfirth Flood of 1852 and I really should try and set a finishing line for ending my research into it 😲 In the meantime, I've put together this page today: huddersfield.exposed/s/78056

Just finished watching the last episode. Not sure it needed quite so much AI generated cold breath tho. Eyewitness accounts from the Holmfirth Flood of 1852 can be found here (and hopefully I'll add a few more in 2026) huddersfield.exposed/s/54091

A couple of photos of the Karrier Works' First World War Roll of Honour. Firstly in situ in the Karrier Motors Ltd offices in Huddersfield and then in the workshop/museum of Geoff Lumb at Golcar back in 2020. I believe it's now on display in Huddersfield Drill Hall. huddersfield.exposed/s/28360

I'm still living in hope that the "History of Netherthong" site might yet still be revived in its original format. However, until then, I've started to reproduce some of its content. Hopefully Mike would approve! huddersfield.exposed/wiki/History...

Peace on Earth and goodwill to all men... unless they're the men from the neighbouring township, in which case Christmas Day is an excuse to put on your clogs and give them a violent kicking! ⚽🤕

An undated photo postcard. huddersfield.exposed/archive/item...

As featured on a Bamforth & Co. Ltd. (Holmfirth) song postcard from the early 1900s.

I know I have posted this before but it wouldn't be Christmas without it. Winter 1947. A single-deck bus marooned in deep snow on Ashes Lane below Castle Hill, Huddersfield. It was one of three Huddersfield Corporation buses stranded here for weeks during the brutal winter; the

Pushing on with indexing WW2 newspaper articles, but getting easily distracted by the adverts. Ladies of Huddersfield -- why not go and make bombs for Russia in Staffordshire?

If you watched "SAS Rogue Heroes" on BBC then you could almost imagine that his wonderful photo of Richard Lister (1918-1941) of Kirkburton was a publicity still for the series. He volunteered for the No. 11 (Scottish) Commando unit to help unleash Churchill's "reign of terror" upon the enemy.

Feels like it's been a long slog, but the research into individuals on the WW2 roll of honour has caught up with the Huddersfield Examiner article transcriptions (which are complete up to the end of June 1941). huddersfield.exposed/wiki/WW2_Pro... huddersfield.exposed/wiki/Categor...

A curious place name! The area was part of a large hunting estate belonging to the Ramsdens of Longley Hall. They seemingly tended to call a spade a spade and the hunting dogs were kennelled at Dog Kennel Bank. "Marten Bank" is believed to be a reference to a local pine martens colony.

Christmas has come early for me and I'm over the moon that I may have played a very small part in the story of this Second World War helmet which belonged to a Quartermaster Sergeant in the 2/7th Battalion, Duke of Wellington's Regiment. Hopefully I'll be able to reveal a bit more soon! 🎄

The "commentator's curse" clearly isn't a modern thing. In February 1827, Yorkshire newspapers reported on the good health and longevity of Joshua Whitehead of Addlecroft, Lepton. A few weeks later, they reported his death.

For those interested in Bamforths of Holmfirth, I stumbled across this 1898 article illustrated with their photographs yesterday: archive.org/details/wide...

Apparently you could buy bottled farts in Wales in the 1880s

Definitely a good time of the year for towpathing

Currently messing about with the geolocation data I've got for the around 4,000 individuals in the local roll of honour. The aim is to try and suggest who might have known who, e.g. lived nearby, went to the same school, attended the same church, worked at the same place, etc.

Things I did not expect to do when researching local WW2 deaths... I've just contacted a pub in Hull to ask if they still say "good night" to the ghost of air-raid warden Ivor Alfred Ellis when they turn the lights off and whether his plaque is still there. huddersfield.exposed/s/77428

This reminds me that I've been pondering whether or not to make page scans of the Chronicle available on the website now that the British Library has placed the scans in the Public Domain. Technically easy for me to do but the storage space required would bump up the hosting costs. Comments welcome!

As someone who gets lots of local history queries, can confirm there's been a big increase in people starting their history research with GenAI/LLM (which just spews out fake facts and hallucinated rubbish) who then wonder why they can't find anything at all to corroborate it.

Fairly certain I've not been asleep at the wheel and missed an important announcement, but Google seem to have kept this bit of news fairly quiet: support.google.com/mail/answer/... If you use your Gmail account to fetch email from another inbox via POP, it'll stop working in a few weeks.

You're right! Home of cloth manufacturer Enos Heppenstall. huddersfield.exposed/wiki/Hazelto...

I wonder if there's a "Huddersfield" somewhere in China? There are (or were) at least two places named "China" in the Huddersfield area -- a cluster of properties off Riley Lane (Kirkburton) and also a China Row at Underbank (Cartworth).

We're only a couple of years away from the 175th anniversary of when a mill engineer in Honley invited the local press to come and watch him connect his wife's breasts to a 100 horse power steam engine. 🫢

I'm old enough to remember when Google was a decent search engine. "Here's an exact result for your query -- you're welcome! Also, here's our utterly useless climate destroying AI to tell you that there are no results for query and that you're a total idiot for confusing Marsden with Edinburgh."

Local history things that have got me flummoxed #8,195: Acre Street in Lindley was previously named "Oxford Road" in the early-to-mid-1800s. Cannot think of a sensible reason why! Somewhere around Acre Mill there was also an "Oxford Row".

Another worthy addition to the author's series of meticulously researched and well-illustrated books on the areas to the NW of Huddersfield (inc. Edgerton and Highfields) if you're on the hunt for Christmas presents. huddersfieldhub.co.uk/new-book-rev... www.huddersfieldhistory.org.uk/publications/

Next on my "to do" list is to ponder how best to get thousands of photos of the late historian Edward J Law's notes and research available online. Managed to save his now defunct websites: edwardjlaw.huddersfield.click

Digital signage on Northern trains to Skipton: "Please have your tickets ready for inspectio." 😕

Bit of a random question... if you're involved with running a membership society, do you rely on "consent" or "contract" as your lawful basis under GDPR for processing personal data (specifically for the purposes of managing that individual's membership)?

@woodsiegirl.bsky.social Have you seen this before? www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

A copy of the 1911 Census return for Dora Thewlis who was boarding along with her sister on Bradley Street South, Huddersfield (a location now under Kingsgate Shopping Centre's car park). Unlike previous census returns, which give her birth place as "Honley", this time she recorded it as "Meltham".

Just reposting this thread in case anyone's interested in how Folly Dolly Falls got its name and didn't catch last night's posts 🫗🎡

This feels like a "choose your own adventure" book and one of the options will open a trapdoor resulting in my death. Unfortunately I can't cheat and do a finger bookmark in the previous page this time 😕

"5,000 Yorkshire women can't be wrong!" - Huddersfield Examiner (22 Jan 1949)

You can also pop the AS numbers (4th column) into this: radar.cloudflare.com/as132203

A shout out to any fellow web server admins who saw a sudden increase in AI bot scrapping requests from around 6:30am today! Based on what I'm seeing, a sizable % of the requests are coming from servers hosted by Amazon and DigitialOcean.

The origin story of Souperman.

This feels like a Zeno Paradox. You can't use this website to check if there's currently a problem with Cloudflare because the website itself uses Cloudflare 😀

Here's an early Christmas present to fellow web server admins -- an analysis of the worst network ranges for AI bot scrapping activity from 3 months of tarpit data (13m+ requests): huddersfield.exposed/files/tarpit... The three columns are: 1) hit count 2) ASN owner 3) parent IP network range