DICK HUDSON'S

DICK HUDSON’S by Gary Firth President of Bingley Local History Society. In these days of regular eating-out and affordable car ownership, the Fleece Inn, High Eldwick is better known to thousands of Bingley folk and to the natives of mid-Airedale as ‘Dick Hudson’s’. Over a century ago it was becoming a favourite holiday spot for thousands of working class families from the nearby textile towns of Bradford Shipley and Keighley. and Whitsuntide, they came in their hundreds via the local railway system to the stations at Bingley and Saltaire with the aim of crossing Rombalds Moor to Ilkley and back in a day. Many settled for the natural beauties of Shipley Glen and Baildon Moor and ventured no further. The very young opted for the attractive new fairground and Japanese gardens at the top of the Glen railway on Shipley Glen. The more intrepid and athletic minded were eager to be as far away as possible from the clamour and smells of their work places and set out to reach Ilkley and back in the day. For them, the journey was refreshed by breaks for dinner and tea at Dick Hudson’s, a halfway house in each direction. On those busy Bank Holiday weekends mine host and his staff served roast beef and Yorkshire pudding(one shilling) or a ploughman’s lunch (two pence), in addition to the famous ham and egg teas, from six in the morning till eleven o’clock at night . The ladies at the tavern had been busy baking bread and cakes and boiling hams since the previous Sunday, in preparation for the hungry hordes about to pour over the Glen or invade the road up from Eldwick. This feeding of the multitude went on for the whole of the bank holiday period. Each day the last meal was served at 11 pm falling into bed at two a.m. the staff were up four hours later to feed livestock and serve the day’s first customers. This annual pilgrimage to Dick Hudson’s took place for much of the Victorian and Edwardian era. Only with the easier accessibility of coastal resorts and the introduction’ of daily charabanc trips did this tradition decline. Since the seventeenth century there had been an ancient travellers ‘tavern ‘ The Plough Boy’ on the old pack horse trail from Bingley to Ilkley. This had been a former farmhouse at Rattle Bank on the Otley Road. However , with the construction of the new road from Eldwick the liquor license of the old pub was transferred to a Mr Tommy Anderson at Highgate Farm ( The site of the present pub built in 1900) Back in 1809 the farm and public house, now the Fleece became the property of Thomas Hudson in whose family they remained until1895. Thomas passed on the Fleece Inn to his son Richard in 1850 and he stayed as landlord for over thirty years. It was during ‘Dick’s’ stewardship that the tavern became so popular with Airedale’s urban workers gaining it the more familiar name of Dick Hudson’s. Two other members of the Hudson family subsequently ran the pub following the death of the celebrated Dick Hudson in 1878. Towards the end of the 19th century an Austrian business man became proprietor of the inn and had great plans to commercialise the site with fountains and pleasure gardens . None of these plans came to pass but in 1900 the old farmhouse and tavern were demolished and replaced by the present day building. The first landlord of this new inn was Mr J Newsome who was succeeded by his brother in law in 1913 Visitors to the pub in those pre 1914 days included the Earl of Harewood and musical hall stars Like Zena Dare and Vesta Tilly, however none were so remembered as Jonny Baker, a former railway navvy, who ran a canteen for the labourers who were building the nearby Weecher reservoir. Johnny also operated an illicit still and the was twice fined at Bingley & magistrates court for various misdemeanours. He paid fines of fifty pounds and one hundred pounds instantly…. In sovereigns! Jonny ended his days frying am’n’eggs at the pub in his famous 18inch frying pan, ‘scenting the air as far as Eldwick village with the aroma of home fed ham, so that walkers on Ilkley Moor and on the Eldwick road ‘twitched their noses like camels coming to water.’ and lengthened their stride accordingly for the last quarter of a mile. By 1923, the pub had given its name to a competitive road walking race between Bradford city centre and High Eldwick . The race was the outcome of a wager made by Harry Redgrave, a waiter at Bradford’s Midland Hotel, who argued with his fellow members of the Yorkshire Road Walking Club that it was possible to walk from Piccadilly in Bradford, to Dick Hudson’s on the edge of Ilkley moor in one hour. The wager was taken up and the original course via Shipley Glen was duly completed by Frank Holt, a Bradford postman, in 59 minutes and twenty seconds. The event caught the imagination of the public, who turned out in great numbers to watch what was to become an annual spectacle. The difficulties of judging the walk over the rough terrain of Shipley Glen, forced the officials to reroute the race in 1929 into the centre of Bingley and up Park Road. The race was later opened to walkers other than those of the Y.R.W.C and was sponsored by the Telegraph and Argus. Older ‘Insider’ readers might recall competitors passing the Prince Of Wales park and Otley Road Eldwick as they neared the huge crowd assembled at the finishing line of Dick Hudson’s. G. Firth N.B. In future editions of Insider, Dr Gary Firth as President of the Bingly Local History Society will present a series of Bingley History articles entitled ‘Corners and Characters of old Bingley‘.