Here are a few recollections of St Ives

I First visited St Ives in 1935,for the Silver Jubilee of George 5th but during the war (1939-1945), we stayed at Austwick with two sisters. They had both been nursery chamber maids for the Ferrand family. My father was the buyer for materials at 'Brown and Muffs' (the large departmental store in Bradford - now closed Ed).
He stored various materials in the courtyard stables block, the one with the large windows. If the shop was bombed, he could start up again very quickly.
Mary Shaw

Around 1937 I went on a Workers Educational Association summer ramble to St Ives with my parents. We were courteously received by Mr William Ferrand himself who, sitting in his drawing room, told us about the history of St Ives. The high walls made the estate seem to me a kind of Bluebeard's castle but kindly Mr Ferrand did not seem like an ogre at all!
Frank Walbank, born 1930

When my mother was about 16, in the early 1920s, she was working long hours every day in the St Ives mansion laundry. Washing was done in cast iron boilers and big items were wrung out in a huge mangle consisting of a trolley fitted with rollers and filled with stones. With the aid of a pulley above, the trolley was hauled over the soaking wet washing by the workers. For ironing she used two flat irons; one heating up on the boiler hearth whilst the other was in use.
Majorie Copland, born 1930

On Whit Mondays we had a Sunday School treat at the field behind Coppice Pond. Mr Ferrand's son provided and served tea and currant buns. There was a punt on the pond and we'd kick a ball into the water so the punt would have to be taken out to rescue it. It never rained. Aye, they were happy days then.
Jack Ingham, born 1923

My father was the estate manager and he and I used to take buckets of feed to the pheasant chicks before they were big enough to be released on to the moor.
Donald Copland, born 1927

On VE Day we had a holiday from war work at the General Electric Company. I took my bicycle and sat under a tree, a place of complete peace and tranquillity.
Fay Kramrisch

We had our wedding reception at the mansion in 1969. It was a beautiful day and we walked by the blossoming rhododendrons around the lily pond.
Anne Smith, born 1944

In the 1930s Mrs Chapman, a widowed school teacher who lived in the mansion, tended the water garden and spent a lot of money on it. She used to sit there in summer wearing here straw hat.
Donald Copland, born 1927

People just started referring to it as Baxter's Pond because I worked on it. I was really pleased when they said they were going to name it after me.
John Baxter, born 1949

My parents, Arthur and Amy Beckie, moved into the St Ives Lodge in 1928/9. It had an earth closet but no running water, gas or electricity. We had a bath put in the kitchen when water was laid on.
Nora West, born Beckie 1919

In the 1970s, whilst taking my two young children to the playground, I met an old lady who was blind. She asked me to describe to her what I could see. I said that I was looking at the entrance to the walled garden (now the STRI area). She told me that when she was a little girl it had provided them with all their food and that the estate had been self-sufficient. The walls round the garden had supported fruit trees trained against them. She then went on to tell me how she had been brought up in the Keighley road lodge and that her father had been the buttler at the mansion. When balls were held at the mansion, she and the other children would spy through the upstairs ballustrade, watching the guests arrive in their finery. My recolection is that she had said that she had been, in later years, the headmistress at Myrtle Park school.
Susan Hart

Back in the fifties, we often came to St Ives for a walk. In those days, before myxomatosis, the estate was populated by a huge army of rabbits. One sunny morning we were walking up the path that passes along the lower side of the mansion when we were seen by a mother rabbit. She started to thump the ground with one of her rear feet. Upon hearing this, small rabbits started to appear and ran into the warren. One small rabbit was not at all phased by the danger and took its time, sauntering up to the warren. As it entered the hole, the mother rabbit gave it a great swipe with here paw before following her family underground.
Graham Hart

My Grandad, Ernest Greenwood was tenant farmer at St Ives (1940-1962). The building that is now the cafe was a large barn with a oblong stone sink along the back wall.
This was where they cleaned and hung game that was hunted on the estate.
Fox tails were taken to Bingley Police station and he recieved a ‘Ransom’ for each one, the rabbits were taken to the ‘Fur & Feather’ butchers near the church in Bingley.
Kelly Born 1953

Poem ‘St Ives at Twilight’ by Missy Moo. July 2025

There is a pond where silence breathes,
In a village stitched with stone and trees,
Where swans in white serenity glide,
And ducks leave ripples side by side.

At sundown, peace becomes a sound-
A hush that hums across the ground,
The swoosh of wings, the gentle dip
Of birds as twilight starts to slip.

Then feathers settle like a prayer,
Soft echoes floating through the air.
The sky, now amber, folds in tight
To cradle this slow fall of night.

The scent of bracken, damp and deep,
Of moss that dreams while others sleep,
Clings to the breeze that brushes past,
As if it knows this peace won’t last.

Beneath my boots, the footpath sings -
A crunch, a crackle - earthbound rings,
Each step a verse, each breath a hymn
To stillness wrapped in natures skin.

And here, in Yorkshire’s quiet hold,
With water dusk-lit, brushed in gold,
Happiness walks beside me, free-
A soft, slow truth that simply is,
And only needs a place like this.