People's recollections

I first visited St Ives in 1935, for the Silver Jubilee of George V, but during the war (1939–1945) we stayed at Austwick with two sisters who had both been nursery chamber maids for the Ferrand family. My father was the buyer for materials at 'Brown & Muff' — the large Bradford department store, now closed. He stored various materials in the courtyard stables block, the one with the large windows, so that if the shop was bombed he could start up again quickly.

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!

When my mother was about 16, in the early 1920s, she worked 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 — a trolley fitted with rollers and filled with stones, hauled over the soaking washing with a pulley above. For ironing she used two flat irons; one heating on the boiler hearth whilst the other was in use.

On Whit Mondays we had a Sunday School treat in 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.

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 onto the moor.

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.

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.

In the 1930s Mrs Chapman, a widowed schoolteacher 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 her straw hat.

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.

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.

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 what I could see. I said I was looking at the entrance to the walled garden. She told me that when she was a little girl it had provided all their food and the estate had been self-sufficient — fruit trees trained against the walls. She'd been brought up in the Keighley Road lodge; her father had been the butler at the mansion, and as children they'd spy through the upstairs balustrade, watching guests arrive in their finery. I recall she said she later became headmistress at Myrtle Park school.

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, walking the path below the mansion, a mother rabbit saw us and began thumping the ground with a rear foot. Small rabbits appeared and ran into the warren — all but one, which sauntered up in its own time. As it entered the hole, the mother gave it a great swipe with her paw before following her family underground.

My grandad, Ernest Greenwood, was tenant farmer at St Ives (1940–1962). The building that is now the café was a large barn with an oblong stone sink along the back wall, where they cleaned and hung game hunted on the estate. Fox tails were taken to Bingley Police Station for a 'ransom' on each one, and the rabbits went to the 'Fur & Feather' butchers near the church in Bingley.