LAST week in Yesterday Once More we wrote about the great speech that Joseph Rowntree gave when he accepted the honorary freedom of York on May 17, 1911.
We illustrated the piece with a number of photos of York itself taken in that year, to give some context to the speech.
In the course of trawling through the City of York Council’s Imagine York website to find suitable old photographs, however, we were struck by just how many and varied pictures from that decade were.
So here, and in no particular order, we bring you a few more, to show you how busy, eventful and sometimes simply quirky that year was, a century ago and just three short years before the Great War.
Our first photo is an unusual view of York Racecourse. The image, taken on May 19, shows the five shilling stand. “The stand is being tested with sandbags giving a load of two cwts per foot by J&T Biscomb and Son,” the caption informs us. Good to see that health and safety was alive and well even back then.
The year 1911 was also when George V was crowned, on June 22. There were celebrations and street parties in York, as elsewhere around the country. The group of children in our photo are in York Road at the junction with Front Street in Acomb.
1911 was also the year when Holgate Bridge was built. Our third photo shows it actually under construction.
Joseph Rowntree wasn’t the only person honoured by the city in 1911. The painter William Etty was, too, when, on February 20, a statue to him was unveiled outside the city art gallery.
We showed you one photograph of the unveiling last week. Here’s another, which gives a good impression of the size of the crowd which gathered that day.
The man in the bowler hat, to the right, may be George Walker Milburn, the sculptor who created the statue, who was 67 at the time and had, incredibly, another 30 years of working life ahead of him.
And finally, we couldn’t resist the wonderful photo of police officers taking part in Military Sunday in Duncombe Place. They seem to march with the precision and pride of a crack troop of guards – apart from the two officers in the second rank who can’t help taking a sneak peek at the camera… Stephen Lewis • Photos reproduced courtesy of the City of York Council’s Imagine York website, imagineyork.co.uk 
Work on Holgate Bridge, which was built in 1911
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