IN the latest on our series of articles looking at the district’s old pubs, Paul Jennings, author of Bradford Pubs and The Local: A History of the English Pub, writes about the Olive Branch

THE end was near for the Olive Branch in Otley Road when this photograph (courtesy of Bradford Local Studies) was taken in 1960.

It had opened as a beer house in about 1850, according to the police register, at the corner with Mab Street. It was therefore part of the neighbourhood from the very first, as the district above the old Cock and Bottle inn was developed with workers’ housing from the 1840s.

King Charles and Cavalier Streets immediately below it commemorated the Civil War, when the royalists besieged the Parliamentarian town. Its rather unusual name derives from the Biblical story of Noah discovering that the flood waters had abated when the dove returned with a branch in its beak.

It sold in turn the beer of a number of local brewers: Jonathan Knowles of Denholme, William Murgatroyd, who brewed at the Drayman’s Arms (later the Goldsboro) in Bolton Road, before finally being bought by Hammonds of Manchester Road in 1890.

They it was who extended the pub into an adjoining shop to create a singing room, along with a tap room, bar, or ‘long stand up’ as it was nicknamed, and a small snug, which was how it was remembered to me by a local lady back in the 1980s.

Hammonds United Breweries, as it became in 1946, decorated it in their distinctive house style of white walls and name board in the mid-1950s.

In my recent piece on the Harp of Erin, I highlighted the town’s Irish community. This part of Otley Road was home to another 19th century immigrant group - the Italians.

The 1861 census shows families of musicians living in Paper Hall Street and Court named Bacigalupo, Farrari, and Tasso. More families followed, among them the Tagliones, of whose third generation Frederick published a fascinating memoir in 1999 in the book Aspects of Bradford.

In addition to earning a living as musicians playing the barrel organ or Tingelary, they made and sold ice-cream, like Joseph Cadamateri at the beginning of the 20th century, whose ‘Caddy’s ices’ were still selling in the Dewsbury area into the 1990s, and who is remembered in a Telegraph & Argus report of February 27, 2016.”

l IN that T&A article, we look at the neighbourhood that developed around the ice-cream company. “Between 1876 and 1920, Bradford saw the settlement and growth of a large Italian population around the Otley Road, Wapping Road and Leeds Road areas,” said regular Remember When? contributor Vincent Finn.

“In the early years of the 20th century, Joseph Cadamateri - also later known as Joseph Caddy - hired a hand cart, made some ice-cream, put it in a tub stacked with ice and went round the streets selling it.

“The Minchella family and Diffouri family were also well known in the area for their ice-cream,” added Vincent. “I think they lived either on King Charles Street or King Charles Court.”