READING recently in Judith Cook’s biography of JB Priestley of his father, Jonathan, and mother, Emma, and her brother, Tom, I was reminded that I had a somewhat grainy photograph of the pub of which Tom was for many years the landlord - the Volunteer Hotel in Green Lane, Manningham.

Cook’s book spells the surname Holt, but in the census and other records it is Hoult. In the 1891 census we find Tom and Emma living with their widowed mother and four siblings in Silk Street, above Lister’s Mill. Tom is a grocer’s errand boy and Emma a silk picker, and thus was indeed a mill girl, which information Cook had found to be ‘suspect’.

She married Jonathan Priestley that year. Tom was to marry an Irish girl, Sarah Elizabeth, born in Clonmel, Tipperary. In 1901 Tom was a draper’s agent and the couple were living in Chatsworth Place, off Oak Lane. But in 1906, according to licensing records, they took the Volunteer Hotel.

Green Lane ran off Lumb Lane and west of it was developed in the 1840s Montgomery and Picton Streets, Wood Square and Green Lane Court, in what had formerly been the Delf Field, according to the deeds held by Bradford Council.

The house was converted to a beerhouse in 1865 when it was bought by brewer Joseph Holmes, who was managing partner in the Old Brewery in the centre of Bradford, before setting up in business with his sons as JR Holmes and Sons at Dowley Gap, Bingley in 1890. An early landlord, John Slater, had drowned himself in the canal at Bolton Bridge in March 1878, having been ‘low-spirited’ for some time, according to the inquest.

Tom was altogether jollier and by all accounts a typical publican, a ‘real character’, according to informants for Cook’s book.

Every year he gave his regulars a treat in the form of a trip to the seaside or the Dales and on a metal matchbox given to customers had a caricature of himself on the lid.

He perhaps let his hospitality get the better of him, as in 1910 he was fined £2 for ‘supplying intoxicating liquor to a police constable without the authority of a senior officer’. In the census of the following year, we find Tom, then aged 37, Sarah Elizabeth, daughters Dorothy and Annie and a servant Eileen Condon, like Sarah from Clonmel.

Tom died whilst at the Volunteer in 1929, by which time the pub was a Hammonds house, that firm having bought the Holmes estate in 1919, and from when my photo, which the former Bass North allowed me to copy some years ago, dates.

In 1954 the area was the subject of a compulsory purchase order for redevelopment into council flats, which took in the Volunteer and also the Cambridge Hotel behind it in Picton Street. They ceased trading in 1957.

Only the Perseverance Hotel in Lumb Lane was left to enjoy some later notoriety for illicit drugs before being closed and converted to a chemist’s shop.

* Dr Paul Jennings is author of The Local: A History of the English Pub and Bradford Pubs, third edition 2021, available from bookshops, The History Press and Amazon.