When an Ilkley school reached its centenary, the town's Box Tree restaurant had just opened and US swimmer Mark Spitz was winning seven gold medals at the Munich Olympics.

During the celebrations in 1972, pupils and staff at All Saints C of E Primary School produced more than 100 embroidered murals depicting important events at the school, in Ilkley and across the world - one for each year of its existence.

Soon after its completion, the handiwork went missing and it was thought it had been destroyed but it was discovered again in a loft when the former school site in Leeds Road was converted into apartments.

And special memories came flooding back for retired teachers Peggy Lambert and Kathleen Waugh when they were invited to the school's new building in Skipton Road to look at the murals.

The pair were instrumental in its production and spent most of the centenary year putting the art work together.

Mrs Lambert, of Ilkley, said: "It's so exciting to find out about it after all these years.

"I've tried to find out about it since I left the school and I kept asking people where it had gone but nobody knew.

"It means a great deal to me to see that it has not gone. It's something that should be kept and put on show for the people of Bradford to see as it is a piece of social history."

The 84-year-old said pupils in her and Mrs Waugh's classes made the pictures using old cloth and stitched the pieces together.

She said: "It really is amazing because we had forgotten how much work had gone into it at the time.

"It does bring back many wonderful memories that had disappeared from memory."

Mrs Waugh, 83, of Cracoe, near Grassington, said the pair had often had to take pieces home at weekends to finish them and make sure the work stayed on schedule.

The pair retired from the school in the late 1970s after teaching there for 30 years each.

Other embroidered panels depict the joining together of the boys' and girls' schools in 1950, the opening of St Margaret's Church in Ilkley in 1874, and the assassination of John F Kennedy in 1963.