This photograph, dated 1943, shows a well-appointed grocer’s shop at 219 Bingley Road. Today the site is still there, in the parade of shops 150 yards past the Tramshed at Saltaire.

In those days it was the custom for grocers to wear either short or knee-length coats to mark them out from shopping customers. The man on the right holds the handlebars of a delivery bicycle. Goods were put in a basket carrier just below the handlebars.

The man on the left with his hands in his pockets glowers at the camera as though posing for a photograph was wasting a busy man’s time.

Tinned goods are piled up like fortifications in the window which also acts as an advertising billboard for, among other things, Chef salmon and potato rolls, Chivers’ jellies, Coleman’s starch and Kunzle cakes.

Judging by public comments on a couple of websites, Kunzle cakes were hugely popular for many years. People still drool, figuratively speaking, over the memory of them, especially one particular brand of chocolate and butter-cream confection known as Showboats.

“To be given a Kunzle cake was to be reassured that one mattered,” said one man.

Tesco has an online recipe based on the original Showboats, consisting of milk chocolate, sponge fingers, butter, sifted icing sugar, strawberries, vanilla extract and chocolate leaves for decoration. It takes 50 minutes to make and bake.

Kunzle cakes were manufactured in a factory in Garrett’s Green, Birmingham. A regional delicacy quickly became a national favourite.

By the 1960s, an estimated 40,000 Kunzle Showboats were being produced weekly. That may not seem a great quantity, but making them was labour intensive because each cake was individually iced and wrapped. Up to 700 people, mainly women, were employed in cake-making.

Evidently these cakes went down a treat in Bradford. But who was the culinary master chef who invented them?

Christian Kunzle was a Swiss chef who came to this country in the 1920s and baked for the House of Commons. He started out with restaurants, but gradually the expanding cake-making business supplanted it.

In 1964, Kunzle was taken over by Fullers. Four years later, the mighty J Lyons & Co bought the business and set about moving the cake-making enterprise to Barnsley. This involved transporting 15-tonne chocolate tanks.

Within a couple of years, with the cost of chocolate rising, making the cakes proved uneconomical and in the mid-1970s Kunzle cakes became just a mouth-watering memory.