John Hargreaves is a native of Burnley and recalls his first personal involvement with local history at the age of four when he rode, face smeared with soot and holding a brush, on the back of a coal wagon in a tableau depicting the evils of industrialisation in Lancashire.[i'>more... His working life was as a secondary history teacher, and he took every opportunity to escape from the constraints of the formal curriculum to introduce his students to the fascination of local material and issues, and local facets of national and international history. An early product developed with a like-minded colleague was an archive teaching unit on the Luddites of West Yorkshire based on contemporary newspaper accounts, facsimiles and transcripts from local record collections; this has since been reissued in a second edition and is still in use in local schools. At the same time as his teaching career progressed, John developed his own local history research interests in Luddism and Methodism by studying part-time for first an MA and then a PhD at the University of Huddersfield, where he is currently a visiting research fellow. He has now retired from full-time teaching, but is still actively involved in school history with activities such a examining and in adult education as a WEA tutor.

 

John's association with the Halifax Antiquarian Society began in the 1980s; he has served as Honorary Secretary, and as President, and is now a Vice President. Alongside the many tasks required of a secretary, he initiated their annual Day School that has become a major event in the Society's calendar, creating, as he has put it 'a dialogue between academic debate and the grassroots study of local history'. The first was in 1988 marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of E P Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class which was written whilst the author was a resident of Halifax and made extensive use of local sources. Edward Thompson provided a retrospective view of his celebrated book, and other speakers on the programme were Dorothy Thompson, Edward Royle, and John Munsey Turner.

 

Since 1992 John Hargreaves has been editor of the Transactions of the Halifax Antiquarian Society which has evolved under his guidance to become a widely respected journal setting an example of what can be achieved by a largely amateur publication. Most of the articles are the work of local researchers and the Society's own members, and under John's editorial leadership increasing numbers of people have submitted papers, and reached impressive standards of research, style and presentation.

 

A founder member of the Huddersfield Local History Society, John is also actively involved in other local organisations including the Halifax Civic Trust, the Halifax Urban Renaissance Town Team, and the West Yorkshire branch of the Historical Association.

 

John's own contributions to local history have also included a full-length history of Halifax, numerous articles and tourist guidebooks. He has made special studies of photographs, manorial court rolls and maps as source materials, scripted several video histories, contributed to TV and radio documentaries and prepared texts for exhibitions. His contributions to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography now number 35.

 

One of John's particular methodological specialisms is in oral history. Since 2006 he has been co-ordinator for oral history for the Methodist Church, with responsibility for building up the archive of interviews with relevant people throughout the country. His interest and involvement in the history of Methodism is long-lived and extensive, and his standing in the denomination has been recognised by his appointment as General Secretary of the Wesley Historical Society.

 

John Hargreaves has spent a lifetime going beyond the call of duty in support of local history and history in the community, as lecturer, author, mentor and stalwart member of local organisations. He has opened the subject to many people with encouragement and support which has been widely appreciated.

 

John's many and diverse commitments meant he was unable to join us at the award ceremony on Local History Day last summer. His wife kindly stepped in to represent him on that occasion, and we were pleased to arrange for our President David Hey to give John his scroll in person at the 'Local History After Hoskins' conference at Leicester University in July.

 

 

 

 

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