Obituary — Stan Lawrence 1926 -2013

Stan was a quietly friendly man with a twinkle in his eye. He was a widower, father, teacher, researcher and member of NCHT committee 1995-9. He wrote two articles for this journal. Stan was born at Kings Heath, Birmingham, the youngest of five children. He attended Kings School until he was 14 and literally the same day, got on his bike and found a part-time job as an errand boy for a clothing firm. He was too young to join the RAF with his older brother and his eyesight was not good enough to join the air crew for which he had volunteered when the war came, so he served in the Civil Defence as a messenger. By 1943 he was training as a junior draughtsman and then worked as an assistant spectographist until 1947 when he enrolled at Birmingham Central Technical College for a year. On leaving there, he began a career of 40 years of teaching by getting three consecutive posts as a temporary assistant. This lead to a teacher’s certificate from his year at Birmingham ETC. So by then qualified, he was able to work as a qualified assistant at Pitmaston School and then Christ Church C of E, both in Birmingham, which took him to 1955 when he moved to Hollyoakes Field School in Redditch and he got married. He had met Win his future wife when they had attended the same training course. By 1961 he had two young children, Hilary and Christopher, and moved to a new teaching job in Bingley. He stayed in Yorkshire for the rest of his life, getting a post as deputy head at Bracken Bank CP in Keighley. His final post until he retired in 1986 was as headmaster at Burton in Lonsdale Endowed Primary School. It was here that he began his research into local history and accumulated a wealth of information especially about Burton and the surrounding villages - photographs, floor plans of Burton Pottery, tithe maps and historic articles. This archive is deposited at Lancaster University, Special Collections, and comprises a large blue box and some twenty tubes of documents and was approved by Prof. Angus Winchester and Librarian David Barron. Prof. Winchester writes, ‘what makes this archive so valuable is that it was assiduously collected over many years and is well-organized and therefore usable by other researchers. It is particularly valuable because the archive sources of North Craven are so horribly scattered, requiring visits to several record offices; so Stan’s work has saved later researchers a lot of time and effort. I know the archive has been used fairly regularly since being deposited in the library. When he retired Stan and Winnie moved to Austwick where he continued his research, writing two articles for this Journal, one on Agriculture in Austwick and the other on the Austwick Weavers, and leading a walk for the Trust around Burton. He regularly contributed talks in Austwick and always lent a hand at local events. As a young man Stan was a climber and made many trips to the nearest hills of Wales and this culminated in later climbing the Matterhorn. His other passion was for flying and he took every opportunity to get in the air in hot air balloons and light aircraft. For his 80th birthday he had a lesson in a glider. Stan’s wife predeceased him in 2012 and he leaves two children, Hilary and Christopher, who gave me a great deal of the information in this obituary.