Family History: Welcome to Mrs Jagger’s world

Nov 25 2009 by John Avison, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

IT’S impossible to even glance at the history of Honley village without coming across the name of Mrs Mary Jagger.

Her History of Honley, published in 1914, was limited in scope, personal in approach and lacking the research discipline that defines modern local histories.

But compared with the dry, academic, list-burdened work of, for instance, Dr H T Moorhouse, who wrote The History of Kirkburton and the Graveship of Holme half a century earlier, her anecdotal style was a breath of fresh air.

She has remained popular ever since and is held in respect to this day by the history group of Honley Civic Society.

So much so that the group has dug out her recollections of childhood in Honley (where she was born in 1849) which were originally published as a series of articles in the Huddersfield Weekly Examiner.

These first appeared in print in 1931. In the Civic Society’s book The Further Reminiscences of Mrs Jagger they are collected together with articles and letters the lady wrote to local newspapers between 1915 and 1935. She died in 1936.

The material, amply and cleverly illustrated, shows a woman of strong, even stubborn character, self-made and proud of it.

“She may have been Britain’s first postmistress when she took over from her father John Tilburn,” said Peter Marshall of the Civic Society, who organised much of the research for the project.

The post office at the time was on Southgate.

Taken prematurely out of school, she held the position of postmistress for 13 years, putting her at the epicentre of village affairs. She knew Honley and its people intimately and cherished and defended them all her life.