HONLEY would not be what it is today without input from generations of the Brooke family.

We know them today as the inheritors of Brooke’s Mill, Armitage Bridge, now an office and light industrial complex known as the Yorkshire Technology Park and North Light Gallery.

The latest publication from Honley Civic Society’s history group, The Brookes Of Honley, is pinned on the centenary of the death of a lesser scion of the Brooke dynasty, Canon Charles Edward Brooke.

Charles Edward is linked most closely to the building of the magnificent church of St John The Divine, Kennington, South London in the 1870s.

He was instrumental in reconciling serious differences between High Anglicans and Catholics at the time.

He also founded three schools – one still called the Charles Edward Brook School in Camberwell, London.

Charles Edward died on July 1, 1911 and, like many of his family, is buried in a modest plot in Honley graveyard.

Research for the book has been in the hands of group leader Peter Marshall, the Very Rev Henry Stapleton, former Dean of Carlisle and now a Honley resident, and researcher Maggie Booth.

“We wanted to produce a potted biography of Charles Edward and his brothers and sisters, who made good use of the money from cloth-making at Armitage Bridge Mills,” said Peter.

“The results of Charles Edward’s altruism and that of his brothers Thomas and William are still around us today.