It’s just over a decade since the women of the Rylstone and District Women’s Institute produced their famous ‘nude’ calendar, launching a fundraising phenomenon that has been taken up by many others since. The latest ‘Calendar Girls’ to bare all for a good cause are a group of shopkeepers and traders from Slaithwaite. Hilarie Stelfox went along to meet them.

IT DIDN’T take long for Colne Valley boutique owner Heather Croft to drum up support for a Calendar Girls-style photoshoot to raise funds for Kirkwood Hospice and Slaithwaite Waves Centre.

Heather, 53, had her own reasons for organising the venture. It’s less than a year since her mum, Sarah Snowden, died in the hospice at the age of 73.

Heather said: “I wanted to do this in her memory, and raise some money. It costs £1,000 a day for someone to be in the hospice.’’

She discovered that the hospice has many supporters in Slaithwaite and not just those who have lost a relative or friend.

“Most people just said yes straight away,” said Heather. “There were only one or two who said no and that was because their husbands didn’t approve.”

Semi-naked calendars, tastefully shot to give the appearance of revealing more than they actually do, have become a popular and fashionable fundraising choice ever since the women of the Rylstone and District WI in North Yorkshire launched theirs to support Leukaemia Research back in 2000.

The story of The Calendar Girls, as they became known, is now well known and was transformed into both a film and a stage play, inspiring many others to follow suit.

Heather’s own Calendar Girls include everyone from holistic therapists and a coffee shop owner to a steel fabricator, hairdresser and grocer.

They gathered at the Waves Centre in Upper Mills, Slaithwaite, on a bitterly cold pre-Christmas evening to have their photographs taken.

The Waves Centre, founded by Sallyanne Green and her son, Ben Wright, as a training facility for adults with learning disabilities, proved to be the perfect backdrop as the large mill floor has been converted to include kitchens and living rooms. There were props galore, including a pet corn snake called Cordelia, a resident of the centre’s menagerie.

Heather, who works as a colour consultant as well as running the Mellor Gray boutique in Britannia Road, did the girls’ make-up while her colleague, Julie Earnshaw from The Salon, was on hand to style hair.

The original Calendar Girls were photographed by the husband of one of the models.

In this case it was infant teacher Jean Bashford, from Honley, who is also a part-time photographer.