When the Wilkinson family get together, you can bet there’ll be fireworks.
For brother and sister Gary and Carly have become the fourth generation of the family to work for Huddersfield’s famous fireworks company – following in the footsteps of their father, grandmother and great-grandmother.
Gary, 28, joined Black Cat Fireworks – successor firm to Standard Fireworks – last year to work in the IT and design department at the firm’s premises at Blackmoorfoot Road, Crosland Hill. And Carly, 23, is now employed in the shop selling fireworks to customers in the run-up to Bonfire Night.
Their dad, Graham Wilkinson, joined Standard Fireworks in 1969 at the age of 15. He worked in the display department, rising to become department manager in 1994 before he left to set up fireworks display specialist Pyro 2000 in 1996.
Graham’s grandmother Flo Wilton worked at the firm in the 1950s and his mother Elsie was an employee in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Both worked assembling fireworks.
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Said Graham: “We grew up on the Walpole housing estate at Crosland Moor not far from Standard Fireworks.
“Lots of Huddersfield people have worked for the company because it was such a family firm. If a position became available, people would go up to the office and put forward their son or daughter for the job – and they usually got it. There was no writing job application forms or CVs.”
Standard Fireworks, which was founded in 1891 by wholesale draper James Greenhalgh, grew to become the UK’s number one fireworks brand.
Standard bought Scottish-based Brocks Fireworks in 1988 and transferred all fireworks production to its 100-acre site at Crosland Hill. At its height, the firm employed up to 500 people in manufacturing and administration, with sites at Crosland Hill and Lepton.
In 1998, Standard was bought by Chinese-based Black Cat Fireworks and all manufacturing switched to China. The Standard brand name was retained and the Crosland Hill site is now used for sales, storage and distribution technical and IT, marketing and design,
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Although Graham left the company in 1996, he still has connections with his former employer. Pyro 2000 stores its own stocks of fireworks at the site and acts as the Standard Fireworks and Black Cat Fireworks official display team.
Gary and Carly both help their father with Pyro 2000’s displays all over the world. Gary has worked on spectacular showpiece displays as far away as South Korea, Thailand, Canada and Barbados.
Pyro 2000 is set for a busy few weeks in the UK as Bonfire Night approaches – firing displays as far afield as Cockermouth in Cumbria, Great Yarmouth, London and Pontypool in Wales. There’s also the Huddersfield Pendragon charity bonfire, which takes place at Blackmoorfoot on Saturday, November 7.
Graham, 61, who now lives at Dalton, said: “I have been trailing up to Crosland Hill for 46 years! But the fireworks business has been here for more than 100 years – and has no plans to go anywhere else.”
Pictures from Bonfire Night 2014 below.
