WHEN Loraine Lowe found a cache of family photographs in a house she had bought she submitted that very emotive picture of the funeral of victims of the Booth’s clothing factory fire in 1941 in the hope it would spark a memory. And it has.
The house had belonged to Brenda Crossley, daughter of Frederick Arthur Dyson, who had lived in Cemetery Lodge at Birkby during the war.
Now Richard A Revitt has been in touch to explain that he is the grandson of Stanley Dyson, the brother of Frederick, who was the sexton of Edgerton Cemetery.
“He was the boss of the grave diggers and someone the family looked up to,” he says, which also shows why he was interested in the mass funeral of the wartime disaster.
Frederick’s wife was Elsie.
“I remember in the 1950s that she had a pantry full of tinned food from the war which she could not bring herself to open. So they were rusting and exploding.”
They had five daughters and Edward Crossley, of Crossley’s Garage at Elland, married Lily.
When she died, he married her younger sister, Brenda.
