On November 30, 1960, the Examiner published a brief note to mark the centenary of a granite memorial obelisk in Edgerton Cemetery.

The monument is the most imposing in the cemetery and its inscription reads: ‘Erected by public subscription in memory of Joseph Brook Esq, JP, whose exemplary public spirit and disinterested devotion to the general interests of the town and district, throughout a long and active life, endeared him to the inhabitants whilst living and caused his death to be universally lamented.’

The Examiner in 1960 remembered that: “He was called ‘The Father of Huddersfield’ ... one of the men who helped to make the Huddersfield that we know today.”

Born in 1787 in Meltham, Joseph Brook was one of six partners in the famous cotton thread business, Jonas Brook & Bros, at Meltham Mills.

But he made his own way as a wool merchant, importing high quality fleeces from eastern Germany to feed the fast-growing demands of the Huddersfield textile industry.  By the early 1840s he was living at Greenhead Hall, the town’s grandest address although a decade later, in 1852, all the contents were auctioned off after a business crash and Brook ‘downsized’ to a modest house at Highfields for the last years of his life, dying there in July 1858.

By then he had left his mark on many aspects of Huddersfield life.

Throughout the 1850s he was chairman of the Improvement Commissioners, forerunner of the corporation and the town’s first effective local government body. His memorial is fittingly placed at Edgerton because the cemetery is the greatest monument to his leadership of the Commissioners. It opened in 1855 after tireless efforts by Brook and the Commissioners’ clerk of works, Joshua Hobson.

These two were also allied in achieving the town’s great public space at St George’s Square, and the Examiner’s tribute a century on saluted Brook as “a town planner long before that office became official.”

His third great legacy from his time as chairman, which older readers may remember, was the Model Lodging House at Chapel Hill, opened in 1854 as an alternative to the cramped and diseased lodgings the town had previously offered to itinerant workers.

Brook’s leadership of the Improvement Commissioners was the culmination of more than 40 years of public life. Interested in the potential of railways from their earliest days in the 1820s, he played a big part – along with Ramsden estate agent George Loch – in bringing a through line to Huddersfield in 1847.

Deputy chairman of the Huddersfield & Manchester Railway Co when it merged into the giant LNWR, Brook soon became a national director of the latter. He had an office at Huddersfield station, but was often to be found too at the company’s offices in Manchester and at London Euston.

Twenty years before the railway came he was a founding director in 1827 of the Huddersfield Banking Co which provided a stable and profitable financial institution to support the town’s businesses after the 1825 bank crash. In the same year he played a big part in establishing the Waterworks Commissioners whose construction of the first Longwood reservoir began the development of a reliable water supply for the fast-growing town.

But it was the issue of water supply which also led to the low point of his public career.  Brought in by Holme Valley mill-owners in the 1830s to add business experience to the Holme Reservoir Commissioners, he presided over their complacent drift to the disaster of the Holmfirth Flood of 1852. The inquest jury regretted they could not bring in a verdict of corporate manslaughter which only became an offence in English law in 2008. Had they been able to do so, Brook would almost certainly have been among those charged.

His failure in this case reflected a key aspect of his character: although with firm views of his own – Tory in politics, staunchly Anglican in religion – his inclination was always to strive for consensus and avoid conflict.

This was a strength in civic leadership and in his work as a magistrate. But it became a weakness when faced with penny-pinching fellow Commissioners unwilling to invest in securing Bilberry Dam, whose defective engineering was an accident waiting to happen.

His death in 1858 was marked with a great civic funeral and his public service to Huddersfield attracted extravagant praise. 

Today his name survives in Brook’s Yard off Market St, close to his business base and family home of 20-plus years, and the handsome town house which became the Queen Hotel.

Brook Street, by the open market, almost certainly recalls his role as chairman of the Improvement Commissioners. Tombstone plaques for Joseph, his wife and daughter can be found on the floor of the parish church crypt, now Keys restaurant.

But, since that brief Examiner reference in 1960, he has vanished from the town’s written records. I hope my biography will return him to prominence as a key figure in Huddersfield’s history.

Joseph Brook of Greenhead is available from retail outlets at £6 or at £7.25 post-inclusive from HLHS, 24 Sunnybank Rd, Huddersfield HD3 3DE or www.huddersfield history.org.uk  

David Griffiths will be talking about Joseph Brook and signing copies of the book at the Local History Lunchtime Club at Huddersfield Library on Wednesday, November 6 at 1pm.