Ravensknowle Park, Dalton

Ravensknowle Park, sometimes referred to as Knowle Park, is a public park on Wakefield Road in Dalton. Located within the park is Ravensknowle Hall, now known as the Tolson Memorial Museum.

The park is home to a number of historic items. When the Cloth Hall was demolished in 1929/30, the Cloth Hall Street entrance and clock tower was dismantled and incorporated into the park's distinctive shelter. It also contained the first public tennis courts and bowling greens in Huddersfield.[1]

History

The Ravensknowle Estate had passed though a number of families, including Sir John Lister Kaye, before being sold to Thomas Wilson of Birkby Grange in 1827 and then John Beaumont of Dalton in 1850. [2]

postcard of the Tolson Museum

In 1860, Beaumont built Ravensknowle Hall at a cost of over £20,000. The house and estate passed to Beaumont's daughter in 1889, and then to her cousin, Legh Tolson.[2]

In the summer of 1919, Tolson approached the Huddersfield Corporation with the desire to gift both the house and estate to the people of Huddersfield in order that they be turned into a museum and a park, and to act as a memorial to two of his nephews who were killed during the First World War — brothers Robert Huntriss Tolson (1884-1916)[3] and James Martin Tolson (1898-1918)[4]

The park opened to the public on 14 May 1921 and the museum a year later on 27 May 1922.

Gallery

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Location

Notes and References

  1. ↑ Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer (29/May/1922).
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 History of Ravensknowle & Scheme for the Development of a Local Museum (1921) by Legh Tolson and T.W. Woodhead
  3. ↑ Born 6 November 1884 in Kirkheaton. Married Zoe Annie Staveley in 1909. Killed 1 July 1916 on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.
  4. ↑ Born 26 March 1898 in Kirkheaton. Killed 20 October 1918 (according to UK, Soldiers Died in the Great War, 1914-1919 and his Probate entry) during the final weeks of the war.