Postcard - Mono (Document ID: 100167)
View of Crossley Heath School and Wainhouse Tower over Skircoat Moor.
Author: Unknown
Date: not dated
Location: Halifax
Format: Postcard - Mono
Document ID: 100167
Library ID: 34241654
Crossley Orphanage was founded by John, Joseph and Francis Crossley in 1864, for boys aged between 2 and 15 years, and girls up to 17 years. The building was designed by John Hogg.
The name Porter was added in 1887 when Thomas Porter made a large donation. It became Crossley & Porter (secondary) School in 1919 admitting day pupils.
Dr John Favour founded Heath Grammar School in 1600, under a charter set out by Queen Elizabeth. It was known as a free school, hence the road name 'Free School Lane'. The strongly Puritanical Favour was a topic often discussed at public meetings. Favour frequently participated in the torture and executions of priests who came to England preaching Catholicism.
Heath Grammar School and Crossley & Porter School merged in 1984, becoming Crossley-Heath School. Today Crossley-Heath School is a Grammar school serving the Halifax area.
Still standing 2003.
Wainhouse Tower can be seen in the distance. It was built by John Edward Wainhouse (1817-1883) in 1871. Wainhouse inherited the Washer Lane Dye Works, together with a large fortune. After the Smoke Abatement Act of 1870, legislation meant that smoke had to be taken out of the valley. Admiring the work of R. H. Watt of Knutsford, Cheshire, Wainhouse decided to build a tall chimney also. In 1871 plans were drawn up by the architect Isaac Booth for a chimney to carry the smoke from the factory by pipeline. In 1874 Wainhouse sold the works to his manager, who refused to pay the costs of finishing the chimney.
Wainhouse decided to keep the tower for himself and convert it into 'a general astronomical and physical observatory'. Completed in 1875 by architect Richard Swarbrick Dugdale at a total cost of £14,000, Wainhouse Tower stands 275 feet high with the top decorated in a neo-renaissance style.
Wainhouse Tower is linked with the owner and his feud with neighbour Sir Harry Edwards, Industrialist, Freeman and Justice of the Peace. Arguments started from one small incident in 1873, and after Edwards misused his position as the Justice of the Peace, things went from bad to worse and Wainhouse became tangled in a war of words until his death.
It has been suggested that Wainhouse built the tower to keep an eye on his neighbour's activities, so Wainhouse may have kept the structure to antagonize his neighbour.
W.E. Dennison [1866-1926], Chairman of Halifax Courier Limited, ran an amateur radio station - known as 2KD - from Wainhouse Tower, sometime between 1912 and 1919. Around this time, it was also used as an ARP observation post.
Still standing 2003.
