The gentleman standing on the right of the back row of this sedate turn of the 20th century walking group was Silsden headmaster David Longbottom.

Cathy Liddle, of Elm Grove in Silsden, who has supplied the photograph, admirably sums up his contribution to village life: “Mr Longbottom encouraged a desire for education among the working people of Silsden, and on his regular guided walks, introduced them to the natural history of their local countryside.”

After his death, aged 64, in 1915, shortly after his retirement to Morecambe, the Keighley News praised his “ungrudging service, rendered so continuously that he almost forgot the necessity of leisure and recreation, unless a change from one kind of education to another could be so called.”

A lover of “poetry, art, literature and nature”, David Longbottom was headmaster of the Bolton Road School from 1880 to 1914. He also served as a Wesleyan local preacher and as secretary of the Silsden Mechanics’ Institute, where he organised lectures.

His daughter, Margaret Wintringham, became the first British-born woman in the Houses of Parliament when in 1921, on the death of her husband as MP for Louth in Lincolnshire, she stood as a Liberal in the resulting by-election and succeeded him.