A BUNDLE of waste paper I bought at an Airedale Hospital car boot sale last year has proved very useful.

The annual sales are normally on the first Sunday of each month, from April to December. I found lots of off-cut scrap paper from computer runs, which I made into scrap parts.

Included with the paper was a pre-printed postcard that I estimated was 50 years old. In fact, there were 20 postcards that seem to have been from an office clear out. These cards are headed: “JT Kerrigan & Company, picture framers, cabinetmakers, joiners, undertakers”.

The company base was the Ginnel Joinery Works, Newmarket Street, Skipton, and the telephone number listed was “3484, Day or Night”. I doubt whether an order of a picture frame would be welcome in the middle of the night.

This was a very interesting variety of services on offer. From the 1970s onwards the introduction of specialisation in single fields slowly took over local industry and engineering. I will see whether Skipton Library is interested in local history archiving for these cards.

The telephone number itself gives an idea of the age of the business, as there is no STD code, no area code, only the four digit symbol, and no fax number. The absence of email and other computer Twitter accounts and so on, strengthens the sense of age.

Picture framers and undertakers in the Keighley, Silsden and Skipton district today tend to keep to their particular speciality.The postcards seen to date from before the time of business cards, and once printed were given out to interested potential customers.

The plain presentation may have benefited from a diagram related to joinery, which an artist ordering a picture frame could have sketched. Some enterprise was shown by the probable use of wood offcuts as a by-product in the making of picture frames or joinery items.

In my bundle of papers, there were also 20 oblong folded cards which looked like place-name cards for meetings. I decided to convert them into greetings card to raise money for Manorlands.

I decided to incorporate a four-leaf clover on each card. I found a patch of these which I pressed for two weeks under a pile of books. Then I laminated them and glued them to the cards.

Manorlands would sadly not accept these all the other cards made by my Long Lee art group, because they no longer sell from the premises in Oxenhope. However, the Sue Ryder shop in Haworth very kindly agreed to support us.

I continue to make greeting cards with help from drawings by Dawn Sedgwick and glitter bought from charity shops. The paper has proved most useful, and I will visit the car boot sale again at some point in the future.

I knew the couple who started the car boot sales at the hospital over 25 years ago. He was a senior staff member in Accident and Emergency and she was a sister in. The Airedale Hospital orthopaedic department.

Keighley Art Club and Silsden Art Club were due to support Colin Neville’s art event at Silsden Town Hall, but this has now been cancelled due to coronavirus. We planned to sell our work, with 20% of proceeds going to Silsden Town Hall.