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Picture source: Hania Franek
The Bulls Head was situated on Westgate. This pub dated back to at least 1760 and was the clubhouse for the master woolcombers who organised the huge septennial Bishop Blaize festival, last held in 1825. The town pillory and bull-baiting ring were nearby until outlawed in 1830 and 1835 respectively. The inn was demolished in the late 1870s.
Source: John Yeadon
The enclosure mentioned above tells you your connection with Mrs. Hannah Illingworth. She was your great great great grandmother. Her life work was to marry and have daughters and to be the hostess of the Bulls Head Inn in Bradford then one of the best known hostelries in town. The inns of her day were not the drinking shops of a later day. The bulk of the travel was by road - horse and cart of horseback. There were no trams or buses and precious few trains and the inns were an integral part of the life of the community. If you want to know what part you might do worse than read your Dickens and in Mrs Lupin of Martin Chuzzlewit you will find an example. After the opening of the railways such inns fell on [hard?] days only to come into their own again with the coming of the motor car. I have said there were no buses or trams and add no telephones and a slow postal service. Hence on market days and others men women and children from a wide radius around Bradford flocked into what was then a little country town and stayed there all day. Similarly on Sundays they came to the Parish Church and the big noncomformist chapel - went to services morning, afternoon and early evening and again made a day of it. They all had to be fed and that was the business of the inn. No cafes or restaurants in those days! And I am told Mrs. H. I. fed them all right. Uncle John once told me he had been pretty well over Great Britain and had never seen tables more beautifully appointed than hers. So I take it she was efficient. She was also a very kind woman. All sorts of little bits keep coming back to me that I heard when I was young. I can see Uncle John aged 7 carrying a little bag to the station for her when she went to Manchester not long before her death and remembering her kiss and the fact that she gave him a shilling - a little fortune in those days when Pocket money was a penny a week, if that! He once told me that he was impressed as a boy by the fact that she had pictures in her Hall! It was in her hostelrie that the Bradford "Old Choral Society" had its birth. It is still going strong! And the book "Old Bradford" speaking of this time says "the hostess of that day, Mrs Illingsworth, was a very kind woman and always saw to it that the singers had something very good to eat before they started out on their way home!" The way home would incidentally always be uphill and they would need it! How life has changed. When she died the Bradford paper published an Obituary Notice which ended with the statement that she died "love and respected by all who knew her.
Note from Ethel Cockshott (1884-1951) to her cousin. This is the family lore of Hannah Illingsworth (1774-1855),
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Other Photos
Hannah Illingsworth, landlady to 1824	Picture source: Mike Harrison