The Black Bull

 

Not looking markedly different from nowadays, this was the Black Bull Inn as photographed very shortly after the Brontes’ time in Haworth, with W Sugden dispensing his “wines &c”.
The Sugden family – first John, then William and then Mrs Rebecca – ran the Black Bull for more than 30 years, with William as publican during the 1860s.
The photograph has been supplied by Mrs Muriel Crook, of Ryecroft, Harden, who as Muriel Waller spent her younger days at the Black Bull till her family left it in 1954. As she puts it, she “was raised, grew up and married here”.

She regrets its subsequent modernisation: “Gone forever is the ‘Bronte Room’, with Branwell’s chair (a replica, I admit) and the bell pull above it.”

She still has a visitors’ book from her family’s tenure, “though this began in 1909 at the Old Hall in Leeds, the first of many of my family’s hotels until we sold the last one in 1954 and I broke the chain”.  keighleynews/The_Black_Bull