THE recent fascinating pieces in the T&A on the Hey’s women’s football team by Dave Pendleton and Kathryn Hey noted how the French team Olympique de Paris was based at the Rawson Hotel on their visit in 1922.

My previous article on the Belle Vue Hotel in Manningham Lane showed another rather fine building from Bradford’s days as the world centre of the worsted trade. Some of the Rawson’s history may then also be of interest.

Bradford Corporation applied for a licence to the new hotel in 1900. It was to cost, it was stated, £30,000 and its custom would include the ‘respectable working class’, an important point to make at a time when the licensing magistrates were reluctant to grant new licences. Indeed, there was local temperance opposition to the Council owning drinking places, as they also had the New Beehive on Westgate at his time.

The Rawson was part of the development of the site for public markets, which had begun in the 1870s. It was at first called the Market Hotel, designed by architects Hope and Jardine on a corner site with a distinctive dome. The name was, however, changed to the Rawson Hotel after the name of the family who had the lordship of the manor of Bradford. The Corporation had acquired from Miss Elizabeth Rawson back in 1866 a 999-year lease on the town’s markets, fairs and market places for an annual payment of £5,000.

Bradford Archives holds a ledger of agreements entered into by the Corporation with a lease of the Hotel of 1905 to Byron Atkinson for £250 a year, together with an inventory which gives some idea of its former splendour.

It had club, dining and market rooms, a bar parlour and saloon, plus in the basement a restaurant. Fixtures and fittings were to a high standard, with, for example, a Honduras mahogany bar cabinet in the saloon, with a moulded cornice and turned and fluted pillars. Seating was covered in Lister’s moquette velvet and ‘figured Mawson plush’. Its 18 bedrooms were connected by an electric bell and indicator.

The whole market complex formerly had a magnificent frontage to John Street with a matching domed building at the corner with James Street. Sadly, on August 31, 1940, an air raid wrought massive damage. That frontage largely disappeared and the whole markets building was redesigned. The Rawson Hotel survived, as seen here in this mid-1960s photograph (courtesy Kathryn Hey and Dennis Birkby).

It was then popular with market traders, as one might expect. Among them was my great-uncle Alf Tasker who older readers may remember had a pickle stall in the old open-air John Street market and its covered replacement.

I only remember the pub from very occasional visits when it was a Webster’s house, the Halifax brewer having taken over Heys. If memory serves, it was by then a rather faded shadow of those Edwardian days. It did continue as a drinking place with various incarnations, which I never knew, but the Rawson Hotel, a Grade II listed building, has, I understand, been closed for some time.

* Dr Paul Jennings is author of The Local: A History of the English Pub (new revised third edition), Bradford Pubs and Working-Class Lives in Edwardian Harrogate. His books are available online and at bookshops including Waterstones and WH Smith.