This youth is sitting outside a Morton Banks house struck by lightning in 1893, collecting money from curious sightseers.

Ridingate, a former farmhouse occupied by the family of Emmott Clayton, a foreman mechanic at a Keighley toolmakers, stood near the road up to Ilkley Moor. During a violent thunderstorm on Saturday afternoon, June 3, 1893, lightning struck a chimney, demolishing roof and gable and ruining the interior of the building before severing a water-pipe and dislodging heavy stone drain-covers ten yards away. Plaster and paper were stripped off bedroom walls, curtains, bedclothes and clothes in a wardrobe set on fire, and windows blown out. The legs of an armchair were "cut off as if by a saw." Furniture was reduced to matchwood and clothes to rags.

At the moment of impact Mrs Clayton had been in the kitchen filling a kettle, which was wrenched from her hands with its handle broken off; she was deafened and concussed.

In the living-room her 15-year-old daughter was flung from a chair unconscious across a table. Fortunately, passers-by sheltering in the vicinity included two doctors who arrived promptly on the scene, and both victims recovered. The only fatalities were a cat and three pigeons in a cote in the garden.

However, the Claytons had lost virtually all their possessions. An appeal launched on their behalf by the Vicar of Riddlesden raised £70, in those simpler days a sum "considered adequate for restoring the home which was so completely wrecked by the lightning."