n a wet day in 1956, a group of men and women in flat caps and mackintoshes walked along Leeds Road in Thornbury carrying banners calling for the banning of nuclear weapons.

Among them was a 34-year-old librarian from Bradford, John Braine, whose debut novel Room At The Top in 1957 was to make him rich and famous and bring Jack Clayton’s movie cameras to Bradford for three weeks a year later.

Like Bradford writer J B Priestley, a founder of the Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament, Braine had a radical view of things in the mid-1950s. The Suez campaign by Britain, France and Israel against Egypt’s nationalising President Nasser was denounced by the United States and divided public opinion at home.

The so-called angry young men of the literary Left were irked by the popularity of middle-of-the-road entertainment like the BBC radio programme Have A Go, presented by Halifax-born Wilfred Pickles, which had started in Bingley in 1946 and at its peak attracted a listening audience of up to 18 million.

Television was in its infancy. Mostly people went to the pub or the pictures, or both. With more than 40 cinemas showing a double-bill of films, cartoons and newsreels, which cost only a shilling or two, Bradford people had plenty of choice.

And when television started to keep people at home instead of going out, and cinemas became vacant, enterprising businessmen like grocer William Morrison were ready to take them over. In the Fifties, he turned a disused cinema in Girlington into a supermarket – the first of hundreds developed by his son, Ken.

Those who had lived through the Second World War were satisfied to have the security of regular work and the safety net of the post-war Welfare State, at the centre of which was the National Health Service.

But the younger generation, which had not known the years of depression and blitzkrieg, wanted excitement. Some of them found it in gang warfare. In November 1955, 20 policemen had to baton charge a crowd of up to 200 Teddy Boys after 17 of them were arrested following a punch-up at Bankfoot’s ironically-named Ideal Ballroom.

Bradford Teds resented the presence of Keighley Teds on their territory. Flick knives were wielded and three girls were hurt.

Bert Shutt, the ballroom’s proprietor, maintained that proper precautions had been taken. Nevertheless, things got out of hand and an older generation tutted disapprovingly over their evening newspapers. In those days you came of age at 21; until you got the ‘key to the door’ you were expected to do as you were told by your elders and betters and behave.

Things got a lot more audible on February 17, 1957, when 6,000 yelling and screaming youngsters went bonkers over the rock ’n’ roll of Bill Haley and his bow-tied, plaid-coated Comets at the Gaumont (later the Odeon). The American foursome invited them to Rock Around The Clock and Rip It Up.

“I haven’t seen such a display of mass hysteria in my life,” commented the chairman of Bradford City Council’s fire services committee. But a senior police officer said the behaviour of fans outside the cinema had been beyond reproach, probably because most of them had work or school to get up for the following morning and a trolley bus to catch to get there.

In icy winter weather, green and blue flashes would spark on the overhead cables from contact with the trolleys dual contact arms. Trolleys were a feature of daily life until 1972.

The playwright John Osborne may have looked back in anger at Britain’s post-war, post-imperial past, but the new Bishop of Bradford, the Right Reverend Donald Coggan, took a different view, as the future Archbishop of Canterbury told 1,000 people who attended his enthronement at Bradford Cathedral on February 3, 1956.

He said: “I cannot align myself with those, wistfully looking back to the Victorian era or some other bygone age, dismally hankering for the good old days... Behold, now is the accepted time, now is the day of salvation.”

Miss Clacton-on-Sea, 20-year-old Liz Lewis, would have settled for a hot drink when she came to town that month.

Here to distribute leaflets to land-locked Bradfordians about the benefits of a holiday on the Essex coast, she posed for pictures in her swimming costume in snowy Forster Square.

Bradford, she commented, was “one of the coldest places I have ever visited.”