SOPHIE Shaw from the German Church in Bradford got in touch with us about a gathering of British descendants of German pork butchers that took place in Hohenlohe, to the north-east of Stuttgart last summer.

About 50 of them, from Yorkshire and Lancashire, made the trip. According to Richard Ford, who went with them, a great time was had by all as they toured hostelries, a pig market and an open air museum.

He wrote: “The Wackershofen Open Air Museum – Accompanied by local television, radio and newspaper journalists we discovered how our ancestors lived. We toured wealthy merchants’ houses to farm cottages throughout the last six centuries, saved from demolition and set up as a museum village. The rural idyll created, masked in the summer sun covered the harsh nature of existence in the winter months. Animals lived on the ground floor providing heat for the house above.

“The first floor seemed quite cosy, but then envisaging potentially two adults and seven children living in a small house, having to sleep in the attic in winter with no insulation in the roof and feeding the family; it became easy to see why so many people opted to emigrate.”

In the mid-19th century they came to Bradford and Keighley – separate towns in those days – and flourished up until the outbreak of the First World war in 1914. After Germany’s invasion of Belgium and Britain’s declaration of war on Germany on August 4, feelings changed.

Ghoulish tales of German atrocities animated antipathy in the streets. On Friday, September 4, the Bradford Weekly Telegraph carried photographs of German pork butchers’ shops with smashed windows in Keighley.

The trouble started the previous Saturday night when an Irishman named Kelley reportedly went into the shop of Carl Andrassy and asked for a pie “without any poison in it”.

A row started and blows were exchanged. Before the night was out other shops in South Street and Church Street were attacked. The windows of Keighley police station were smashed. The Telegraph said thousands of people were in the streets. Police charged with drawn batons, but only two men were arrested.

German U-boat attacks on merchant shipping led to rationing being imposed in 1917. The sinking of the liner The Lusitania in 1915 and the loss of more than 1,000 men, women and children, didn’t help. Germans who had emigrated to Britain and hadn’t been held as aliens got out when they could and went to Canada, the United States – which didn’t come into the war until April, 1917 – and New Zealand.

Richard Ford said: “Many people made new friends and found new family connections both in Germany and within the group. “It’s an experience I doubt any of the participants will forget.”

To read more, visit porkbutcherhub.org.uk.