Thanks for your responses to Eric Hinchcliffe's inquiry about whether Italian prisoners of war were ever billeted at Odsal.

Mrs Mabel Briggs phoned to say that yes, they were - in what used to be Odsal Deaf School.

"As children we used to watch them being drilled in Common Road," she said. "And we'd see them setting off with spades, on work duty. A lady in the next street married one of them later."

Mr John Wilkinson said that quite a lot of Italian prisoners of war were billeted at Shelf Hall in 1946-47.

"During the day they worked on local farms," he said.

Mrs Hilda Drasdo recalled that her father, Billy Stebbings, a foreman shunter, used to have a group of Italian PoWs working under him on the railways at City Road Goods Yard (where Grattan now is). Others worked in the textile mill across the road.

She phoned her brother, John Stebbings, for confirmation of this and he told her that when he was in the Navy, in 1947, his ship was in an Italian Mediterranean port where one of the hotels had been turned into a NAAFI and a dance was being held there.

A girl he was dancing with introduced him to a man who said he had been in Bradford and remembered "Billy with the big stick" (his shunting pole).

His fond memories of Bradford included the cakes made for the PoWs by Billy's wife.