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John Parkinson Whittingham, known as ‘Park’ Whittingham, was born in 1857 and moved to Embsay as a young man to work as an assistant grocer for John Mattock’s wholesale grocers warehouse and shop at Cross End.
On 21st September 1877 he married an Embsay girl, Lydia Read, at St Mary’s Church. Lydia was the daughter of Joseph Read and Mary (Phillip) of Hill Top, Embsay. The witnesses at their wedding were John Davy, a fellow grocer’s assistant at Mattock’s and his wife Sarah Ann (Mason). John Davy later took over the Grocer’s shop and warehouse following John Mattock’s death in 1881.
‘Park’ and Lydia were both 20 when they married and initially lived at Cross End in the cottage now known as Hawbank, just a few yards from Mattock’s grocer’s shop and warehouse.
John Parkinson Whittingham was the son of James Whittingham and Alice Parkinson, and his father had worked for worsted manufacturers near Preston before moving to Keighley soon after ‘Park’ was born. By the mid 1860’s the family moved to Cononley where James Whittingham was the Manager of Aire Side Mill. Until he moved to Embsay, ‘Park’ Whittingham was a member of the Cononley Cricket Club, along with his elder brother William Henry Whittingham. In later life he said that he first raced pigeons competitively at the age of 11 and had been a pigeon fancier for a few years before that. He used to fly birds from Morecambe which were liberated at the station and flew back to Cononley.
In 1885, when he was living at Cross End, he and James Bishop, the innkeeper at the ‘Old George’ Inn on Skipton High Street, formed the Skipton Homing Society, which still exists today, and is one of the oldest clubs in Yorkshire. ‘Park’ Whittingham quickly established himself as club champion and decided to strengthen his pigeon stud in order to compete in national races. Racing pigeons can only be bred from a strain of racers and he purchased some birds from Mr J O Allen, the British Champion at that time, including the strain of a nationally famous bird called ‘Marcia’. He crossed these birds with his own strain and within a short time was producing birds said to be equal to the famous ‘Marcia’.
In 1888 he won his first cross-channel race when a bird of his covered the distance between Cherbourg and his pigeon loft at Embsay in 7½ hours. In those days there were no timing clocks and he had to run nearly three miles to Skipton to send a telegram to the headquarters. The same year he also won a cup for first bird in an all-Yorkshire Homers race, his winner being 1½ hours ahead of the second, which was a celebrated pigeon owned by a Dr Jeffries of Ripon. He subsequently won the ‘Grand National’ from La Rochelle.
At the end of the 1880’s, ‘Park’ and Lydia Whittingham and their then four children, Fred, Alice, Minnie and Annie, moved to Greenside, just below St Mary’s Church where they lived for the next 25 years. The family photograph shows the Whittingham family in 1888 shortly before they moved to Greenside. The family are dressed in mourning black for their son Harry who died on 29th February 1888 aged 7. His gravestone is in St Mary’s Churchyard.
‘Park’ Whittingham continued to work at John Davy’s grocers shop and was also the actuary for the Yorkshire Penny Bank in Embsay from 1889 to 1893. Apart from Skipton Homing Club, he was also a member of the Airedale and District Flying Club and competed in many of their races.
Pigeons could be ‘conscripted’ at times of war, and during the Boer War some of ‘Park’ Whittingham’s birds played a part in the Defence of Ladysmith in South Africa between November 1899 and February 1900.
At his pigeon loft at Greenside in 1907 he bred ‘No. 66’, a pigeon regarded as one of the greatest champions of all time. In his turn ‘No. 66’ sired ‘Steeplejack’ in 1908 and this is the bird John Parkinson Whittingham regarded as the best he ever owned. ‘Steeplejack’ only raced for two seasons, yet he won nearly £200 in prize money – a prodigious amount in those days. He was named ‘Steeplejack’ because he tried unsuccessfully to throw away a race by sitting on the top of Embsay church tower (which lacks a steeple), next to the lofts at Greenside, for over an hour, apparently not liking a beautiful new Panama hat Mr Whittingham was wearing. ‘Steeplejack’ went on to sire what was known as the “Silver King” strain, a strain that steadily spread to racers all over the world.
In 1914, ‘Park’ and Lydia Whittingham left Greenside to live at Silsden where their eldest daughter Alice had a milliner’s shop. They lived first at 51 Skipton Road, and in their last years at 15 South View Terrace.
His ‘Steeplejack’ strain produced champions through the 1920’s and into the 1930’s, and in 1929 John Parkinson Whittingham won the Government Shield with a descendant of ‘Steeplejack’. The shield was originally presented to the National Homing Union as part of the nation’s thanks for what pigeons did in the Great War. He was again awarded the Government Shield in 1933 for the best performance of an individual bird – his one-year-old hen flew a total distance of 1,269 miles, with an average velocity of 861 yards per minute (almost 30 miles an hour). He also won the gold medal the same year for best individual performance in three races, each over 300 miles. The photograph of ‘Park’ Whittingham in old age is labelled ‘writing up pigeon notes.’
Lydia died in 1929, and in his last months John Parkinson Whittingham was unable to look after the birds, and the lofts at Silsden were taken over by two of his sons-in-law, neither of whom was an expert fancier. They apparently tried to persuade their father-in-law to give up the sport, but he said he had been a pigeon fancier all his long life, and he intended to die as such.
He died on 26th January 1934 and in his obituary in the Leeds Mercury on 29th January he was described as the ‘father of Yorkshire pigeon racing’. The Halifax Evening Courier referred to him as ‘one of Yorkshire’s oldest fanciers, whose name was a household word throughout the county’. His executors quickly arranged the sale of his birds, partly because it was better to introduce birds to a new loft early in the year. The sale was attended by a large number of fanciers and conducted by Mr Hanson Tetley, Secretary of the Bradford Flying Club. His winning birds were purchased by members of the Halifax Flying Club.
John and Lydia are buried at St James Churchyard, Silsden where the curb stones of their grave can still be seen.
In the 1940’s, two of John & Lydia Whittingham’s granddaughters, Dorothy and Marjorie Robinson, married brothers Bertram and Cyril Luxton, and in the 1970’s they came to live in Embsay, in neighbouring houses on Millholme Rise. I am grateful to “Dot & Bert’s” daughter Gillian Read for sharing copies of the family photographs and some old newspaper cuttings.
David Turner, Embsay with Eastby Historical Research Group
Categories: History Posts
