Column: Looking Back with Alan Burnett

Give them any excuse - a Saint’s Day, a holiday, a gala day or whatever - and they like nothing better than to jump on the back of an old flatbed truck and, in full costume, re-enact the Battle of Trafalgar whilst slowly driving along Southgate.

Sunday school parades in the nineteenth century, charity gala parades in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, they’ve all brought out the crowds and provided an opportunity for Halifax folk to gather together and celebrate.

Over the years, such parades have encouraged people to dip into their purses and wallets to support good causes, and also to get out their cameras to record such moments for posterity.

I seem to have dozens of photographs from the 1960s of charity gala parades in my collection.

These were black and white photographs, and therefore the glamour and excitement of the occasions had to be conveyed by crowded streets and carefree smiles rather than technicolour lights.

Such photographs have dated over time but the clothes and the very nature of the activities have provided their own date stamps.

What lasting interest they have is as a piece of social history and as a record of a changing background.

The parades march by shop names that can transport you through time better than a Tardis and pass buildings that are now a distant memory.

You may be lucky and spot your younger self amongst the crowds in this selection of photographs.

More likely, you will spot familiar buildings and revive memories of a Halifax before the stone-cleaners moved in.

And as you look at them, you may just hear the sound of a marching brass band as it parades through the streets of Halifax sixty years ago.