A hundred and four years of small, patient giving — and ten people round a table in Hipperholme.

How we came to be.

In the spring of 1922, four years after the end of the Great War, a small group of Huddersfield citizens met to settle the practical question of who, in perpetuity, would look after the town’s new War Memorial. A site had been agreed in Greenhead Park. A sculptor had been commissioned. A subscription had been raised. But a memorial is not the work of a single year — it is a slow, hundred-year piece of stewardship, and someone needed to hold the responsibility.

On 9 May 1922, a Declaration of Trust was signed. It set out four charitable objects which we still hold today: the support of Huddersfield Royal Infirmary; the maintenance and repair of the War Memorial in Greenhead Park; the education, maintenance and benefit of persons in necessitous circumstances; and the support of convalescent homes or institutions caring for the sick, poor and needy within a 20-mile radius of Huddersfield Town Hall. Those four objects have been amended once, by resolution dated 15 April 1957, to clarify the eligibility scheme. They have otherwise survived a century unchanged.

The Cenotaph was dedicated in Greenhead Park on Saturday 5 May 1924, in the presence of the Earl of Harewood and a crowd of many thousands. Three thousand four hundred and thirty-nine Huddersfield names are cut into its drum. The trust has been responsible for its care from that day to this — for the stonework, for the annual cleaning before Remembrance Sunday, and for the slow conservation work that protects the inscribed names from West Yorkshire weather.

Around that central duty, the trust’s grant-making has grown and shrunk with its modest investment income. In a typical year we move somewhere between £24,000 and £36,000 out into the Huddersfield area — to ex-service neighbours, to Huddersfield Royal Infirmary, to convalescent homes, and to families and individuals facing necessitous circumstances who are referred to us by trusted local partners. We do not run our own programmes. We award small, careful sums to organisations and households we can verify.

A century in milestones.

Ten unpaid people, all of them local to Huddersfield or its vicinity.

No trustee receives any remuneration, payment, or benefit from the trust. We meet four times a year, in Huddersfield, around a table.