John Goodchild, local historian and manuscript collector, who has died in his 82nd year, was a remarkable figure amongst the succession of Yorkshire antiquarians, following in the footsteps of figures like Sir Thomas Brooke and H. L. Bradfer-Lawrence. Although neither of his parents, Ernest (1896–1952) and Annie (née Lee, 1899–1979) had Yorkshire ancestry, their Wakefield-born son took the history of his locality to his heart. Chronicling it and, moreover, seeking to collect and preserve the written evidence of its past became a life-long passion.
In Wakefield his father was employed as deputy registrar of deeds for the West Riding of Yorkshire County Council. The title of registrar was held by the clerk of the county council, but his deputy was the administrative head of the office. John won a scholarship to Wakefield Grammar School but left at seventeen to join the staff of the clerk’s department. Here, his apprenticeship in local history began, for he became responsible for the care of the records of county administration then located in the basements of county hall. He began the organisation of the West Riding quarter sessions records, following the principles first established in the Essex County Record Office.
He soon started to develop his own interests in manuscripts. His growing engagement with records was pursued in the exceptional circumstances to be found in the West Riding, the largest, most populous and most industrialised part of Yorkshire. The county council steadfastly refused to create a county record office and by 1974 it was the only county in England, with the exiguous exception of Rutland, not to have done so. The library services of Leeds and Sheffield, its major cities, appointed archivists in the later 1940s, but the niggardly financing of both meant that the archive services they could provide for their respective regions were very limited in scope. By the later 1950s, the Yorkshire Archaeological Society was beginning its retreat from active record collecting which it had begun in the 1920s.
In the absence of a comprehensive public provision for safeguarding the archives in the Riding, he had largely a free rein to collect almost as he wished in the Wakefield district, and his collecting activities later encompassed a larger area, reaching southward to Barnsley and Doncaster. In the mid-1960s, he moved from the county council to establish a museum of industrial history at Cusworth Hall which had been recently acquired by the Doncaster Rural District Council. After the new local government structure was introduced, he became district archivist and head of local studies in Wakefield in 1976, a post he occupied until his retirement in 1994.
Throughout the period he was progressively amassing a manuscript collection which finally comprised over a 1000 boxes of records of all kinds relating to the central area of the former West Riding, many acquired by gift but many also by purchase, for he devoted a substantial part of his income to this purpose. Because of local circumstances, he was able to pursue the private accumulation of a substantial manuscript collection in an age when such activities had become exceptional. He also built up a complementary library of historical works. In the absence of any county-wide archive service before 1974, it is highly likely that a significant proportion of the records which he took into his possession may otherwise not have survived. All these materials he readily made available to enquirers. After retirement, he moved his collections to rooms he hired in the basement of Wakefield public library, where he received visitors, often in the company of his current canine companion, and subsequently at the Wakefield office of the West Yorkshire Archive Service. There, in the former Registry of Deeds building, he occupied an office next door to that of his father 50 years earlier. He bequeathed his extensive collections to Wakefield metropolitan district and these became available to users of the fine new archive service building in the town on its opening in February 2017.
He also published a large number of books, pamphlets and articles on many aspects of local history, especially on railways, canals, collieries and quarrying, based on his own record resources. In Wakefield he was a leading figure in the Wakefield Historical Society and in the promotion of local history in the town, often in conjunction with Kate Taylor, whose obituary was published in volume 88 (2016) of this journal. He was also active in the Labour Party, freemasonry, and Unitarianism and was a founding member of the Canal and Railway Historical Society. In 1984, his contribution to local history was recognised by the award by the Open University of the degree of Master of the University. He was a long-standing member of the Yorkshire Archaeological and Historical Society, having joined in his teens, and was a promoter of its Industrial History Section, serving as its secretary from 1964 and becoming its chairman 10 years later. He was also an active member of its Wakefield Court Rolls Series committee for over forty years, speaking at many of the one-day events that launched its publications.
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