It was a beautiful setting for this sewing party when they got together to make clothes for people in Finland in 1940.

The group met at Denton Hall, near Ilkley, to make garments as part of the war effort.

In the Ilkley Gazette of January 19, the sewers were said to be members of the Denton Depot. Mrs Arthur Hill and Miss K Hill were pictured with the group, left, as they worked on a special consignment of goods for Finland. The garments shown were part of a large consignment, much of which had already been collected and dispatched.

Finland came under attack from the Red Army in November 1939. The sewing circle in Britain was part of a wider movement of support for the Finnish to aid them as they fought the Soviets.

In a speech of January 1940, Winston Churchill said: “Only Finland – superb, nay, sublime – in the jaws of peril. Finland shows what free men can do. The service rendered by Finland to mankind is magnificent... If the light of freedom, which still burns so brightly in the frozen North, should be finally quenched, it might well herald a return to the Dark Ages, when every vestige of human progress during 2,000 would be engulfed.”