Anne Hawkesworth: 34 years being Mrs Ilkley
"I thought, no, you're not interested in climbing up the greasy pole. You’re here for your ward."
“Anne – did you get in?” a woman asks.
“No, that’s why he’s interviewing me,” replies Anne.
“No?” responds the lady, astonished.
“Did you vote for me?” asks Anne.
“I didn’t,” she says. “I didn’t vote for anybody.”
“Why not?”
“They wouldn’t let me vote. I didn’t have my photo ID.”
Anne turns to me and says, “Maybe that had a part to play in the vote – because a lot of older people would have voted for me.”
The older woman expresses her disappointment.
“It’s a loss for Ilkley,” says Anne. “But it’s alright … I’m hoping to do some other things.”
This exchange is one of many that breaks up the flow of my interview with Anne on a late Wednesday morning in early May in La Stazione, a perennially busy Italian cafe that is a stone’s throw away from Ilkley train station. We are perched on a couple of high chairs by the main window, with the Post Office opposite us. She opts for a black coffee. I decide on tea. The interruptions, which include hand waves and smiles from numerous people passing through, aren’t a distraction or an inconvenience. They’re full of warmth and, more importantly, they tell me something about who Anne is and has been in Ilkley: an individual of some note, well-known and well-liked by the town’s residents – though, being a councillor and all, not universally – a seemingly immutable figure who offered a continuous presence in an ever-changing, tumultuous and uncertain world, like, perhaps, the late queen (which is, of course, where the comparison ends, one being democratically elected to serve, the other owing their service to hereditary privilege).
“It’s actually wonderful, the reaction I’ve had,” she tells me. “I had a lovely surprise at the Ilkley Carnival, too. I was asked to come up on stage and I was a bit shocked. They said, ‘We want to thank you for all you have done for Ilkley’ … and they gave me a big bunch of flowers, which –”
Anne cuts herself off mid sentence. She spots another resident coming up to her with, as if on cue and as incredulous as it sounds, a bunch of flowers in her hand.
“Sorry about your loss,” she says, handing the flowers over. They’re peonies.
“Thank you,” says Anne, smiling warmly. “You shouldn’t have.”
“It matches your scarf,” the lady replies, before saying her goodbyes. Anne is wearing a pink scarf, with a red neckerchief to boot, dressed in double denim and a blue gilet. A white top with pink horizontal stripes peeks out from behind it. She looks stylish.
She puts the flowers down. “What was I saying?” she asks. “Yes, I went up and I had tears in my eyes. I didn’t have tears in my eyes when my husband died or when my brother-in-law passed. It was just so unexpected … I can’t explain it.”
There’s nothing to explain. After a remarkable 34 years as a councillor, with reasonable confidence that she would add at least two more years to that, Anne finds herself no longer able to pursue one of the last enduring joys and responsibilities of her life. Yet, she remains optimistic. There are other ways of contributing to the future and prosperity of Ilkley. After all, as another resident puts it, she’s “Mrs Ilkley”.
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Anne Hawkseworth was born in the 1940s in Bradford, the year the seminal Beveridge Report was published. The world was at war. Her parents, Harry and Hilda Hainsworth, Conservatives through and through, ran a chip shop, Hainsworths High Class Fisheries, on White Abbey Road, which they lived above.
“It did very well,” Anne remembers. “So much so they were able to buy themselves a car, which they kept parked in a garage in nearby Whetley Hill so that the customers didn’t know about it.” Her folks were keen to keep it under wraps because very few people at the time could afford such a luxury – they were worried it would send the wrong message and drive business away.
They eventually saved up enough money to buy a semi-detached house at top of Toller Lane, meaning that Anne no longer had to sleep in the attic above the shop, where she’d have to put up with all the fumes coming up from the chip shop below. While she may have been a born and bred Bradford gal, she was already enamoured by Ilkley. “I likened it to Hollywood because of the open air pool,” she says. “And my biggest treat was to be brought to the cow and calf rocks.”
Anne left school at 17 to train as a medical laboratory technician at St. Luke’s Hospital, specialising in haematology and blood transfusion. She was there in 1962 when there was a smallpox outbreak in Bradford, which would claim the lives of six people. It caused a small panic in the city, but was contained and over within a month.
“And that was that,” she says. “Then I married one of the taxi drivers who took me in on call – and I won’t say too much about him. I stayed with him a long time because … he was very handsome and I had Nicholas with him.”
They ended up working together, successfully owning and running fish and chip shops in Bradford and Cleckheaton. “We tended to buy, build up trade and sell,” she tells me. But she wasn’t happy. The marriage wasn’t a healthy one. He was unfaithful, he drank too much and was “missing a lot”. “ I was very shy and introverted during this time,” she says. “The effect that someone like that has on you … they demoralise you.”
She took on a lot of responsibility, personally and professionally as a mother – she had Nicholas in 1974 – and as a small business owner. “I had a babysitter for when I had to collect staff to open the shop and deliver them back at night. This was while the Yorkshire Ripper was on the go, so I had to make sure they were okay and then see to getting home myself. I couldn’t wait to get back and lock the door.”
The marriage invariably ran its course and ended in divorce. She kept one of the shops, which doubled up as a home for her and her son. And that, unbeknownst to Anne, was life for a short while. She had no idea that everything was going to change – that she would fall in love again, leave Bradford and discover a new sense of purpose.
John, her second husband, was Anne’s solicitor. He was from Ilkley, involved in local politics and, like her family, a diehard Conservative. Something between them had changed and her friend, a fellow Tory, decided to play Cupid.
“She rang him up and said, ‘My friend Anne would like to take you out for a meal would you go with her?’” Anne says, her face beaming. “And he said yes.” Although she jokes that, like a knight in shining armour, he brought her on “his white charge to Ilkley,” there’s a truth in the romantic idea of the transformative impact her relationship with John had on her – he whisked her away to a better life, helping her find her confidence again.
“It was quite a change in circumstances,” she says. “John said it was like I was swapping a man with a bomber jacket for a man with an Abercrombie & Fitch overcoat – because he was very conservative with everything. That was his style. He liked bowlers and top hats when given a chance.”
They got hitched in 1982 and never looked back. When asked how she knew that he was ‘the one’, she mentions his brain – and that fact that he made her feel secure. Made. Past tense.
“This was our silver wedding in Lanzarote,” Anne wrote on Twitter in October 2021, during the Covid-19 pandemic. “John was hoping to see our 38th next month … this morning my protector, guide, wordsmith, rock … who brought me and my son Nicholas to Ilkley and made us happy, died. John’s light went out.”
For the first time in years, Anne was alone. Along with John, she had, years ago, unexpectedly lost both her sons. Michael was just 12 weeks old when he passed away, while Nicholas, who was a enthusiastic cricket player – he had only just returned to playing for Ben Rhydding Cricket Club – was just 26 when he died.
Words cannot describe how much I loved him,” Anne said at the time. “He was a wonderful boy and for a lot of my life, he was all I had. He was my partner."
Ilkley, since then, “has been a great comfort” to her personally.
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Anne’s political life began in 1983. “I needed an outlet from just running the fish shop and my son was at school,” she says. “I saw a press release about the Shipley Conservatives doing something, so I went to their office and said, ‘I have time during the day and I want to volunteer and –’ there was a screech from the back office. The Conservative agent ran out and said, ‘Keep that woman. Margaret Thatcher has just called a general election’. That agent is still my best friend.”
Thatcher would go on to decisively win the election, securing a thumping majority of 144 seats. It could have been a different story. Her success had been buoyed by her handling of the Falklands War a year earlier, which effectively helped wipe out and soften her widespread unpopularity. Labour’s swing to the left under its leader, Michael Foot, also played a part.
“John was heavily involved in politics when I started out,” she says. “He was chairman of the Ilkley Conservative Association and deputy leader of the Keighley Conservative Association. He was supportive, especially when I got elected.”
Anne first served as a parish councillor, becoming the parish’s chairman in her second year (a role that has since evolved into the town mayor). She was a natural and local politics suited her. Ambitious to be more influential, to better represent the residents of Ilkley, she set her sights on Bradford Council and, in May 1990, the same year that Thatcher introduced the controversial poll tax in England and Wales (known more formally as the community charge) – which would bring to an end her divisive 11-year reign as prime minister – Anne would find herself elected as one Ilkley’s three councillors.
“The Conservatives didn’t do well that year,” remembers Anne. “In fact, they had a very, very bad year but I still managed to get in because Ilkley was a strongly Conservative area.” She’s right – it was pretty much guaranteed. The Conservatives have, at least for what was Anne’s seat, won every local election in Ilkley since 1973, when the Bradford Metropolitan District Council was first formed. That technically ended when Anne became an independent in 2013, but that’s semantics – she was then and is today a small ‘c’ conservative. “I lean more in a right direction than the left,” she tells me. Ros Brown’s win in 2024, however, does represent a more definite break from that long association with conservative politics. The Green Party is a world away from them.
Anne made an impression immediately and in 1992 she was made chief whip of Bradford Council’s Conservative group, a role she would hold onto for 18 years. The 90s flew by and they were, at least within the Conservatives, relatively temperate days. Emboldened and something of a rising star, she stood to be an MP in 1997, standing for the Conservatives in Bradford South, which has long been a Labour-held seat. She lost to the incumbent, Gerry Sutcliffe, who won 56.7% of the vote compared to her 28%. He continued to be its MP until 2015, when he stepped down. It remains a Labour seat to this day.
If it was any consolation to her, she wasn’t the only Conservative to not make it to the House of Commons (or to return for that matter). Labour conclusively hammered the Conservatives, earning themselves a 179-seat majority and 13 years in Number 10. “It was the worst year a Conservative could have stood because it was Tony Blair’s year,” she says. “He was very persuasive and every time he came on TV or the radio, I knew it would be hard.”
She thought about standing again, even submitting an application to be the Conservative candidate for Keighley and Ilkley in 1999. But, in the end, with the new century and new millennium approaching, she realised that where her heart truly lay, where she saw herself as being the most effective representative for Ilkley – above all – was at a local level, without the distractions, disruptions and detachment of Westminster compromising her ability to do that.
Little did she know at the time that she would spend 25 more years doing just that – more had she been reelected – with a significant part of her adult life defined by her sense of duty to the people of Ilkley and to the town itself … home.
Indeed, she would be at the height of her powers during the first decade or so of the twenty-first century – I was a “very important person in Bradford”, she says matter-of-factly, without any trace of self-importance – and, alongside her role as chief whip, she was the executive’s portfolio holder for the environment for nine years and leader of the Conservative group in Bradford.
While the latter was a high point for Anne as a councillor, it would be short-lived. Within a year of being elected in 2010, the year that David Cameron kicked off what has objectively been 14 erratic years of Conservative government – see five prime ministers, seven chancellors, seven health secretaries, eight foreign secretaries … – she was out.
“I had a contretemps with some my Conservative colleagues,” she says. “Especially with my deputy, Glenn Miller, who was after being leader. After he took over, I found myself sitting in the back – which I wasn’t used to.”
Anne felt increasingly sidelined by her Conservative peers and there was certainly not a lot of love lost between her and her former deputy. Eventually, it all came to a head and in January 2013, she resigned from Bradford Council’s Conservative group. “I never thought I’d leave the Conservative party,” she says. “I suddenly got to the point where I thought, no, you're not interested in climbing up the greasy pole, as Disraeli described it. You’re here for your ward.”
Joining another party was out of the question. Instead, she would now sit as an independent. While local, party-specific politics had a lot to do with her decision – her contempt for Miller, for instance, even today, is clear – national politics also played a role. The coalition government, the Conservatives propped up by the Liberal Democrats, was proposing to allow more housing to be built on greenbelt land, which dismayed Anne. She felt like she didn’t belong to the party anymore.
“From now on I shall sit on the council as an independent where I shall be free from attempts to silence my protests over ministers’ proposals by use of the ‘whip,’” she was reported as saying by the Telegraph & Argus in 2013. “I’m sure I can do better for my ward as an independent than as a member of the Conservative group under councillor Miller’s leadership.”
Miller, who himself, in 2017, would fall out of favour with local members of the party – they decided not to reselect him as their candidate for the 2018 local elections – was equally scathing in his remarks: “Anne has played very little part in the group and has even been unsupportive of the Conservative group in council meetings whilst publicly being critical of national Conservative Party policies without forewarning colleagues and the whip.”
Some of her personal highlights during that peak period of her long tenure as councillor include helping to set up the Friends of the King’s Hall and Winter Garden charity in 2000 to secure the future of the venue, which was at risk of falling into disrepair; founding the Ilkley Summer Festival in 2002, which would go on to become a popular and regular annual celebration in Ilkley (it hosted its last ever event in 2017, with Anne saying at the time that “I am convinced that [with] public funding diminishing … the festival and events in the town will not continue unless we find new ways of funding …”); helping bring about the Friends of Ilkley Moor, a charity that was founded in 2008 to “preserve and improve understanding and awareness of the moor”; and restoring The Grove’s road and pavements in 2013, which were, quite literally, beginning to show some serious cracks – primarily as a result of the high-level frequency of delivery trucks pounding the roads and curbing pavements – with some new cherry trees from the Netherlands to boot.
“I brought music onto the streets of Ilkley,” she says, referring to the Ilkley Summer Festival. “It’s something I am very proud of.”
Since then she has been active on a wide range of issues. More recently that has included joining forces with her former Conservative colleagues to propose revisions to the controversial 20mph speed calming measures that are currently being introduced in Ilkley – despite, as critics of the scheme say, a parish poll opposing most of it – helping raise funds for a memorial park and stone plaque to remember those in Ilkley who lost their lives to Covid-19, and campaigning against new plans for houses to be built on greenbelt land in the town. With 34 years behind her, the list goes on and on and on. And whether you’ve agreed with her ideas or not, supported her politics or hated them, she has, if anything, been relentless in her work ethic.
There was, she hoped, more to come. Announcing her bid to stand for reelection in January, she remarked that what Ilkley – and, in fact, any town, village or city across the English land – needed at a local level were representatives that put residents first and party politics second. That, she explained, was what she had done since 2013 – and that’s exactly what she would do if given the privilege to continue as a councillor.
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“Arrived back in Ilkley after [the] count and coming third,” she wrote on Facebook, the day after the local elections were held. “I am obviously very disappointed. However I have been fortunate and honoured to represent my wonderful Ilkley for 34 years. I shall have to find another route to keep Ilkley special.”
Anne, surprisingly, ended up in third place with just 988 votes. In second place were the Conservatives with 2,247 votes and in first place were the Greens with 2,414 votes (with just 167 votes in it). It was a historic moment. Even though the Green Party had picked up 1,827 votes in 2021, they only managed to get 309 votes in 2016. But that big jump did suggest there was something in their messaging that was beginning to resonate with voters who, on the whole, have remained loyal to local Conservatives irrespective of how the party has performed in Westminster. Times may be a-changin’, this being a general election year and all.
“It was a shock,” Anne tells me. “I’ve been so proud to do it. My main thing in these recent years has been about Ilkley because Ilkley has been my family. I am very much an Ilkley person and an Ilkley councillor.” Her surprise at not being selected is understandable. After 34 years as a councillor, 10 or so of those as an independent, you can forgive Anne or anyone for that matter for being quietly confident in retaining their seat – not that she was, it’s important to add – because as a former Conservative in a town that tends to vote blue, particularly at a local level, why wouldn’t you?
This was also, perhaps, a more complicated election, even more than the one that happened in 2021, a year into the pandemic. While it debuted last year, there was still the issue of voter ID and the impact that it might have had especially among older voters (“I was quite taken aback by the lady when she said she couldn’t vote because she didn’t have ID”, she says).
There’s the fact that Anne, as an independent, didn’t have the same level of resources as the candidates fighting on behalf of parties (though, while this was not so much an issue in 2021, it didn’t stop her from getting elected as an independent in 2016).
Then there’s tactical voting, with speculation that Labour, knowing it didn’t have a chance, tacitly threw their weight behind the Greens. There were also more local and recent issues being used to shore up support, potentially diverting away key votes from Anne, even though she was “on their side” (the Conservative candidate, for instance, was the lead petitioner against the closure of the Golden Butts Household Waste Recycling Centre).
And, finally, there’s the paradox of Ilkley being both conservative leaning and, as Anne puts it, “not as conservative as it used to be – and I mean that with a small ‘c’,”, again resulting in her former supporters, while remaining affectionate towards her, returning to more familiar and alternative ground. National politics may even have played a role in Ros’ election, with, for example, local disdain for what has happened to the Conservative Party potentially resulting in more support not for Labour or the Lib Dems but for the Greens instead.
Disappointed as she is, Anne says she won’t be returning to mainstream local politics. Thirty four years, while a couple of years short of where she perhaps wanted to be – maybe even longer, if, in two from now, in a now alternative future, she still felt up to it and still had the support – is a long enough time to be a councillor.
“It’s been pretty tough the last few years,” she says. A lot of loss. A lot of upheaval. Still, although she’s ‘earned’ the right to step back, she won’t be resting on her laurels. It’s not in her nature. “I would love to be, in some form or another, an ambassador for Ilkley, for culture,” she says. “I’m not sure how it would happen, but it’s a thought.”
As we wrap up, one cup of coffee, one cup of tea and many, many welcome interruptions and hand waves later, I ask if she has any advice for anyone looking to get involved in local politics – or for anyone still involved for that matter.
“You must do it for the right reasons,” she says. “And you need to have a passion for it. Above all, make sure you don’t lose touch with your home base and always think local. It’s what I’ve done.”