Here, Robin Longbottom looks back at the life of a celebrated mountaineer and photographer UNTIL the mid 1970s, there was a small collection of framed photographs on display in the old Keighley Reference Library. They were of mountain scenes taken in the French and Swiss Alps by Alfred Holmes, of Keighley, who during the late 19th and early 20th centuries was one of the district’s most celebrated mountaineers and rock climbers. He was born in Keighley in 1846 and was in business as a machine woolcomber in Great Horton, Bradford. He never married and his bachelor status left him free to indulge himself in mountaineering and photography.