A lad like any other lad who met an early end – one of three named here, in fact – and a wife and mother who had to carry on regardless.
Samuel Thomas was born in 1855 to another Samuel, a railway labourer, and his wife Betty. He was the youngest of the four children that Samuel and Betty had together before his untimely death; Betty would quickly remarry, to cotton scutcher Henry Sutcliffe of Union Street, and young Samuel and brother John (the older siblings Martha and William had by this time both died) would be joined by 1861 by a little half sister named Grace. Sadly she too died young, in 1866, and was buried up at Cross Stone. This appears to have possibly led to a breakdown in the marriage as in 1871 Betty is on her own again, not widowed, with the two Thomas boys still with her and all three having moved to Canteen in Lydgate. John and Samuel were both working on self acting mules, machines which spun cotton thread, John as a piecer and Samuel as a minder. Piecing involved fixing broken threads as they came through and minding meant watching the machine and the two younger boys who would be helping with piecing and other aspects of the machine’s running. Small hands can get into smaller parts and knot smaller thread ends…they also get lopped off more easily but that doesn’t feature in this story.
In 1879 Samuel married Sarah Jane Taylor, or Jane as she was known and made herself known on her marriage certificate, in Heptonstall. We’ll stick to Sarah Jane as that’s what’s on her gravestone. Sarah Jane was the same age as Samuel and had been born in York to James and Mary Ann Taylor. James was a “slaughterman” who had a butcher’s shop in the Shambles and specialised in pigs. He appears several times in York newspapers in the 1860s and 70s with his prize-winning pigs at the annual York Pig Show. He was a York native and would stay so all his life, and the route by which Sarah Jane made it to Todmorden in order to marry Samuel is very, very unclear. Opaque even. How did they even meet with Samuel and James’s occupations being so different? But meet they did. Sarah Jane gave her address as Bowed Row, the curved row of terraces that once stood over the Calder next to Robinwood Mill and was also known as Fielden Terrace. One sister, Lydia, witnessed the marriage, and another sister, Hannah was later living with Samuel and Sarah Jane at Bowed Row. Both sisters were working in the cotton mills, even with there already being a baby Thomas in the household, so perhaps it was work that drew them to the valley.
Samuel and Sarah Jane had nine children together starting with Betty in 1880 and ending with Samuel Jr (technically Samuel III) in 1897. Their only early loss appears to have been baby Henry, who was born in late 1882 and died in 1884 and is buried at Cross Stone possibly with his aunt Grace. As far as we know the family was a happy one. Or at least, if we knew the answer to who told the census taker in 1891 that Sarah Jane’s occupation was “slave”, we’d know whether they were a happy humourous family or if there was perhaps a bit of a conflict…
Samuel never appears in the newspaper named as a drunkard or thief or as abusive, so that’s a clue that things may have been all right. His only newspaper appearances are his marriage and his death. He died in March 1901 at the relatively young age of 44. Sarah Jane was left a widow, with seven of eight children still at home, the youngest one only four. What a situation to find yourself in. She rallied though and decided that they could do it themselves, without her having to remarry. Eldest daughter Betty had already married and moved out but the others hadn’t yet and three were hard at work at, most likely, Robinwood Mill earning their household’s keep. There wouldn’t have been the space to take in any lodgers so what they earned would have to be enough.
Sarah Jane, however, wasn’t in such straitened means that she couldn’t have a life. In 1910 she went on a very interesting adventure – to visit Delano, Minnesota, to see her eldest sister Elizabeth. Elizabeth was now Elizabeth Buckley and her husband, Walter S. Buckley, was a linotype printer and publisher who seems to have been working back and forth between the US and UK for some time. They married in 1879 and while the 1910 US Census says they emigrated there in 1887, this is either incorrect or only mentions their first foray to the US (they were living in Buxton in 1901 at least when the census was being taken). By 1910 they were living in Delano and Sarah Jane visited them for about six weeks, arriving on July 5th and leaving around August 21st. Walter died in 1915 so perhaps the visit was to help her sister with an illness, or maybe it was just something to bring them both a bit of cheer. The passenger manifest from when she entered the US at Boston gives us our only clue about Sarah Jane’s appearance that we have: 5’5″ tall, fresh complexion, grey hair and brown eyes.
Charles William, our war hero, was the third youngest child. He had been born in 1893 and by 1911 was also working as a cotton weaver like the rest of his siblings (he had been too young to go to work even as a half timer in 1901). He was a young man full of energy and looking for adventure and this may have been what led him to join the Territorials in 1910 for a four-year stint. By 1912 he had left weaving to become a porter for the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway although having to work every Saturday made it hard for him to fulfil his army duties. Unable to prioritise, and apparently to bring himself to ask for some time off work, he ended up missing shooting practice and being fined 20s for it. He doesn’t seem to have handled things very graciously, but we don’t always do well when we get called out for messing up do we?!
Not long after this he left the railway and went back to weaving. He found work at Frostholme Mill and joined the Frostholme Institute, a social club set up for the young men and women employed there that gave them some social and educational outlets outside of work. It wasn’t as easy to nip into the town centre to go to the library in those days, and an Institute was better for them than the pub in the long term. This photo that belongs to the Todmorden Antiquarian Society is undated but maybe Charles William or one of his siblings or friends is one of the tiny figures in it.
We can imagine, can’t we?
When the war broke out Charles William’s attestation was already over – it had likely expired in the middle of 1914 – but he felt the urge to return, probably thinking he had all the training he needed. It would have also potentially taken some of the strain off of his brothers, since John was married with a young child and James was only recently married himself. There was also Sarah Jane to think of. So it probably seemed like a good idea. His war records haven’t survived so we only know what we can glean from the newspapers, and sadly what we can glean was that Charles William had gone to the Dardanelles with the 6th Battalion Lancashire Fusiliers, and on May 15th he and his fellow soldiers were fighting for their lives at Gallipoli to little avail. He was one of four Todmorden lads who died in the battle, and likely some of the wounded followed.
If he joined up to protect his brothers, then the saddest thing of all will be that James enlisted on May 13th 1915 – two days before Charles William died. Luckily for James however (or maybe not, thinking about it) he failed the medical exam for a pre-existing heart condition and poor eyesight, and was discharged on the 18th of May, just in time to hear of his younger brother’s death. Charles William was 21 years old. He is remembered at Twelve Tree Copse Cemetery in Turkey, which itself is made up of graves exhumed and reinterred there from smaller burial sites on the Gallipoli peninsula. As many as a third of those buried there are unidentified but believed to be the bodies of specific soldiers, but Charles William’s body is known to definitely be there. Some small comfort.
As did all the other mothers, Sarah Jane had to continue on. She had other children and by this point grandchildren to be thinking of. She had moved to 6 Cornholme Terrace along with daughter Sarah Jane, who would marry Joseph William Leach in 1920, and the three carried on at that address. Daughter Martha, who had married Walter Sharp in 1912, lived just a few doors down. For those last years she was surrounded by family and that will have counted for a great deal. She died in 1925 aged 69 and her death marked in the paper – and that’s the end of this story here.
