15.25 -Arthur and Hannah Hirst, and Maria Hudson

Following on from our story about Sarah Elizabeth and Mary Ann Hirst, enjoy another Hirst story. The story of these two is straightforward, but this grave contains a mystery: who was Maria Hudson? We’ll get to her at the end.

Firstly, though, a recap on Arthur Hirst’s childhood. His parents George and Hannah Hirst came here from Knottingley, with George working as a hairdresser out of his own shop at 24 Halifax Road. George, though, became fond of a drink, and something of a terror to his family for the last few years of his life. Arthur was the baby of the family, born in 1872 just as his parents suffered the loss of his three year old brother Tom, and will have been a special favourite as a result. So special a favourite that George, in front of the court for having threatened to slit his wife’s throat and murder half his family in a drunken rage, asked the court to grant him sole custody of Arthur. The audacity of this man…

The courts quite rightly said no and Arthur stayed with Harriet, working as a warehouseman and looking after her along with his sister Priscilla. The most trouble Arthur ever got into was when he was 11 years old, when he might have tried to climb into a bucket to get hauled up with some weft at Lord Bros. and nearly got himself fatally folded in half.

Otherwise he was a good boy, as so often children who are raised in abusive households become, and he continued living with his mother for as long as he was single. But in 1894 the outside world got a look in, and he married Hannah Smith of Gauxholme Fold. Hannah was two years younger than him and couldn’t have had a more different childhood in the parenting sense. Her father Samuel was a plasterer who ran a painting and decorating business alongside his brother William. The company went bust in 1874 and Samuel had to sell everything down to the furniture to satisfy creditors, but he continued to work and his family unit seems to have been unaffected. If she hadn’t been a literal babe in arms she would have been proud of him that same year when he rushed in a neighbour’s house which was on fire and put the fire out and tried to save their clothes and other flammable belongings by throwing them out the window. Now that’s a dad to look up to. After he died in 1880 his wife Elizabeth took over the business that he’d regrown, which employed six men including two of his sons, but by the 1891 Census she too had passed away and it was just sisters Ann, Sarah and Hannah at 1 Gauxholme Fold, all working as weavers to keep the household going.

After Arthur and Hannah married they stayed at Harley Bank for a while. Arthur found work at Crow Carr Ings Mill as a weaver and continued playing cricket for the Bridge Street Methodist Club that he had been a member of for years at that point. Their first child Edward was born there in December 1894. By the time second child Walter was born, though, they had left Todmorden altogether and moved to Marton near Skipton. Why? Because Arthur, perhaps out of respect for the policemen who helped his family deal with his drunken father, had decided to join the West Riding Constabulary.

First to Skipton, then to Ossett, and the Hirsts stayed there until 1922 when home called and they answered. It will have gotten tiring dealing with endless variations on his dad. They moved to Garden Street and Arthur settled into retired life, joining the Liberal Club, and in 1935 he and Hannah saw the last of their children married off. Hannah died the following year, and Arthur kept on for a while but joined her in 1944.

And what of Maria Hudson? Well, it took some sleuthing, but the answer is that she’s no relation at all to the Hirsts. Maria Hudson was her name all her life; she was born in 1844 in Escrick, just south of York, to sawyer William Hudson and his wife Sophia. She was one of many children and like most of the Hudson daughters, left home to work in service as soon as she was old enough. Her younger sister Emily married the charming groomsman and later cab proprietor William Crowe of Ilkley in 1876, and the pair themselves set about starting their own large family – eight in all. William was very successful but also was terrible with money, and fond of horse racing, and also fond of creative accounting.

The couple moved to Halifax but spent time in Ilkley, Preston, and Sheffield as well. For whatever reason they ended up taking on a house in Todmorden and Emily, with a generous £500 given to her by William to thank her for her housework and raising their children, bought a drapers and milliners business at 21 Halifax Road. He also started paying his son Herbert £2 a week to run the cab business, later excusing this by saying that if he paid the boy any less he’d have left for Ilkley to go work for a competitor…

Maria Hudson had been working at various homes in York but by 1891 had moved in with the Crowes to help both with the children and the business – in 1891 she was described as William’s assistant. William’s lifestyle caught up with him in 1898 and months of bankruptcy hearings, bruising questionings by creditors and their solicitors, and the outright scoffing at his claims that Emily’s business was entirely hers and he wasn’t going to trouble her about anything she owed, must have been stressful for everyone. Maria was the least touched by everything but also had plenty to lose, and will have worried about her sister’s apparent cooperation with William’s ridiculous scheme. An already unwell woman therefore became more unwell, and she died of peritonitis and “general debility”. Niece Fanny was the informant…everyone else was probably busy!!

Maria’s death in March 1899 came as the court was deciding not to discharge William as otherwise he wouldn’t ever be held to account. Money WASN’T tight for the Crowes, not at all. Emily made sure that her sister Maria got a grave all to herself. But she never seems to have gotten a stone, and by 1901 the Crowes were in Sheffield. William was an insurance agent…make whatever joke you want there…and Emily was a clothier. Fanny, the daughter who was the informant for Maria’s death, later married a bank cashier named Sep Radcliffe, and when Sep and Fanny moved to Rotherham Emily went with them. She died in 1916 and was buried back in Sheffield, and William with her in 1932.

It seems that at some point the ownership of this grave was transferred to Arthur and Hannah, somehow; no paperwork survives that proves it. Either that or Arthur was able to pull some quiet strings and get not just a burial agreed here for his wife and him, but also permission to place stones. These things do happen, believe it or not! It’s only the sexton’s book that tells us Maria is here at all. Luckily modern technology and scanned in archive records allowed us to identify her and figure out how she ended up in Todmorden.