Here’s a war grave that encompasses quite a bit more than “just” WW1; here we have wealth gained, wealth lost, new starts, domestic violence, and a little bit of Russian and Canadian intrigue.
The story begins with George Hirst and Harriet Rowlandson of Knottingley, who married at Christ Church in East Knottingley in July 1851. Both came from working class backgrounds and George was a hairdresser. They would have nine children that we know of. Their youngest, Arthur, is buried at 15.25 and is a story for another day. The Hirsts came to Todmorden in the late 1860s but all was not well, with George developing a taste for drink and this either causing him to become, or making him less willing to stop being, a domestic abuser. The couple also lost a son, Tom, in 1872. Between 1878 and his death in 1881 he terrorised Harriet and the children to the point where she was granted a protection order and he was sent to prison several times for either threatening her or for being drunk and disorderly.
At this grave there’s only really the first two children of George and Harriet Hirst who figure into our story: Sarah Elizabeth, born in 1852, and Mary Ann, born in 1854. First let’s look at eldest daughter Sarah. How did her life turn out after this somewhat rocky start?
The eldest daughter often gets the roughest end of the deal, but Sarah did all right for herself more or less. She became a weaver and given the large number of younger siblings in the home might have been expected to stay single and home for quite some time. She did stay home, probably because of George’s instability, but she bucked the trend in one way. In 1972 she married William Lord, a stonemason from Crawshawbooth near Bacup. William was the only son of either William or John Lord of Bacup (we can’t tell from the GRO index which one of the two it was) and his wife Christiana Hannah Maden. They had married the year before William’s birth and he was dead by 1851. She married again and William seems to have had a decent life as a young man. He seems to have been working back and forth across the north and must have met Sarah on an outing to Todmorden. They ended up getting married in Bolton (perhaps George didn’t approve) but their home was definitely Todmorden. 1872 was a bad year for the reason mentioned earlier, Sarah’s little brother Tom dying, and this might also be why they stuck close. That little Tom was buried up at Cross Stone. In 1874 William and Sarah had their own little son, naming him Tom as well…but this Tom was also unlucky. He died at the age of three months old and was also buried at Cross Stone with his three-year old uncle. He would be William and Sarah’s only child.
William and Sarah were very supportive of Harriet during the difficult period where George began to lose the plot. We know this because one of the more serious criminal charges brought against George mentioned that he was living at a house that “taken in the name of his [John James Hirst’s] sister”, presumably Sarah, while the rest of the family lived at Harley Bank. Eventually they got George out of the house on Brook Street and moved back into it, where Harriet and the Hirst children and the Lords can be found on the 1881 Census. William had in the meantime purchased another house and hope on Brook and Back Brook Street, and it was to Back Brook Street that he and Sarah would move after he let out the shop.
William was a skilled worker and worked on a number of building sites throughout Todmorden in the late 1880s and early 1890s, when there was a particular boom in housebuilding as well as the expansion of the public sewerage system. If you live at Brighton Terrace in Cornholme, we definitely know that he helped build your house as well as the houses behind on what was Brookfield Terrace thanks to a newspaper article about the inquest of a man working there under him who died after drinking too much cold water too quickly. Yes, that can be a thing! Ultimately he became foreman mason for local contractor Benjamin Lumb, and it was for Lumb that he was working when he died suddenly in 1889. Pneumonia strikes again. Not the first time it would fell someone in this family either.
Two years later Sarah would lose her mother Harriet, and it must have felt like a very lonely existence for her indeed. On the 1901 Census she’s living alone at the house on 24 Back Brook Street, and in 1911 she was still alone at the same address. Her helpful nephew Joe Hirst Shackleton filled in the form for her. By 1916 her health had deteriorated though, and she died at the end of March that year and was buried here alongside William. She left her estate to her sisters Priscilla and Mary Ann to disperse to the rest of the family.
What about Mary Ann? Let’s rewind back to 1881. Back then Mary Ann was still single, and still helping William, Sarah, and her other siblings support Harriet in the days after her father’s death. But a young man had turned her head, and quite the young man too. Sam Shackleton, the eldest son of cotton manufacturer William Shackleton of Vale Manse in Cornholme – yes, the owner of Springwood Mill and others in the area. She must have thought that she’d won the lottery, even with the Shackletons not enjoying the best financial position in 1881! Sam’s father William had been forced to declare bankruptcy in 1877 and was in the middle of trying to rebuild his business and income stream. Despite the “temporary embarrassment” the marriage seems to have been a good one at first. Three children came along, William in 1886, then May, and lastly Joe Hirst Shackleton in 1893.
But Sam was a highly motivated individual; a mechanic, an engineer, a foreman enameller, a science teacher, and a cotton man. He worked hard and worked a lot, and Mary Ann was literally left holding the baby. And to top it all off, he was an adventurer in the name of business, and in the 1890s went on what would have been an exciting but also surprisingly dangerous work trip to Smolensk, in the very far west of Russia, near what is now the border with Belarus.
Russian-spun cotton had come to the attention of the British during the American Civil War, when cotton was being desperately sourced from all corners to try and make up for the loss of cotton from the southern states. It wasn’t of very good quality but it did the trick. Later, though, thanks to links between the Russian royal house and Queen Victoria, there began to be a move to help improve Russian manufacturing and technology via encouraging British firms to set up mills in Russia, whether to do spinning or for making machinery. They’d make a bit of money too, of course, but revitalisation of Russian industry was the reason. Sam went to work in a bobbin works in Smolensk first in, it seems, 1898, which was rather dangerous – only a few years earlier in 1895 a cotton mill manager from Oldham was stabbed to death in Smolensk by an employee after withholding his wages! He was still there in 1899 and in early 1900, before returning to Britain and trying to keep his bobbin turning business in Blackburn going. There is little information about his trip apart from the few letters he sent home that were published in the Todmorden Advertiser (and one in an anti-Russian London newspaper – can’t imagine why from reading the above excerpt).
The attempt to keep his business in Blackburn going seems to have failed and Sam was back in Todmorden by 1901 working as a pipefitter. The family were living at Cobden, which seems odd but if you realise that William Shackleton’s second attempt at industry had also failed and in 1882 he’d had £3200 of liabilities against £920 of assets, his wide variety of work pursuits, dangerous work abroad, and seeming to flail around for some, any, work on his return home suddenly makes more sense. In this context was Sam a directionless polymath, or a young man brought up in luxury who suddenly had to make his side interests and pursuits into a real career, and was struggling to do so consistently?
By 1911 Mary Ann and Sam were living apart. He was boarding with his brother Edwin on Shackleton Street in Cornholme, marked as unemployed, and she was living with Joe at 9 Boardman Street in central Todmorden. Joe was working as a cotton weaver. It ran in the family on that side, after all! And he had done well in examinations at school on practical cotton weaving techniques. He had found work at Crabtree’s, based at Ferney Lee Mill, and he was also a regular attendee of York Street Wesleyan’s Sunday School. A good son by all accounts. Mary Ann’s other children had moved away from Todmorden and she only had her siblings left now that mother Harriet had died and joined George and the two Toms at Cross Stone. Her brother and her younger son’s namesake Joe Hirst, who had become a successful and nicer hairdresser than his father as well as a tobacconist and Liberal candidate, and maybe her biggest support financially whenever things got difficult, had also moved to Bournemouth following a heart complaint. So when WW1 broke out she will have feared her two sons William and Joe being sent off and her being left completely unsupported.
As it happened Joe went and William, from what we can tell, stayed. Joe enlisted in January 1916 and trained and qualified as a signaller with the Royal Field Artillery. Signallers were at the front lines operating radios and telegraphs to communicate between base and the troops and were also tasked with ensuring that vital electrical lines remained intact and working at all times. It was a prestigious and dangerous job, a world away from cotton weaving. Joe’s luck held for a good long while but it ran out in the end, and because of his bravery rather than bad luck. On May 1st 1917 he saw an officer and a sergeant get hit by a shell, went to help them when they cried out, and a second shell caught him in the arm and neck. He initially seemed well and as though he would pull through, but shortly after Mary Ann received a letter to this effect she got a second letter; the one all mothers dreaded.
He’s buried at Sainte Catherine British Cemetery in Nord-Pas-de-Calais.
Poor Mary Ann, and William and May, and poor Emily Sutcliffe.
We call your attention to his in memoriam a year later; is there a trace of bitterness in the statement “gave his life for two officers”? So often it’s lads who gave their lives for their fellow men, or for their country, or for freedom…maybe this is pointed is a very modern reading of a simple sentence though.
Mary Ann stayed on at the house on Boardman Street. She saw her daughter May married in 1918, which will have been nice, and her son William was doing all right for himself living in Cornholme. But sadly she would suffer ANOTHER loss, as May died suddenly in October 1922. After this she began to become unwell (no surprise right) and went out to Blackpool to spend some time getting fresh sea air. It wasn’t enough, though, and pneumonia again claimed someone in the family. She was the last person to be buried here in this grave in January 1923.
Epilogue: what happened to Sam? This question vexed and perplexed researchers until some papers belonging to the Shackleton family and held by the Todmorden Antiquarian Society were dug out of the library’s archives and looked through at some length. The answer also explains why the marriage might have broken down. After William Shackleton died, what was left of his estate was passed to his wife Jane to be held in trust for their many children, with the money going to them after her death. In 1900, after coming home from Russia and while struggling to keep his business in Blackburn going, Sam sold his share of his inheritance to someone else. Why wait for the money then when you could have it now? His brother Edwin knew about this as he was a solicitor but he might have been the only one who did. After Jane died at Storthes Hall in 1910 the matter will have come fully to light. We wonder if Mary Ann knew…because if she didn’t, it would make a lot of sense for him to suddenly be thrown out of the house. Sam’s unemployment in 1911 is also interesting in this context. In 1912, once the will had been proved and we know that Sam’s money was paid out to the new inheritor, he left England and sailed to Canada to start over. He would settle in Quebec for a spell, working as an engineer, before moving across the continent to Calgary in Alberta. He died in February 1926 and is buried out there.