18.24 – Richard, Frank, John Albert and Agnes Scholfield, and Benjamin and Emma Jane Shepherd

The people above are buried here, under this lancet-laid-flat in the lower yard. Emma Jane is last in the title of this story but she’s the thread that ties everyone else together. This grave contains her first and third husbands and her two sons and a daughter in law, as well as four unnamed infants.

So as she’s the central thread, let’s start with her. Emma Jane Hartley was born in 1862 in Walsden to Edward and Hannah (Hurst) Hartley, the fifth of eight children. Edward Hartley was a carter and everyone in the house pulling their weight, no pun intended – even little Emma Jane was a “scholar and short timer” at the age of nine in 1871. Hannah was home looking after the children but that was so literally every child legally able to do any work at all could be working. Things were no different in 1881; even their address of 3 Lewis Street was the same. Emma Jane now worked as a cotton frame tenter. After the 1881 Census had been taken the Hartleys moved toward the centre of town, to Honey Hole, and in 1886 Emma Jane got married for the first time to Richard Scholfield of Butcher Hill.

Richard was two years older than Emma Jane and his parents Samuel and Mary (Pollard) are buried here too at 36.35. Samuel was an engine tenter and the family moved around Shade for some time, renting where they could and, again, with all child worker hands on deck. Even the under-10s had work as errand boys! Richard became a stoker at a cotton mill, a very dirty and physically tiring job keeping boilers going to create steam to run various processes – the sort of job where you fall asleep as soon as you get home, or at least, it would for most of us reading this today. He had good habits, only appearing once in the newspapers, when he got punched and kicked a few times while helping a policeman apprehend Thomas Kendall on one of his drunken escapades.

After the two married they settled at Weir Street and started their family. We can only confidently name two of them, the two named here: John Albert, in 1887, and Frank in 1890. The couple did have a pair of stillborn twins in 1887 but they aren’t buried at this location as this grave is in a row of 1897 graves; their actual location is unknown. If other children were born and lost in the intervening years between 1890 and 1897 we have no record of them. 1897 is where we end this particular search, though, as this was the year Richard died. He was only 37 and died from double pneumonia and “asthaenia”, aka asthenia, or generalised muscle weakness and paralysis. It would have been a complication of double pneumonia and is a reminder of how before modern antibiotics it didn’t matter how hale and hearty you were…even an engine stoker could be felled by a little bacteria.

Emma Jane mourned for a few years and then remarried in 1900 to Joseph Sutcliffe, a widower 11 years her senior who lived at Swineshead Clough. Joseph had been left with three youngish girls when his first wife died and at first he and Emma Jane seem to have blended their families fairly well. He was a cotton weaver who originally hailed from Oldham. We aren’t sure why things didn’t go so well for this couple but by 1911 Emma Jane was living with her sister Ada and brother in law Sidney Midgey, as well as the boys, on Oak Street while Joseph was living with two of his daughters on Ivy Street. Both in Shade, not far from each other, but conspicuously not together. At least they both still said they were married, which is better than some marriage breakdowns…it’s possible that some of the unnamed infants in this grave came from this marriage, but neither declared any lost children on the 1911 Census who could be attributed to this marriage so we suspect not.

Meanwhile the two boys, John Albert and Frank, had found work in the cotton industry which is hardly surprising. John Albert was a loom overlooker and Frank a weaver, and of course both pursued their own outside interests too. We aren’t quite sure what Frank’s were but John Albert was particularly interested in textiles beyond merely making them, and won a £60 scholarship and £25 bursary in 1907 from the Worshipful Company of Drapers in London for further study in the field. This was quite an achievement for a young man from solid working class roots and would have represented a massive boost to the family’s name and potentially also fortunes. Maybe this is why he was an overlooker in 1911 rather than still “just” a weaver (although there’s nothing wrong with that!). Both were also active with the parish church, and interestingly Frank is linked with St. Mary’s while John Albert with Christ Church. WW1 put an end to Frank’s church activities though as he enlisted in October 1915 and joined the 3rd Battalion 6th Lancashire Fusiliers.

The war put an end to everything for Frank, in the end, as just under two years after his enlistment he met his end in France in September 1917. His name is on the Tyne Cot Memorial; as it says on the stone here, “our Father knoweth where he sleeps”.

Emma Jane was, understandably, devastated. Even worse, possibly, the following year Joseph Sutcliffe died. He’s buried at Cross Stone with his first wife and two children who had predeceased him, but in the meantime Emma Jane had only her son and remaining siblings left for support. She temporarily moved to Poulton-le-Fylde, where Frank’s pension information had to be sent, but eventually returned to Todmorden.

John Albert, meanwhile, had stayed home throughout the war. He had gotten married in May 1911 to Agnes Stansfield of Industrial Street. Agnes was one of eight children of Thomas and Hannah Jane (Bentley) Stansfield, more cotton folk – in Thomas’s case a picker maker. Agnes’s particular expertise was dressmaking and no doubt she and her future husband found much to talk about when they met. Between his elderly mother and the arrival of their first child in 1915, daughter Hannah Mary, John Albert was clearly exempt. He used the time to continue to develop his education…and to help pick up the pieces when Frank died. It won’t surprise you to learn that his and Agnes’s son, born in 1920, was named Frank.

(An aside here – it must have terrified them when Frank was reported missing during WW2; it turned out in the end that he had been taken prisoner of war in the Middle East by the Germans, and spent some time in a POW camp before being released at the end of the war. Especially as the resemblance between the two is clear.)

John Albert became a teacher at the Technical School after the war, teaching “theory” of cotton weaving and cloth dissection. He and Agnes both remained active with Christ Church and they welcomed another two more children over time. He also joined the Freemasons although we don’t know which Lodge he was a member of. He died in 1949 and was much lamented in the newspaper and by many at Christ Church.

Agnes followed him in 1966 at the very respectable age of 80. We wish we had more to say about her life but don’t know much; any family members who wish to weigh in, please do so!

Hang on hang on, you say, you told us that Emma Jane was the central thread here! Well it got a bit unwieldy swapping back and forth between people so it seemed easier to divert a little. Back to her now. Widowed for the second time in 1918 and with one of her two beloved children dead in a foreign field. Was starting over even remotely possible? Emma Jane was nothing if not a soldier herself, carrying on regardless. And while her third marriage would be relatively short, hopefully it was a chance to heal and be healed, as her third and final husband was also grieving.

Benjamin Shepherd was born in 1863 in Shoreditch, London – no comments about Londoners coming up here! – to Thomas James Shepherd, a shoemarker. Like Emma Jane he was from a large family. The Shepherds moved north to Bolton in the 1870s where there was already a Benjamin Shepherd who was a shoemaker living; an uncle, perhaps? Benjamin though had no time for shoes. He was an iron moulder and glazier, and likely was a big strong man like Richard Scholfield had been once. He eventually worked his way over to Todmorden and in 1891 was lodging at Union Street…but not for long. That same year he married Ruth Priestley Marshall, a widow ten years his senior who had lost her husband about twelve years previously and who had a 16 year old son (Fred) who worked as a machine fitter. So Benjamin was 32 and Ruth 42, but that didn’t stop them having a child of their own in 1894 named Florrie. That would be it though.

The family moved up to Summerfield Road and Benjamin also started working as a machine fitter at Lord Bros. on Halifax Road. It’s not clear whether it was Benjamin or Ruth, or both, who were keen Baptists, but both Fred and later Florrie would get married at Rehoboth Baptist on Roomfield Lane; a denominational world away from the Scholfields and their firm commitment to Christ Church and St. Mary’s, but it doesn’t seem to have mattered in the end. In January 1920 Florrie married and moved out, and in December 1921 Ruth died. Benjamin was now on his own. He mourned for six months and in May 1922 married Emma Jane at St. Mary’s. John Albert and Agnes must have approved, as they both served as the witnesses. You want to see your mother happy, though, don’t you?

Emma Jane and Benjamin had five hopefully happy years together before he died in 1927. It was Emma Jane’s last marriage. They had moved to 5 Watty Hole and she stayed in the house there for as long as she could afterwards. As time went on though her health faded, and she eventually ended up as an inpatient at Stansfield View. One night in January 1943 she fell and broke her hip, and the subsequent period in bed led to her developing hypostatic pneumonia (as still happens today) and after two weeks she was too tired to fight it any longer and died at the age of 80. She didn’t live to see her grandson Frank return home from his POW camp but she did live long enough to know that he was alive, and hopefully that was enough to give her a little bit of peace.

She had remained a member of the Mother’s Union at Christ Church to the end, and she was remembered at their February meeting by way of a £1 donation being made to St. Mary’s Hospital for Women in Manchester in her name. And we remember her here too; sometimes it’s hard to tell a woman’s story when so much of the reporting on life was done on the men around them, but we hope we did her justice. Like many of the other mothers in our war grave stories, she lived through two wars and lost much and feared the loss of so much more, but kept going because there was no other choice. Or at least only a very binary choice: keep living or don’t. She chose to hold on until the very end.