Two William Henry Robinsons are buried here, or rather one is buried here but two are named. A father and son who both died young, the wife and mother left to mourn them, and the second man in her life (and the only one who outlived her).
The first William Henry Robinson was born in 1863 to William and Hannah (Pilling) Robinson of Mount Pleasant. William was a wheelwright who hailed from Hebden Bridge originally and William Henry would follow him into business by the time he was 17. The Robinsons of Mount Pleasant were living at the Gauxholme end of that geographical area and were all wheelwrights, so it truly was a family business, and a relatively lucrative one too. When William Sr.’s brother John died he inherited his estate, and this allowed him to buy at least one cottage out of the group of houses known as Wood Cottage above Knowlwood Chapel.
William Henry married Alice Finch of Knowlwood in 1886. Alice had been born in Heywood, the daughter of whitesmith James Finch who himself was originally from Wigan, and mother Alice from Preston. The Finches had moved down to Walsden en masse in the 1870s and were all firm Methodists as evidenced by quite a few relatives of Alice here being buried up at Lumbutts. They were certainly here by 1871, and by 1881 Alice was living with her widowed mother and six siblings at Inchfield Buildings. After their marriage she and William Henry moved to Wood Cottages and set about starting a family. First came Edith in 1888, Annie in 1890, and in October 1891 William Henry Jr. came along.
But first there was tragedy due to our old friend phthsis. How many people buried here died of it? In the 1840s it was responsible for 1 in every 4 deaths and sometimes it feels like this was true well into the late 1800s here as well. William Henry Sr. didn’t live to see the birth of his only son because he died in July 1891 from phthsis and exhaustion. Alice was left pregnant with two little girls, soon to be two little girls and a boy, and things must have felt hopeless. The executors of his estate, brothers James and John, had £185 to share out to creditors and family, and we don’t know how much went to Alice and the children. She didn’t remarry for some time though and in 1901 was living at 574 Rochdale Road (now the Walsden Village Store) with the children and her brother James Finch. He was a cotton mule spinner and she and Edith were cotton winders.
In 1905 though she found love again in the form of James Thomas Highley. They may have known each other for some time, since James grew up at Clough and then Inchfield. James was born in 1872, the last child of James and Ellen (Harrison) Highley before Ellen’s death. James Sr. remarried Cornish migrant Salome Northey Wearne and their blended family found work as weavers, winders and scutchers wherever they could. After he died their mutual children stayed behind with Salome as long as they could, all working together to keep things going. Even a daughter-in-law joined the team, so to speak! James was nearly ten years younger than Alice Robinson and the thought of becoming the stepfather of three not-that-small children would have had many young men then (and now) pausing for thought, but he had already seen firsthand the importance a stepparent can have in the life of a child. He’d been a young child in a similar situation himself, after all. So they married at St. Peter’s, with his stepsister Martha Jane as a witness.
James was a fan of brass bands and sports and must have been a breath of fresh air for the Robinson children, William Henry particularly, as well as seeming to have been an excellent stepfather. By the time of their marriage Alice was 42 and so the couple never had any children of their own. The family moved to Maitland Street. The Robinson children continued to work in the cotton mills, with William Henry working as a picker maker. As we have mentioned elsewhere, when WW1 broke out initially picker makers were exempt from being called up. As time went on and casualties mounted, however, this was modified to only married picker makers being exempt (and even that began to crumble near the end). William Henry was single when the war broke out, and he stayed home as long as he could, but eventually his time came to enlist. He must have known it was coming as he had already joined the St. John Ambulance volunteers and obtained his first aid certificate.
He enlisted in September 1916 and went to France in March 1917, joining the Machine Gun Corps. He lasted less than four months. On July 11th 1917, he was near his gun in a trench when a shell landed and exploded, killing him and his trench mates instantly.
He was buried at Messines Ridge British Cemetery in Mesen, Belgium, and has a CWGC stone there.
All deaths hit a family hard, and everyone copes with grief differently. William Henry is one of the war dead who had an in memoriam printed nearly every year for years and years afterwards. Poor Alice, having lost his father young and then him even younger…it’s a hard grief to imagine, and knowing she wasn’t alone may have helped, or it may not. Again everyone is different. But for years afterwards he was missed and missed some more in the papers.
But time and societal expectations moved on, and the in memoriams grew shorter and shorter, until ten years later in 1927 the final one came.
James may have been a carter but he was a clever man – he had been a National Register enumerator in 1915 – and he became an insurance agent. Tracking his career path is rather difficult due to the number of Highleys in Walsden, and particularly due to there being another J. T. Highley living at Maitland Street during this time! But in 1914 he began working for the Britannic Assurance Company and he would do so until his retirement in 1937. This left him and Alice three years in which to enjoy his retirement in their home on Unity Street. But in 1940 Alice died and joined her first husband here.
Her in memoriam from 1941 reads “gone from a world of trouble, into a haven of rest”. We always wonder what the mothers of boys lost in WW1 made of WW2 and the fears it would have brought up for them for their grandchildren. Alice perhaps really was called away at a “good” time, before WW2 could get any further off the ground than it already had. James, a loving husband and stellar stepper-upper for his three stepchildren, followed in 1945 and was the last person into this grave.
