Lineholme stalwarts here, with a dash of Liverpudlian for good measure.
Thomas Sutcliffe was born in 1846, the first child of his parents Joseph and Grace (Rigg) of Lineholme, Lydgate today, on the Burnley side of Todmorden. Joseph was a labourer who soon became a grocer and who spent the rest of his life supplying the people of Lydgate with all (or at least most) of their culinary needs. Thomas was a cotton weaver though and happy to be so, or at least comfortable being so, and was also so happy in Lydgate that he would spend his entire life in the area. Back then such parts of Todmorden were their own little economic units and you could easily never need to pop into the town centre for anything at all if you didn’t want to.
All insular places need outside blood and that’s where Harriet Maltby Ingham enters. Harriet’s early life was unnecessarily dramatic; her mother Jane Ingham, the daughter of Baptist minister Richard Ingham (who preached at Heptonstall-Slack Chapel from 1822 to 1834), had a strange sense of “Ingham supremacy”. We say this because she married her first husband, chemist Amos Ingham of Liverpool, in 1844, and had three children with him before his death in early 1847. Harriet was the third child and was born a few months after his death. Jane went back to Sheffield with her children to stay with her widowed mother and in 1851 we can see that she had fostered her daughters out to several different aunts across the North – why? That’s not clear. But in 1852 she married weaver Henry Ingham of Wadsworth, a widower who was thirteen years her senior, and started a fresh family with him. Harriet and her sisters followed along but the fostering continued. Harriet was taken in with Jane and Henry but her older sisters Annie Louisa and Ellen Jane chose, we assume, to stay with Jane’s widowed sister Sally Mitchell, who lived in Lydgate.
Henry Ingham left weaving behind to become a grocer and this plus Sally Mitchell’s residence and both families being committed Baptists is how Harriet and Thomas must have met. They were married in 1866 and started their family – eight children all told, six boys and two girls. One, Joseph, died young and was buried here at Christ Church in 1872. While Harriet worked in the home Thomas worked at a mill, still weaving.
When we say the Sutcliffes were also committed Baptists we meant it – Joseph Sutcliffe was the first Trustee of Mount Olivet Chapel when it was built in 1867. Mount Olivet was an offshoot of Lineholme’s Bethel Chapel, which itself was an offshoot from Shore, and had met for a time at Arch View above the picker works there, but they outgrew that space as well as found it a bit miserable. Harriet and her sisters all became members of the offshoot church as did Thomas and his siblings, and members they would stay, all the way through to the building of their grand new chapel which is now sadly no more.
The Sutcliffes, old and new, were committed to this area in more ways than one, bouncing from street to street but never straying far. In 1871 they were at Canteen, next door to Joseph and Grace – in 1881 they were at Kitson Wood Road, with Thomas having “graduated” to becoming a book keeper for a sizing mill, most likely Canteen Mill under Robert and John Hollinrake – and by 1891 they were at Robinwood Terrace. Hard work was paying off! Life wasn’t without its troubles though. In 1888 Thomas and Harriet’s second child, Willie, died suddenly one afternoon in late January 1888. Be ye also ready, as so many stones in the graveyard here tell us, and the Sutcliffes were showered with support from their church despite Willie never having become a member along with a small subscription that was taken up for them by members of Lydgate Liberal Club.
At this point Willie, if not the entire family, had been living at Well Street. Not the Well Street you’re probably thinking of. This was the original name for the row of terraced houses that now makes up the even numbers of Plane Street in Lydgate. We told you the Sutcliffes weren’t travellers!
In 1901 there were still six Sutcliffe children living at home on Robinwood Terrace, but they swiftly began to marry and move out, and by the time Thomas died in February 1909 he and Harriet had moved to a much smaller house on Barker Street – again, not that one, but the one now called JOHN Barker Street – with only their daughter Eva in tow. Eva had also been an active member at Mount Olivet who worked as a cotton weaver and seems to have decided that marriage wasn’t for her. Thomas was buried here with Willie and possibly also Joseph, and just Harriet and Eva were left together in the little back-to-back next door to the Poultry Keeper’s Arms. But all things must come to an end eventually and by 1921 the mother and daughter had waved goodbye to Lydgate and moved down nearer to the town centre to live with daughter/sister Jane and her husband, Joseph Hargreaves, and their little family on Crescent Street. WW1 had come and gone and Mons Mill, once Hare Mill, was booming. Both Joseph and Eva had jobs there, Eva still weaving as she always had.
Harriet died in 1928 at her last home with the Hargreaveses on Mons Road, much further from Liverpool than anyone else in this story ever got from their own place of birth. Unfortunately her death notice in the newspaper named her as THOMAS Sutcliffe, with her first name not just being lost in newspaper reports but also in this final newspaper appearance.
Eva may have already decided by now to live singly, because when we get to the 1939 Register she’s found at 12 Ingham Street, part of a row of terraces that once stood directly behind Toad Carr and Jack’s House. You can’t escape the name Ingham in this story! Later though she moved to Cowhirst Avenue where she lived out the rest of her days. Her death came in July 1944 up at Stansfield View in the hospital after having become too unwell to remain at home.