This grave holds two sisters, the only children of their parents and another testament to how one’s presence in a particular graveyard isn’t about how much time you spend in a place but about what happens in that time.
Charles Raper was from Spalding Moor, and Elizabeth Hides was from Conisbrough, but the two began their married life in Worksop where they were married in 1830. Why? Because Charles was a gardener and like Thomas Lloyd he moved around where the work was. Those moves eventually brought him first to Doncaster and then to Halifax by 1835 when he became the gardener for George and Elizabeth Edwards of Allangate, which still stands today just off of Rochdale Road between King Cross and Sowerby Bridge. You can also see it from the bus if you’re going back down t’valley, but only from the back and only just. He was working here when his and Elizabeth’s first daughter, Ann, was born.
His time with the Edwards family was a little fraught, mainly because of his prosecution for poaching which he alleged was a setup – he had been complaining of the game from a neighbouring estate coming in and eating all the expensive flowers and trapped a single hare, which the gardener next door supposedly threw back into the garden the next day before maliciously prosecuting him. His employers (both of them!) tried to intervene and vouch for him and as a result he was only charged for a game license and not imprisoned. There was a public to-do over it though, with next door’s gamekeeper complaining that the newspaper had impugned his assistant and insisting that Charles was an “old offender”, and no doubt Charles and Elizabeth decided that maybe some time somewhere else was in order…
…and so by 1840 they were here in Todmorden, living at Newton Green. Who were they working for? Frustratingly we cannot figure it out! It could have been anyone over the road. Platts House, Centre Vale, Ewood, Scaitcliffe? Charles’s specialty was flowers so he could have worked anywhere really. Credit to him for trying to make Todmorden bloom long before it was a thing. The couple had a second child, Mary, in late May. Poor Mary only had ten weeks of life before dying in August of the same year from enteritis.
Charles, or perhaps a thoughtful employer, bought the grave here, and they buried Mary and soon moved on from the town and went back to Halifax. Now they lived in Warley Town on Cliff Hill Lane, just where it meets Warley Town Lane. Again, who was he working for? Possibly “landed proprietor” Richard Learoyd who was living next door, but maybe someone else. One of his character references from the hare-snaring case was a well-off resident of Cliff Hill so maybe he – a Mr. Milne – was his new boss.
The Rapers stayed here until 1852 when Ann, their only other child, caught typhoid. She struggled against it for two weeks but it eventually became too much. She was 17 years old when she was brought back to Todmorden to be buried with Mary.
Their parents put up a stone (helped by yet another generous employer?) and left Calderdale for good. Wouldn’t you? They went back to Holme in Spalding and Charles continued to work as a gardener, but no more mentions of him or Elizabeth appear in any newspapers we can access, and so all we can go on is the census. Elizabeth died in 1868 and was buried at the parish church, and twenty years later Charles joined her.
It’s a surprise in a way for them to choose to be buried so far from their only children (the only children we know of at least) and at first we thought maybe finances simply wouldn’t stretch. It’s one thing to go from Halifax to Todmorden, another from the middle of East Yorkshire, and Charles was only an outdoor labourer in the end. Matters of the heart and of the purse don’t always align…but then we looked closer, and Charles did own a freehold property, and left a little bit of money when he died, and certainly wasn’t destitute; so what happened? We’ll probably never know. But if someone does then do tell us!