Schoolmaster – land agent – house builder – railway inspector – all in one? How??
Burnley lad Thomas Newton was born in 1812. There he grew up, and a good brain (not family financial support – his father was a carter) meant he was able to find a better job than most young men in the weaving industry. Thomas became a land agent, which meant he looked after a wealthier person’s land and interests. This could be anything from collecting rents to ensuring agricultural labourers and tenant farmers did as they were told. He was still a servant himself, of course, but he was near the top of the pyramid if not the top, and it held him in good stead.
In 1836 he married Ann Bland, whose origins are also somewhat a mystery. We think she could have been a Tod lass on the Yorkshire side since the 1841 Census shows her as having been born outside of Lancashire. The couple married in Burnley, though, and don’t appear conclusively in Todmorden until 1841, when Thomas – the only Newton on the census here – was living at Bridge End and working as a schoolmaster. He must have been running one of the factory schools at Wadsworth Mill or maybe even Waterside, but we can’t be sure so there are no clues as to who his employer was. Thomas wasn’t one to hold still for long though and the teaching didn’t last. When their first child, Walter, was born in 1844, he was baptised in Burnley and the family address was still listed as Bridge End but Thomas’s occupation was once again “agent”.
After this the Newtons moved to Mount Pleasant. Another son, Samuel, was born in 1846. Ann died shortly after his birth, though, and ten weeks later Samuel followed her. Both were buried here at Christ Church and Thomas – now single, ambitious, and with a small child – went looking for another wife. He found one in Quaker and confectioner Mary Hanson, the sister of local landlord Samuel Hanson and daughter of annuitant Martha (Shackleton) Hanson of Bankfoot. They married just a little under a year after Ann’s death and had two children of their own, another Samuel in 1849 and Martha Ann in 1851.
Samuel was, now, not just a land agent but had also been working within the local Temperance Movement, and also invested enough in a house building company with local builder William Denham to be able to describe himself on the 1851 Census as a builder who employed 38 men. He had also moved on from land agent work to become an inspector on the railway. This work involved working under the foreman plate layer to ensure that new rails were laid properly and was described as being supposed to be “constantly upon the line, walking over it” by a railway official during an inquest into a rail accident which involved a broken rail. That was before 1847 when his foreman retired and he became the Superintendent. How he had the time or energy to have a family at all is quite remarkable.
Now the partnership with Denham actually was dissolved in 1850, so what Thomas was up to that meant he still called himself a builder after that it unknown.
But continue on he did anyway. This couldn’t last forever though. He continued on as a railway inspector until his death in 1859…we haven’t ordered his death registration, but if the cause was exhaustion, we wouldn’t be surprised.
Mary will have placed the stone here based on the order in which the deaths are engraved, and she made sure Ann and the first Samuel were remembered. She never remarried and instead moved back in with her brother Samuel, going back into the confectioner business. She died in 1879 but isn’t buried here.