Mourn not my friends, twas God’s decree, That I should leave this world of strife,
From earthly danger shall I flee, To share with him eternal Life,
Sudden fate so soon to sever, The tender thread of nature’s ties,
From Parents, Friends, I’m hid forever, Yet we shall meet beyond the skies.
But millions of years may onward roll, And ages yet unborn may die,
Ere he who dose the world control, Shall hold his judgement seat on high.
The poem tells us as much about William Taylor as anything else does. William is a mystery, mainly because figuring out who he was and where he was a mere two years before his death has proven impossible.
The scene is set by the arrival of the railway in Todmorden and the construction of two railways in two different directions, with a third on the way. We already know of plenty of offcumden who flocked to the town to be part of the railway boom, like Murdoch Campbell and the Pearson brothers, and either William was one of them or he was someone who had been working as a weaver but changed tack and found work at the station here. Either way, this makes identifying him in 1841 very difficult. None of the William Taylors who were in the right age range were railway workers.
What can we know, or guess at? He was born in either 1818 or 1820, depending on which age you believe (the one on the stone or the one on his death registration). He lived at Back Brook Street, possibly with William and Rachel Brooks – William was a railway inspector in 1841 and had a railway clerk lodging with him and his wife then, so perhaps had a spare room for young men working at the station to rent. He was single. And in February 10th 1843 he died after being crushed between two carriages, in what one newspaper’s coverage of the accident kindly termed as carelessness:
His fellow workers clubbed together and paid for a grave for him and a stone, as was their custom, and left a kind poem behind on it as well for this poor young man who apparently had no one else in his life who was worth mentioning in any of the newspaper coverage of his death. Rather than a longer tale of a life from start to end, William’s story is the story of only a single moment in his life…the final moment.