This post initially focuses on Jack Clegg, one of the subjects of our 2023 Holocaust Memorial Day tour. Following his story below we will return to the rest of his family – and don’t think it isn’t worth continuing to read, because we’re going to touch on a number of famous (occasionally infamous) figures. It wasn’t only Jack whose life (or in his case, death) brushed against historical events and figures.
At the base of this grave there is mention of Walter and Clara’s son Jack, who was “reported missing” on 27th April 1943 aged 22. We do know where he died, however. Our story really begins with Jack’s father, Walter Clegg, who was born at Lobb Mill Arches, Todmorden on 18th August 1893. His mother Clara Waddington was born in Burnley on 19th September 1893. On 19th November 1919, a year after the end of the Great War, Walter and Clara married, actually here at Christ Church. Walter was a cotton twister living at Bath Street, and Clara a weaver living at Nuttall Street. Honest origins—a proper working class Tod family. The wedding was probably a modest affair, but it would bring us all a hero.
In April 1921 their son Jack was born, and then a few years later in 1926 their daughter Iris Dorethea arrived. By 1939 when Jack would have been 18 or so, the family had moved to Castle Lane, and their father was now the Local Authority Assistant School Attendance Officer, as well as serving with the Air Raid Precautions Service with the Ambulances. Clara continued as a Cotton Weaver. Jack grew up to follow in his parents’ footsteps as a working class lad—a picker maker. At some point in the early 1940s Jack had met a young lady, Margaret Chambers, from Leeds, and in March 1943 when Jack was a mere 22 years old they were married.
In 1942 Jack joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve and initially was posted to Canada to train as a pilot. This was highly skilled and tough training, and having failed to meet the standard, he retrained as an air gunner. Sgt Jack Clegg (656810) became operational in April 1943, joining 76 Squadron at RAF Linton-on-Ouse, North Yorkshire, assigned to Bomber Command. On 27th April 1943, a month after he married Margaret, Jack was part of the crew of a Handley Page Halifax Heavy Bomber on a raid to Duisburg. This was likely to have been his first mission. The crew, like many others, was international, with a pilot from New Zealand, an air gunner from Canada, as well as 5 from the UK. On the journey out, over the North Sea, the plane encountered a BF110 night fighter bomber, and took damage. It started to dive, with the pilot struggling for control. As the plane lost altitude, it was caught in searchlights West of Amsterdam, and received further flack damage, putting it past hope. What thoughts went through the heads of these young men? Did Jack think of Margaret with his last moments? Among the smoke and flames, the chaos in the dark skies, do you panic or do you not have time? With 2 engines out, and fire on board, the pilot was unable to keep the plane in the air.
The crew surely knew that the Carlton Hotel below was being used as the local Luftwaffe headquarters, as well as lodgings for German Army officers. Did the pilot use his last efforts to at least bring the plane down where it would cause the most disruption to German forces? We will never know for certain, but they crashed in central Amsterdam just behind the Carlton Hotel. Tragically all 7 crew were killed. The impact also killed 7 civilians, and 3 German Army personnel.
In a brush with history, a young Jewish girl named Anne Frank was in hiding nearby. We all know her from the incredibly detailed and emotive diaries she kept throughout her time in hiding, and she mentions the crash in her diaries.
“The Carlton Hotel has been destroyed. Two British planes loaded with firebombs landed right on top of the German Officers’ Club. The entire corner of Vijzelstraat and Singel has gone up in flames. The number of air strikes on German cities is increasing daily. We haven’t had a good night’s rest in ages, and I have bags under my eyes from lack of sleep.“
The 7 aircrew are buried together in Amsterdam New Eastern Cemetery, with the graves maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Jack’s remains were only finally located and identified as such in 1947, meaning his parents had four years of waiting to find out if there was anywhere they could visit to remember their only son. He was survived by his parents, sister, and wife, who all kept his memory alive during their lifetimes. This mantle has now passed to his nieces (who are members of our group), and also the grandchildren of his wife Margaret, who now live in Australia. Although his body never came home, his memory is kept dear by those he left behind.
……..
Now…back to the rest of the family, and starting with Jack’s grandparents Samuel and Emily (Barker) Clegg. Samuel was born in 1867 to Jonas and Susannah (Law) Clegg, a ropemaker and homemaker respectively. Jonas was also a respected and regionally famous cricketer. Samuel grew up on North Street, AKA Burnley Road, not far past the Black Swan, AKA the Polished Knob nowadays. He was their third son and, curiously, did not go straight to work at age 13 like so many working class children did. He was still a scholar at 14…perhaps his parents saw he was clever and realised that for him an education would get him further. In the end Samuel would become a velvet weaver, but in the meantime he made a very good marriage, maybe out of his educational aspirations.
Not far away, on Eagle Street, there lived a young lady named Emily Barker. She was one of the many children of John and Susannah (Marshall) Barker, and if you went on the same tour where we told Jack’s story then you also heard about her brother John Albert Barker. Emily was the same age as Samuel, the eldest child of her parents, and a clever girl who at age 14 was a pupil monitor at Roomfield School where she was also attending. That will be how she and Samuel met – love in the hallways! They met and got along…very well…so well that when they got married at St. Edmund’s in Falinge in February 1887, Emily was five months pregnant with their first child. Edith Susanna Clegg was born in June 1887, and she would be followed by Charles in 1890, Ruth in 1892, and Walter in 1893. During this time Samuel ended up involved in one of Todmorden’s most notorious criminal cases; he was one of the jurors at the inquests of Clara Law and John William Halstead. He was only 24 at the time so this must have been an honour, and also a traumatic experience to some extent.
Emily didn’t allow becoming a wife and mother, and having to continue to work as a fustian tailoress to make ends meet, to stand in the way of her education though; and she was committed to a larger ideal – education for women. She became the Chair of the Women’s Co-operative Guild in 1897 and would hold this post until shortly before her death in 1944. The Guild was a way for women workers to continue to be educated beyond their schooling days and would involve classes and speakers visiting on a weekly basis. Women were important to the co-operative movement but did not have the same membership opportunities as men, of course, and Emily was quietly interested in finding ways to change this. That’s why a postcard on eBay falling into the hands of one of our researchers was such a lucky find, opening up a side of Emily’s life that we wouldn’t necessarily glean from the newspapers.
Dear Mrs Cooper, We are expecting you on Wed. to lecture on How you got Open Membership. Come early if possible + have some tea with me. Yours Sincerely, E. Clegg.
E. Clegg is, of course, Emily; we worked this out by looking at the electoral register for 1907 and finding Samuel at 6 Dalton Street. At 59 St. Mary’s Street in Nelson was Mr. Robert Cooper. His wife was mill worker, socialist and suffragist Selina Jane (Coombe) Cooper, aka “the respectable rebel”, aka “the Belle of Brierfield”. Selina was the child of Cornish migrants and was a hardworking and committed proponent of universal suffrage. She walked from mill to mill, talking to men and women (but especially women), giving all her spare time to organising women workers into their own trade unions so they could improve their lot. The end goal was the vote, and while Selina wasn’t as radical and sometimes violent as some other suffrage groups, she had her eye on the prize and didn’t give in to capitalist forces the same way that Emmeline Pankhurst found herself doing towards the end of the struggle. Anyway; Selina came to Todmorden to talk about open membership, ie. equal membership for men and women within the Co-operative Society, and would visit Todmorden several more times over the years to address the Women’s Guild. Well done Emily. What else were you doing to ensure your daughters had the same rights as your sons?
In the meantime, 1901 found Samuel now working as a “theatrical carpenter” as well as still working here and there with ropemaking, and the family was living at Meadow Bottom. His sister Bertha was a singer who often performed with the Band of Hope so that’s likely where his help came in handy. Samuel was by all accounts a loving husband, but a bit of a wide boy on the side; in 1899 he was fined 20s for seemingly not just meeting others at Back North Street for the purposes of betting, but taking and handing out money to men and boys who approached him! A proper bookie? Perhaps not, but the police thought so.
For all or any of his flaws Samuel was, as we said, a clever man, and after years of working at whatever he had to do (and perhaps making a bit of money on the side…) he was able to go into the ropemaking business fully, opening a rope works at Nell Cote just outside of Todmorden, by where Springside used to be. It struggled at first due to a storm bringing a tree down onto the building, but he rebuilt and prospered. At the same time he and Emily were heavily involved in Christ Church, as well as their children. We know from later newspaper coverage that Samuel didn’t just run the ropeworks but also toured the country building stages for various theatre companies. The energy the man must have had is incredible.
Meanwhile though, what of the children? Ruth and Walter are the two we’re most concerned with here. Ruth had become a sewing machinist and Walter was working with his brother Charles as a baker and confectioner. But Ruth had a dramatic side, probably encouraged by Samuel and his sister Bertha, and she frequented various shows and carnivals. In 1922 we find the first mention in the newspapers of her future husband, Johnson Ambler Harcourt Jr., as having won first prize for his portrayal of – ahem – a gollywog at the Patmos Dramatics Society’s carnival. Johnson was the son of actors whose birth name was Maycock (Harcourt being their stage names) and by 1911 had come from Sussex to Todmorden with his siblings and widowed mother Jane. He worked as a picker maker but his heart was on the stage. He and Ruth were married in April 1928, but their marriage was short indeed. Ruth was already pregnant with their only child, Mavis Ruth, when they were wed. Come November, Ruth went into a hard and painful labour, and died shortly after giving birth from a pulmonary embolism and form of deep vein thrombosis known as “milk leg” as a result of the strain of childbirth. It was a surprise to everyone and a tragedy for the entire family. Her funeral here at Christ Church was heavily attended by the great and good from the church, local business, and the stage.
We cropped it where we did because “Frances, Connie and Geoff” are significant Todmorden figures; Frances was Frances Maycock/Harcourt, and Connie and Geoff were her children…Connie and Geoff Love. There’s the earliest brush with wider fame this grave holds. Frances was one of Johnson’s older sisters.
And brother Walter? Walter went on an adventure during WW1, with the stories he would bring back no doubt inspiring to his son later on. He enlisted in September 1914 but within three month was discharged due to several “probably hysterical fits” and a judgment made that he was “unlikely to become an efficient soldier” due to neurasthenia, aka emotional disturbance. What changed between December 1914 and July 1915 is unknown but on that second date he re-enlisted and re-attested to the Royal Army Medical Corps and the following year embarked for Salonica. After a few years he voluntarily transferred to the East Lancashire Regiment with whom he served out the rest of the war. Walter was one of the exceptionally fortunate who served for nearly the entire duration of the war, and returned home with only a half dozen of hospitalisations for dysentery on his medical record.
When Walter returned he married his sweetheart Clara Spencer. Clara was a Burnley lass whose parents, John Henry Waddington and Eliza Spencer, married after John Henry’s first wife’s death and several years after her birth. She was the only child to be born a Spencer, and one of five girls in the end – no sons for John Henry. The Waddingtons lived at Nuttall Street and Clara was working as a weaver prior to her marriage to Walter. Clara took back her respectability for their marriage certificate though, giving her surname on it as Waddington. While Walter was away fighting she worked at Centre Vale as a volunteer nurse, doing her bit while he did his.
Walter remained part of the Todmorden Ambulance Brigade and continued to serve his community in that way. He must have taken inspiration from Emily and seen the value of giving back to others around him; he also became the Secretary of the Beamers’ Twisters’ and Drawers’ Association, aka a trade union for those in that occupation in the Todmorden and Walsden District, and stood for the town council as a Labour candidate for Stansfield in 1931. He lost sadly. But in 1933 another opportunity arose to do something, although at first it seemed like the opposite, He led his union members out on a strike and was told after it had started, by his employers, that once it was over he was going to be sacked. Unsure of what to do he saw an advertisement for a job he felt he had no hope of getting, but put his back into the application, and was surprised to find out that he was the top applicant of an astonishing 178 applicants! Thus he was appointed as the assistant school attendance monitor (and later Education Monitor) for the district. If you played hooky any time in the late 1930s, Walter would be having you for it. More often though his job was ensuring that children weren’t yanked out of school at age 13 to start work, with time having moved on and education beyond 13 being considered much more important than it had before. He also – also! – became the Secretary for the St. John Ambulance Brigade.
Meanwhile Samuel and Emily had their golden wedding anniversary – here’s just part of the newspaper writeup, and finally we get a chance to see a photo of these impossibly energetic and devoted public servants.
Samuel died in 1941, predeceasing his only grandson, and Emily followed in 1944. Samuel’s health had declined in the mid-1930s supposedly as a result of the popularity of “talkies” impacting the live theatre industry and affecting his side hustle of stagecraft. The joke about highly motivated people dying as soon as they retire springs to mind. Likewise, Emily stepped down from the Women’s Guild only a few months before her death. Correlation or causation? Either way, their deaths deprived Todmorden of their strenuous efforts, and you hope their replacements knew what they were doing. Walter certainly continued the tradition, now adding support to what was then called the “Cripples’ Aid Society”. On his retirement in 1958 from the Educational Board he put his energies into this and the SJAB. His energies were being moderated now, though, due to heart trouble. In 1963 he wandered down to the council offices at Hall Street to see a visiting heart consultant, and promptly had a heart attack on the premises and died.
Typical of a Barker-Clegg, his obituary noted that he was in the habit of warning speakers who he knew were prone to thanking the organisers of events to “leave me out of it”. It wasn’t about fame, it was about the doing of the thing.
Someone’s missing from these last few paragraphs though, aren’t they? Clara Spencer/Waddington Clegg. What happened to her after she got married? Mrs. Walter Clegg rarely appears in any newspapers apart from when mentioning Jack, or in relation to the SJAB. In 1939 she was still working as a cotton weaver so interestingly she either never gave up work or went back to work after Jack left home and Iris married. Now and again “Mr. and Mrs. W. Clegg” make a donation to a society or to the parish church, but that’s all. Clara – she had a name – died in August 1964. The Golden Age Club held a minute of silence in her memory; donations were made to the Cripples’ Aid Society in her name; otherwise, her life is an unknown, and if there’s any family who can shed light on what made her Clara and what sort of life she had in between the lives of everyone else around her then please get in touch.
