40.21 – James, Betty, Eli and Mary Crossley

Lineholme Mill is gone now, as well as these four people who were part of the place’s history – just a car wash, curry house, garage and a few buildings left from what was there before. But what was there then?

Back in the day, back in the early 1800s, Lydgate was beginning to form into a full branch of Todmorden’s water-powered textile industry, with spinning mills forming and then weaving sheds once the power loom was introduced. But both these mills and industries require pickers and shuttles, and so these specialised woodworking industries also took hold. That’s where our Crossleys here enter in. Although technically James Crossley “entered in” in Walsden, where he was born in 1798. He wasn’t Ely and Sally (Farrar) Crossley’s first child, but he was their first legitimate child, brother John having been born a few years earlier.

James grew up to initially become a cotton spinner. In 1822 he married Betty Mitchell at Heptonstall, Betty being just two years younger, and the couple went on to have six children in ten years. For unknown reasons the children weren’t baptised themselves into the Church of England until 1837 when they were all baptised at Christ Church, by which time the Crossleys were living at Blind Lane and James had entered the lucrative picker business.

By 1841 the family had moved to Lydgate where James was working as a picker maker. In 1851 he and his son Eli, who was then 21, set up business together as picker makers at Lineholme Mill employing three men (Eli included) and seven boys (youngest son Samuel included), but then ill health struck and James died in August. Here’s where Betty stepped in. Betty had worked as a cotton weaver even while raising the couple’s children so was clearly no stranger to hard work, and she took over James’s role in the business. The Todmorden and Walsden website’s entry for the mill points out Slater’s Directory for 1855 has the entry for the occupier as Betty Crossley, and also mentions that in February 1857 Betty treated the workforce (now numbering 40) to dinner at the Shoulder of Mutton. The workforce? Her workforce! Not bad for a woman who in 1822 wasn’t able to even sign her own name on her marriage banns.

(On a serious note, where would we be without that website? The research that was done for it is one of the building blocks of our own site and our own research and we owe the site owners and their contributors an enormous debt of gratitude)

Betty’s sister Grace had already joined the household before James’s death to help with keeping that side of their lives running and she stayed by her sister in her widowhood. By 1861 Samuel had joined Betty in running the business at Lineholme and Eli had set off on his own. He had been busy himself, having married Mary Watson in 1855. Mary was a nice girl from Wakefield whose father Joseph had died while she was young, and whose mother Ann had become a washerwoman while her sons were growning old enough to become bricklayers like their father. Mary went into service and eventually came to Todmorden. After she and Eli married they had three sons but would also take in Mary’s niece Harriet for a time – she was living with them in 1861 at their home at Lineholme. Their first two children had a ten year gap between them which is curious; there’s no sign of any other children who were born to them in the interim on the GRO, so it seems they were either extraordinarily careful, had a massive falling out for a spell, or had some sort of fertility issue. In those days it’s hard to otherwise explain such a long gap between children…but certainly there were no live births that we know of apart from these three.

In 1867 Betty handed the reins over fully to Samuel and took her retirement. This lasted until 1871 when she died, just over twenty years after her husband. Samuel continued as a picker maker and Eli continued as a shuttle maker, thereby avoiding competition with one another quite nicely. Eli and Mary lived at Gate Bottom near Newton Grove before moving to Kitson Wood Road. Their sons James, Watson and Samuel all found work as cotton weavers over time, and Eli invested in some properties at the nearby and now-gone Lily Bank Terrace. The family lived quietly, with the sons all attending Mount Olivet Baptist and supporting its Band of Hope, and there’s little mention of them apart from Mary lodging an objection to the assessment on two of the Lily Bank properties (which begs the question why her, and not her husband?). A happy life but not a newsworthy one, it would seem. When Eli died in 1884 there was little to say about it apart from the brief announcement in the deaths column. At least he got to see his son James married…he missed a lot more though.

Mary was left with her children to support her and they did her proud. She and Watson and Samuel decided to move a few streets down and took a house at the also now-gone Barker Street up there. Watson was studying at the Burnley Mechanics Institute and won a Royal scholarship which allowed him to go and study botanical sciences in Dublin. Mary must have been very proud! She and Samuel held down the fort until he returned to Todmorden in summer 1894, which was fortunate, as Mary died that autumn. What did she miss? She missed Samuel going off to war in 1896 and returning as a Chelsea pensioner, and becoming a successful metalworker in his own right making shuttle tongues and employing others to do so. She also missed Watson becoming involved with the Cornholme Brass Band and moving to Kent to become an analytical chemist.