40.41 – Alice, William, Ann and Sam Livsey

Some names get remembered because of their manner of death being unusual, or – in this case- spectacularly traumatic for a large part of the town.

As with so many of these stories, we start with an offcumden and a local lad or lass. For this story the offcumden is William Livsey, who was born in Bolton in 1826. William is hard to pin down before his arrival in Todmorden and since his marriage to Ann Lord was via the registrar, we don’t have the details of his parents to hand. We know a little more about Ann’s origins though; her father was John Lord Jr., the son of the John Lord who founded Lord and Sons, later Lord Bros. of Canal Street works.

That makes what happened later even worse.

William and Ann married in Halifax in 1848 and began their family immediately; Elizabeth was born in 1849 and Sam in 1850. Then came Alice in 1852. Before their next child, John Edward, could be born, Alice died and was buried here at Christ Church. After John Edward was born in 1856 just one more child came, Martha Ann in 1866. Yes, ten years later!

William might have been busy working for Lord Bros., where he rather unsurprisingly found work, and also in his other interest, policing. William had worked his way up to a supervisory position at work and this seems to have been one of the things that meant his name appeared in elections for local constabulary. That and the family connection, but not everything is down to nepotism or who knows who! Whether as foreman millwright or constable of Langfield, things were going well for him and his family at their home on Omega Street. Sam, our other grave inhabitant here, was also busy working as a mechanic’s apprentice under his father and with his own hobby of cricket. Ann? Well, if she had hobbies the record is silent, as always. We do think she was involved with the Bridge Street Methodist and their bazaars, but can’t be certain that it’s her as she’s only named as “Mrs. Livesey” (the spelling would vary from paper to paper but we’ve stuck with Livsey as it’s the most common one and is on the stone here.

On January 21st 1875, the family’s peaceful lives were changed forever with the boiler explosion at the Canal Street Works. Rather than write an imperfect cobbled together version of this longer piece on the Todmorden and Walsden website, follow the link and read about the event. It’s hard to comprehend the scale of the impact this event had on the working people of Todmorden. Everyone will have known someone who was working there that day, and since “kick a man in Tod and half the town limps”, the trauma will have spread outwards from the families of those who died that day. Spare a thought for poor Sam, who had to view his father’s crushed body four times by the time the inquest was held. He worked there too and will have been caught between counting his blessings and mourning the unnecessary loss. William’s cause of death was found to be suffocation and compression, so identifying him and then viewing him repeatedly would have been even more upsetting than it would otherwise be…

Life had to go on for the family, and Sam and Martha Ann supported their mother as best they could. Ann was subject to the usual issues a widow has, namely, having tradesmen try and pull one over on her by overcharging her for work on her house, but she soldiered on. Sam continued to work for Lord Bros. – somehow! – and as his cricketing days drew to an end he threw himself into his work.

Ann died in 1883 and now it was just Sam and Martha Ann, although in 1891 she would become Martha Ann Walton and move to Sowerby Bridge with her new husband. This left just Sam, and he remained just Sam. He retired from Lord Bros. in 1913 and after 50+ years in a filthy sooty machine shop decided to enjoy as much of the outdoors as he could. He became a keen walker according to his obituary.

Where he was in 1921 is a mystery, but by 1939 he was living with his niece Martha (Grindrod) Law, the daughter of his sister Elizabeth. Poor Martha had been through the wringer. She had married Ernest Law in 1909 and had two sons with him after the war ended, William and Albert. William died in 1927 at the age of 16 from heart failure and Ernest died in 1935 aged 50 from the same affliction. The Laws were Unitarians but both William and Albert are buried at Christ Church at plot 6.2 in an unmarked grave. With WW2 breaking out and Albert joining the Army Medical Corps, Martha really was on her own, and so Sam became one of her lodgers, helping around the house and giving her some wage.

In the end Sam had a good run, a better run than 99% of the people buried here. He died in 1940 at the age of 90, about a month after his birthday celebrations. He left his entire estate of £515 – £24,000 in today’s money – to Martha. He may have been considering the very real possibility that Albert wouldn’t make it home from the war and wanted to ensure she had a safety net. Luckily for her Albert did come back.