40.7 – Edward and Ann Greenwood, and Mary Thorpe

This story was a wild ride, a tale of the dangers of drink and of one woman’s progress from Todmorden to Chester and back again. Plus there’s a cougar.

First though, we start with ostler Edward Greenwood. Born in 1803, he married Ann Whiteley in 1824 by banns at St. Chad’s and Heptonstall, since she was from the Halifax side of the Tod border. His work took him all around but after the birth of their first two children, Elizabeth and Mary, they came back to Todmorden and Edward settled down in the employ of William Crossley of the White Hart. Edward wasn’t settled in his mind or habits though, and despite having solid work, a fixed abode, and a wife and children (seven of them by 1845) who presumably loved him, he took to drinking. This culminated in his dismissal in 1854 and his choice to handle this blow by doing something drastic and irreversible: suicide.

The impact this would have had on his family psychologically can’t be overstated, as well as the immediate financial impact on them. Ann struggled and within two years she too had died, albeit from natural causes, and joined him here in the grave. The family made do as best they could with the girls having only two choices, really. Some of them got married like Susannah, who became Susannah Parker, and some found a trade for themselves like Mary, who became a dressmaker. Mary took in her youngest brother James Henry as well as a niece, Ann Sutcliffe, and stayed put in the family home on King Street near the Golden Lion.

Her brother Edward, however, was a clever young man, and decided to make his name elsewhere. Somehow or other he ended up in Ridley, near Wrexham, as the headmaster of a church school. He also, somehow, ended up married to Eliza Lloyd of Is-y-Coed near Ridley in 1858. Their relationship raised both this researcher’s eyebrows as in 1861 he was 25 years old and she was 59 years old! Behold, our cougar! This age though is very, very suspect, and every single public record with her name on gives a different year of birth. If you go by her burial record alone then she would have been 45 in 1861. Either way – when their marriage certificate said “of full age” for both it was certainly accurate.

In the meantime, Mary somehow or other made her way to Boughton, just outside Chester, where she met Samuel Thorpe. Samuel was a nailmaker who had suffered some terrible losses in the 1860s – two sons, his wife, and a daughter all within five years of each other. He found comfort in Mary and the two were married in April 1866. The couple had no children of their own but Samuel still had two left and Mary helped raise them and see them on their way.

Meanwhile, her brother Edward found schoolteaching not to his liking, and decided instead to take on an occupation he’d have been familiar with from childhood: inkeeping. A brave move for the son of an alcoholic but he did it. He and Eliza also moved to Chester where he took on the license for the Axe Tavern on Watergate Street. So many news stories followed, with Edward seeming to be quite a character. He was constantly telling crowds to “have at” policemen while they were arresting people, he threatened to kick an elderly neighbour up the backside (or frontside – the newspaper is vague as to the specific anatomy), and best of all, he gave free beer to people in return for voting Conservative for quite a number of years, and then when an enquiry was made into the practice, supplied the investigators with a full list of names! This hand in glove work with local politicians probably explains why he got away with just small fines or dismissal of cases for so many years.

As you can see, Mary even got drawn in to one of the many such cases. But in her private life Mary was very unlike Edward, living a quiet life with Samuel and trying to have some peace. In 1878 though Samuel died, and Mary moved in with Edward and Eliza. Somehow she had found an occupation as a provision dealer and on the 1881 Census she is the head of the household; unsurprisingly, after dobbing in the local Tories in 1880, by 1881 Edward was a “retired” innkeeper only.

Mary and Edward stayed in Chester until 1886 when Eliza passed away at (supposedly!) the age of 70. Mary had her buried with Samuel, who she had buried in his own plot, not with his first wife and children, which must have been a controversial act for his remaining children…

…and by 1891 Mary was back in the Calder Valley. Edward had become an insurance agent and stayed in Chester, where he would die in 1898. Poor Mary on her return to this area had to go into service to keep a roof over her head. She lived at 13 Hangingroyd Road in Hebden Bridge, the housekeeper for printer compositor Fred Hartley. The two spent her final days together. Mary died in December 1894 at the long-since-demolished Claremont Place in Heptonstall. Someone in her family who was still around and remembered her – their? – parents made sure that she was buried with them, and she was the first person buried at Christ Church in 1895, on the first day of the year. Her travels were finally over.