Poor Eleanor Pennington, who died far from her family and whose story hints at mysteries behind closed doors…
Eleanor (sometimes Ellenor) was born Eleanor Royston in 1810 in Leeds, the second daughter (we think) of Luke and Mary (Kay) Royston. Luke was a woollen cloth merchant and Eleanor’s early life was one of relative comfort, if not wealth. The family lived on Lady Lane at that point, and we don’t recommend you look on Google Street View, because there will be one intriguing Georgian building (an old Methodist chapel) and then a carpark and some modern faux-Georgian buildings. What used to be there is long gone. But back then, the Roystons had a decent home, Eleanor’s brother Luke Kay Royston went to the Grammar School, and she had potentially a nice life ahead of her.
Five years after Eleanor’s birth a baby boy named John Pennington was born in Huddersfield. His father Thomas was a cabinet maker and like father, like son. John became a cabinet maker too and when he grew up he and Thomas went into business together and had premises in both Huddersfield and Halifax. Looking for drum up more work for their company, he travelled about, including all the way to Leeds. There he met Eleanor, and in November of 1837 the couple were married at the parish church in Leeds. John’s sister Mary Ann was one of the witnesses, and Eleanor’s brother Luke was another.
It was a lovely start, but John’s ambition meant he wanted to be off doing his own thing, and so in 1840 he and his father dissolved their business partnership and he struck out…entirely alone. He kept travelling, and the 1841 Census shows him lodging in Halifax working as a cabinet maker while Eleanor was left alone in Leeds in their house on Claremont Street. Her father, stepmother and brother were only one street over at Claremont Place but it must have felt strange. And the lonely feeling will have continued as a careful check of the GRO index shows that John and Eleanor had no children. Not just no children who lived for very long but none who lived long enough for their births to be registered. The newspapers are silent about marital issues so we’re left wondering what was going on.
By what means the Penningtons both reunited and came to Todmorden we do not know, but they moved to Fair View just above Cockpit. That row of four houses is gone now, with only a single one remaining and renamed Bank Side after the clump of houses lower down. Fair View appears on the 1851 Census between Bankside and Goshen Terrace so X marks the spot.
It marks the spot, mainly, of Eleanor’s final days. She died there in June 1850. Her final days were painful – her death was due to pneumonia and pleurisy, the latter being notoriously painful. On both her death registration and the burial register for Christ Church her name is spelled wrong (“Ellenor”). She was remembered in Leeds due to her father’s importance in the area. He too was dead within the year. 1850 was a bad year for the Royston family indeed.
There may have also been some heartbreak. On the 1851 Census there are two people living in the house at Fair View, John and a house servant, Mary Pearson. Mary was from Leeds and interestingly was in service there for Francis Buckle and his family in 1841. Any relation to the Christ Church Buckles? We couldn’t find an immediate one, but perhaps she came down here and was hired later, or perhaps she was brought from Leeds with the Penningtons to look after the house. Either way, a year later, Mary was no longer a servant but the lady of the house. Mary had a daughter, Eliza, who had been born out of wedlock in 1845, so she was able to have children…but she and John were also childless.
Mary died in 1875 and is also buried at Christ Church, although without a gravestone. It’s reasonable to think that she’s buried here with Eleanor. Three years later and John had left Todmorden and moved to Keighley, where he married for the third and final time, to Fanny Pearson. No relation? Actually, yes relation. Fanny was Mary’s niece, the illegitimate daughter of her sister Ann, and Eliza’s best friend as the two had been raised together their entire lives. She outlived John and after she was widowed in 1887 moved in with Eliza and her husband and children to spend the last five years of her life with her favourite cousin. She is not buried at Christ Church, and neither is John. It’s just Eleanor and Mary, who might have been rivals in life, but are keeping each other company in death.