Here are some more members of the Lord family of Canal Street Works fame, but from a slightly lesser known Lord brother: Abraham. The story here starts with his first wife, Emm. It also covers the lives of two of her sons…one to be proud of (or at least not disappointed by), and one to shed an angry tear or two over.
Emm, not Emma, Andrew was born in 1813 in Hyde, Lancashire.
Her parents Henry and Charlotte (Gosling) had gotten married on New Year’s Day 1807 and Emm was their fourth child and second daughter. Henry was a hatter and he and Charlotte would have three more children before her death in 1821. He remarried but he and his second wife Nancy suffered a repeated series of heavy child losses. Only one of their five children together would survive beyond the age of two. So Emm didn’t grow up without a mother figure, but she also grew up surrounded by loss, which even in those days when it was the norm would still have been hard for her.
How successful a hatmaker Henry was is unknown to us, but even if he was the premier hatter in Hyde, Abraham Lord would have been one hell of a good match for Emm. He would be in the future, at least…but in 1834 he and his father and brothers were still employees of Fielden Bros., not out on their own yet, although they would have been beginning to consider doing so. How Abraham came to her part of the country is unknown but he was a mechanic or “machine maker” and he may have been being subcontracted out or doing research for ideas to bring back to Todmorden. The two were married in Mottram in Longdendale and because Emm couldn’t read or write, she didn’t notice that the clerk wrote her name on the banns as Emma.
The couple stayed there for a year or two before returning to Todmorden, which would have timed up to about the time that John Lord Sr. and his other sons began to form Lord & Sons and build their works on Canal Street. Abraham and Emm had five children together between 1834 and 1846, four sons and one daughter. Unlike her father and stepmother, Emm was lucky. Four out of five of her children lived. Little Andrew died in 1843 at just under a year old and is the first Lord buried in this grave here.
In 1841 the family were living at Hallroyd and Emm was Emm on the census. Abraham clearly was making sure that her name was recorded correctly. And he continued to do so up to the end, when she died on Valentine’s Day 1846. Another church official was not about to get it wrong.
She at least got to get a taste of the very good life, as Lord Bros. took off and began to bring the family some real wealth. But now there were four children, the youngest, Sam, only being two years old. Abraham waited just over a year before remarrying, and would end up with more than a few wives before he died in 1872, but they’re probably stories for another day. This grave here is restricted to Emm and some of her children, a daughter in law, and a grandson; so which ones do we have here?
Sam Lord was Emm’s youngest child and youngest son. He would have been his mother’s darling for life but for Emm dying when he was two years old. Instead he was merely the youngest of her children. Abraham and his new wife Sarah (Firth) had a daughter after six years of marriage and she was apparently their only surviving child so she may have taken up the mantle of youngest darling. Sam though doesn’t seem to have grown up with any issues, unlike…well, you’ll read about that later. Sam became a mechanic like Abraham though and presumably found good work as a result of his connections. Frustratingly, like his brother John and some other people in this story, he cannot be pinned down on the 1871 Census and so it’s hard to know which of the many references to a Sam Lord in the newspaper from 1862 to 1879 are to him. One of his cousins was named Sam which doesn’t help. There was a Sam Lord who was very active within the Todmorden Musical Society but we have no evidence that it was this one. Perhaps he was in the army (can’t be sure), perhaps he was abroad for work (very possible but no record of it)…hard to tell.
Come 1879 though and we have him in our grasp again, at his wedding to Mary Ellen Kershaw. Mary Ellen was six years younger than Sam and from what we can gather was the adopted daughter of her parents John and Grace (Bentley) Kershaw. She had been born on May 22nd 1850 to Jane Richardson, a yarn winder who was originally from Stockport but who was, in 1851, lodging at Henry and Ellen Rostron’s house at Cobden just a few streets and census pages over from the Kershaws. 20 years old and unmarried, somehow the Kershaws ended up with her daughter, and by June of that year she had moved to Derbyshire and married a John Hibbert. She spent the rest of her days there building a family with him, and Mary Ellen stayed here. It was an interesting decision, given John and Grace had only been married for about as long as Mary Ellen had been alive, and it was a bit early to be saying “let’s adopt” – not much time to see if they could have children of their own. But one of them must have known something because Mary Ellen would end up being their only child.
Was John Kershaw her father? Good question…we checked for newspaper mentions or bastardy records and found nothing. It may well have simply been that for whatever reason both he and Grace knew they would never have children of their own, or chose not to. 1861 saw the family comprising of John, Grace, and Mary Ellen alongside two of Grace’s nieces, Susy and Hannah. John was a master tailor and was well off enough to be able to look after these adopted children. Handily Mary Ellen had a talent for it too, and by 1871 she was working alongside him. On that census her name is given as Mary E. Richardson, so there was still for some reason a cause to make it clear that she was their adopted daughter…so when she and Sam married and she gave her father’s name as his, was this an honorific, or the truth? You decide.
Sam and Mary Ellen had their own troubles with children. Only one child was born, Minnie, in 1880. Sam meanwhile was working away happily as a mechanic, and apparently chummy enough with his richer cousins Jesse and Mary Alice for them to witness the marriage. Was Mary Ellen happy? We’re only asking the question because the next time we hear anything at all about her is at her death. And it wasn’t a pretty one. She died in February 1884 at Wakefield Asylum from pulmonary tuberculosis, and had been sent there in the charge of the Board of Guardians. It is clear from her death registration that she was a patient in the “lunatic asylum” there, so what sent her there? Postpartum issues? Some other breakdown?
She was buried here, and sadly that’s where her story ends – not the only woman whose story is told in this blog post with an unsatisfying ending, but onward we go.
Sam was remarried by the summer, this time to Emily Phillips, or Emily Phillips Lord…this is an interesting one. Her father John Phillips was a mechanic and she was born in 1863 in Shropshire; how she got to Todmorden is anyone’s guess but in 1884 there she was, marrying Sam Lord who was nearly twenty years her senior. The couple quickly began having children together – Florence Emm, Abraham, and Willie. Spare a thought for poor little Minnie Lord, who had lost her mother and now had an entire new family – it must have been hard. The couple had seven years together but in 1891 Sam died suddenly at the age of 46 on New Year’s Day, and Emily now had the four children to look after. She took in lodgers to make ends meet at their little house on Myrtle Street. Willie, the baby, would then die in July 1891, leaving Emily and the rest of the children doubly bereft.
Sam was a Lord, yes, but he was one of the “lesser” Lords, and unfortunately for us this means no obituary in the paper detailing what accomplishments he might have had that we don’t know about. His only newspaper appearance was for getting caught playing cards on a Sunday with cousin Jesse in 1882. That’s probably why Willie’s death didn’t make the papers beyond the basic death column notice either.
Emily eventually remarried in 1897, and that’s where the interesting little note about her name comes into play. On that marriage certificate she gives her father’s name as John Phillips Lord…again, is there a story here we don’t know? Or was this an attempt to hold on to the Lord name even after remarrying? Who knows.
Now onto the less happy story for this grave. We included a “domestic violence” tag on this post but if you missed it and don’t want to read on, that’s fine.
John Lord was Emm’s eldest child and eldest son, and even though he died last, he has no wife or children in this grave with him. You’d think this would make his story simpler but it absolutely does not.
In 1851 Abraham and his new wife, Sarah, and four of his five children were all living at Hanging Ditch. John had also become a mechanic and was working for Abraham producing machines for spinning cotton. At that point Abraham was indeed part of Lord Bros. as then it really was all the brothers; but the partnership was dissolved in 1855 so it could continue on with only some of the brothers, not all. Abraham’s settlement seems to have been that he owned the works themselves while Thomas and Edward ran the business itself. John would have benefitted from this in terms of work, and even with rumblings about war from the Americas would have felt pretty confident about his options. He was an adventurous young man too and joined the army in the 1850s, serving at Lucknow in India during the “mutiny” in 1858, according to some letters alluded to in an article in the Todmorden Advertiser in 1900. He was there for eight years before returning home.
In 1862 he decided to get married, to Mary Elizabeth Stansfield (whose parents and some siblings are buried just next door to here). This marriage, though…what do we say about it? What can we say about it? In 1871 Mary Elizabeth and their son, James Henry, were both back with her parents and with “Wid” on the census next to her name. She wasn’t though, John was still alive, but where John was is a mystery. Maybe it’s not a surprise though if the two were alienated. When they married John was 27 and Mary Elizabeth was 18 – we’ve seen bigger age gaps here in the graveyard but many of them were from earlier times than this, and Mary Elizabeth had supportive family who clearly had no problem with taking her back in when things went wrong. John might have become a commercial traveller though and his absence therefore unremarkable – you have to be careful not to read too much into some things.
…but in this case, it was entirely correct to read the worst into things. John liked a drink, it turned out, and that was why the pair had split. In 1870 he had been brought before the magistrates for having to be dragged from the Black Swan on Burnley Road after calling the landlady a “bloody whore” and P.C. Hargreaves a “thief”. In January 1873 an advertisement appeared in the paper – John placed it, stating he would no longer be responsible for any debts that Mary Elizabeth incurred. The feeling was undoubtedly mutual.
Whether or not it was mutual wasn’t James Stansfield’s concern, and he took John to court over maintenance for Mary Elizabeth. More details now came out; it was disputed whether it was John’s decision or Mary Elizabeth’s, but the couple had been living in Manchester and found post-Civil War life to be difficult financially, and she was now home with the Stansfields as a result. John had provided little, was now alleged to be living in Manchester adulterously, and Alice Stansfield was in his eyes the source of the conflict. The court appearance ended in a nonsuit with no costs, much to James’s probable disappointment. You’d think John would have taken the win, but no; a month later he assaulted Mary Elizabeth in the street and was sent to prison for two months.
Almost immediately on his release, he assaulted his mistress and was sent to prison for another two months. Yet another young man who served abroad in the army for years, and came back with a problem or two…we have a few of them here at Christ Church.
Mary Elizabeth filed for divorce in 1873 and although she never went through with the final application, more details came out in her affidavit; that he had been abusive since their marriage; that he had turned her out into the street while heavily pregnant with their first son, who died shortly after his birth; and that he would routinely promise to do better only to immediately begin abusing her again. Why she didn’t finish the process of seeking a divorce isn’t clear from the paperwork. A friend of this researcher, on hearing the story, immediately said “they paid her to drop it and go away – that’s why she and her mother went to Accrington after her father died” and it’s hard to argue with the plausibility of that theory. During the filing he was either in prison for the assault on her or for the assault on Fanny, but by October of 1873 the adminstration of Abraham’s estate finally passed to him, and maybe he simply had too much money then for her to feel confident fighting him. Or…like the friend says…he or someone else paid her and Alice to go to Accrington and never bother them again.
After all this John either stayed well away from his wife or got sober; either way, he never appeared in the newspapers for dodgy behaviour again. In fact it wouldn’t be until 1901 that he appears in the public record in Todmorden, when he can be found living as a “boarder” with his sister Sarah and his niece Minnie. He might have been the John Lord living as a pauper in Halifax in 1891, but if so he was lying about where he was born. By 1901 he was definitely back in Tod though, and by 1907 he was at Stansfield View as a workhouse pauper. He would finish out his final days there with a shilling a day from Lord Roberts’s fund for military veterans for an income.
When he died, he was buried at Christ Church with full military honours, including a gun salute, and hailed as one of Todmorden’s many brave war heroes. All his past transgressions were seemingly forgotten, and only his army service and lineage at the forefront. Many military mourners…but interesting to note that in the writeup of his funeral, there was no mention of any family present at the graveside.
As for his wife and son; Mary Elizabeth is in many family trees as having died in 1872 in Leeds, but she was the informant at Alice Stansfield’s death in 1880 so that’s clearly not correct. Like John, though, she is notably absent from that point on. We checked prisons, we checked workhouses, we checked emigration records; nothing. And no, she didn’t get back together with John! She simply vanishes. Either she finished her life under a pseudonym or she emigrated under a pseudonym? Either way, her fate is lost to us. James Henry was at Christ’s Hospital School in Newgate, London, a boarding school which apparently took in many destitute children as well as well-off ones in 1881. After leaving there he joined the army, but sadly died in the Military Hospital in Canterbury in January 1886 due to pneumonia, exacerbated by the poor conditions of the hospital. He was buried in Camden alongside the uncle he was named after.
A sad end to this grave story, we’re sorry about that. If we find out anything new we’ll update this entry.
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