Anyone who stands at the fence between the Garden of Rest and the church will now be able to see the two impressive needlepoint spires of the twin Lord family monuments, which mark two enormous vaults holding family members of the Lord Brothers who once owned and operated most of the mills at Derdale and Key Sike, since Incredible Edible Todmorden removed the decades of thick ivy concealing them. But not all the Lords are in those vaults – they weren’t opened until the 1860s. Some of the very early Lord family deaths are instead in this modest grave, just one of many flat ledgers on the back slope.
We won’t go into the entire history of the Lord family as it’s already told elsewhere in great detail…but some information is needed here. We’ll start with Martha, the last name and last burial in this grave, but its oldest inhabitant. Martha was born and baptised as Martha Barker, in 1772, the daughter of Mary Barker and her young man – not husband – William Scholfield of Stansfield. Martha was baptised at Heptonstall with William’s name mentioned as the “reputed father”. William and Mary would be married four years later, so Martha was brought up as his daughter and used his name going forward. In 1790, aged 18, she married John Lord of Stansfield who was then merely a “webster” or weaver. That would change years later when he and several of his and Martha’s sons struck out on their own from Fielden Bros. and set up their own concern…but, again, go check the link at the start of this paragraph if you want to know more.
Martha would have nine children with John between 1791 and 1815, which seems like a very long and improbable time, but she would have been 43 when the last child was born (baby Martha in 1815) it’s not so impossible. There are older mothers buried here. Their lives were hard as they were weavers and even when success came later on, the Lord children and their children too were kept busy, working at home or at their mills.
John and Martha’s seventh son, Edward, married Mary Law in 1837 and while Edward might have been the polymath brains behind the success of Lord and Sons, as it was at that point, he and Mary still suffered terrible losses at home. Brains did not save you back then. Or at least it did not save your children. The couple would have twelve children over twenty years, and as you can see from the title of this story, five of them are here. James, Elizabeth, and Sarah, all three under a year old, in 1838, 1839 and 1841. Angelina and Charles Edward were born in 1844 and 1846, respectively, and while Charles Edward had a similarly brief life to his other siblings here, Angelina made it to age five before her death in 1849.
During this terrible time, Martha had yet another loss: John Lord died. He was buried with his and Martha’s daughter Mary at St. Mary’s. She had died in 1838 at the age of 21, and was buried under a stone also commemorating their son Robert who had died in Massachusetts, USA, in 1829. Other Lords were buried there too so it made sense, even with the new burial ground having been opened a few years earlier. Martha was now left a widow, and still not yet a fully wealthy one, but things were beginning to gather steam for what was now Lord Bros. and she moved in with Edward and Mary to help look after her remaining grandchildren. In 1851 the Lords were living at York Street along with Mary’s younger sister Hannah who is listed as a servant but would have probably been also helping with the children.
The Lords probably always knew that at some point the family would be split up, and so it would be later. In 1856 St. Mary’s was officially closed for burial business, and so Martha realised at that point that she would not be resting next to her husband and daughter. Whether it was her wishes or those of her children, when she died in 1859 at the age of 87, she was buried here with her grandchildren. Even this grave here could only hold so many people…even if five of them were infants or small children. Which is why when the next Lord family member died, Edward and Mary’s daughter Martha, two new, large family vaults were purchased near the entrance to Christ Church. The family was not going to get split between two churchyards ever again.