Sisters in law and a tiny son – these women hailed from afar and their husbands didn’t stay long…but this grave is linked to one of Todmorden’s greatest railway landmarks via one husband, and it’s a shame that the story of these women will be light on details when there’s so much to tell about what happened after they died. Having said that, we aren’t 100% sure which of Todmorden’s greatest railway landmarks it is…
A beautiful stone for sure, with elegant scrollwork – these women must have been loved, and their husbands well off. We can’t say about the first thing but the second one is true. We’ll start with Hannah since we know the most about her. Hannah Colledge was born in Brinklow, Warwickshire in December 1808, the daughter of Josiah and Hannah (Stepnill) College. Josiah was a blacksmith and young Hannah was the fifth of ten children they would have that we know of. Hannah’s life is, for a large part of it, unknown to us…the details, where she lived, what her family did, why she didn’t marry for a long time, all of that. On May 1st 1838 her story begins again, though, because that’s when she married stonemason Charles Pearson at Holy Trinity Church in Coventry.
She and Charles would shortly move to Todmorden and Gauxholme, where in early 1840 their son Thomas was born. He was baptised at Christ Church in April of that year, and Charles’s occupation was described as “contractor”. This is important, and we’ll come back to it later.
Hannah’s name is on the baptism record, but Hannah didn’t get to see Thomas’s christening. That took place on April 19th; Hannah had died on April 6th, from phthsis.
Charles’s work in Todmorden (more on that later…) finished shortly after this, and he went onward to Liverpool with Thomas in tow. His work would soon take him to Wales to Manchester and back again, but Thomas was not part of his ongoing story. He stayed in Liverpool under the foster care of William and Mary Ann Fearnley, with William also being a stone mason who was obviously known to and trusted by Charles. They did their best, but times being what they were, the odds were against Thomas. He died in December 1841 from inflammation of the bowels, just shy of two years old (although his death registration and this grave rounded up).
The Fearnleys were clearly not blamed for Thomas’s death, as within a few years they had themselves moved to Cardiff, undoubtedly at the instigation of Charles.
Both Hannah and Thomas were buried here at Christ Church, although neither was the first one into this grave – that honour belonged to Jane Pearson, who died in April 1839. Who was Jane? We know less about her than about Hannah, but we know that she was born Jane Cookson somewhere in Britain in 1813, and that she and William married in Chorley in May 1836. Unlike his brother, William wasn’t able to sign his own name, but neither was Jane.
William and Jane lived at Top o’ Rough near Lumbutts, known now as Rough Top, and William was also a stonemason. Like her sister in law, Jane spent her time in Todmorden pregnant with her and William’s only child, a little girl named Elizabeth who was born in April 1839. And like her sister in law, Jane died shortly after giving birth; from consumption according to her death registration. Nothing to do with the exhaustion of childbirth or complications thereafter, just plain illness – just like Hannah.
Their daughter Elizabeth, like Thomas, lived for a few years and then died far from the town where she was born; in her case in Tadcaster in November 1841. Unlike her cousin, though, she’s buried there rather than having been brought back here to rest.
So the question now is who were William and Charles Pearson, and why were they in Todmorden, and why didn’t they stay? The answer lies in the railway boom, and specifically, in one of two local industrial landmarks: the Summit Tunnel and the Gauxholme railway bridge.
Construction on the tunnel began in 1837 but due to the initial slowness of excavations the original contractors were sacked and in early 1839 George Stephenson (the “Father of Railways”) and his son Robert took over. This might be when Charles and William showed up. Or perhaps they appeared shortly afterwards to work on the bridge, which would end up finished well before the tunnel thanks to the lack of needing to dig out a bloody great hillside and all that inconvenient collapsing. These Pearsons were just two of a number of brothers, all stonemasons, from Dewsbury who were working their way around Britain using their skills to take advantage of the rapid expansion of the railways.
Charles would have the most illustrious career of the two brothers here; following the Summit Tunnel’s completion, he continued to work under Robert Stephenson and in partnership with others, including his other brother John. Charles is credited with having worked on the Cardiff Docks, the Ardwick railway extension (although this bridge collapsed and he faced a hefty fine for it), and the Britannia Bridge going over the Menai Strait to Anglesey. What parts of the bridge did he work on, we wonder? If it was the lions, they’re still there today. His involvement with this project is what makes us think that it’s more plausible that he was working on the bridge at Gauxholme, although who’s to say he didn’t have a hand in both?
He remarried in 1845 to the widow of a fellow stonemason in Liverpool. He eventually retired to Glamorgan and died there in 1870. William, meanwhile, went onward to Tadcaster after his work in Todmorden was done, as we mentioned before, and remarried there in 1841, not long before his little daughter died. Perhaps Jane and Elizabeth’s deaths had something to do with the fact that when he travelled for his own work, going forward, his second wife and their children all stayed at home in Tadcaster. He eventually returned to Dewsbury and died there (we think) in 1868. His story was less illustrious than Charles’s, but then, don’t forget he doesn’t seem to have quite the same level of education as his brother. In fact, when you look at the gravestone, you can’t help but notice that Hannah and Thomas’s names appear first, and then at the bottom Jane’s name appears, despite her being buried there first. It looks like what William couldn’t afford to do, Charles made sure could happen.
Hannah and Jane do not exist in these men’s family trees on Ancestry, and of course there is no mention of them in any newspapers. Poor Jane’s origins are lost entirely and we can only confidently say anything about her death, thanks to this gravestone; Hannah has a slightly larger archival footprint, but only slightly. This is the trouble with the past; it slips away from us and we sometimes only have a few little scraps of paper to tell us anything – anyone – had happened at all. This gravestone is a little bigger than a scrap of paper and its place here is the key to identifying these women and this child in death.