Quaker and bread baker Robert Walmsley was one of Todmorden’s many offcumden residents over time who made their home here; this story is short on detail about the people buried in the grave mostly due to their ages, but his first wife Sarah also suffers from the usual lack of records and roles for women in society at the time.
So what do we know about Sarah. She was born Sarah Ingham in Crawshawbooth, near Rawtenstall, in around 1809. Her father Richard was the gravedigger for their chapel…or rather, their meeting house, because the Inghams were Quakers. What other positions he may have held in life are unknown to us. In early June 1830 Sarah married fellow Crawshawbooth resident (although possibly not a fellow Quaker) Robert Walmsley, a baker and grocer. Either he or Richard must have had some sort of social standing, as their marriage was included in the Manchester Courier.
This may also have been reputation management, as Sarah was almost certainly pregnant by that date. Their marriage was made official at the parish church in Haslingden as it was still the requirement for non-conformist marriages to be held in one in order to be considered legally binding.
Their first child, Mary, was born and died in January 1831. Her name is on this stone, as is that of Robert and Sarah’s next child John who died in January 1833, but neither are buried here. Mary is almost certainly buried at one of the two burial grounds attached to Crawshawbooth Friends Meeting House since we know that John is definitely buried there, and it would make sense. By 1833 the Walmsleys had come to Todmorden and settled at Dobroyd, so why bury their second child “back home” if the first wasn’t there too? Sadly the records we have easy access to don’t go back before 1832. And, as we can see, Sarah’s father was the man directed to “make” the grave.
Robert and Sarah’s misfortunes with children continued. Over the next seven years three more children were born, and two of them died before those seven years were out. Their second daughter named Mary was the first to be buried here at Christ Church, then her little brother Ingham. By the time of the first census in 1841 there were only two children alive, Ann and little Sarah who was born that year, out of the six they had had in total thus far. Still, business was going well, and the Walmsleys had a grocer’s assistant, apprentice baker, and a female servant living with them. Could things be improving?
Sadly the answer was no. It’s the 1840s after all, and for reasons covered in many many stories before this one, mortality was well known to people of this time and known only too well to parents. Robert Jr. was born in 1843, and in 1845 Sarah went into premature labour and gave birth to a small daughter named Betsy. Sarah had been suffering from phthsis and the premature labour was likely related to it…although, maybe we were unfair to Robert and Sarah with their first daughter. Maybe she wasn’t pregnant in June 1830, and the birth in January 1831 was actually a premature one? We can’t know at this point in time. Poor Betsy died after sixteen days from “debility”, and Sarah followed her ten days later. A Betty Ingham of Crawshawbooth – sister or mother? – was by her side at the end.
This left Robert with three children, and like most busy men in that situation, he remarried within a matter of months. His new wife Mary (Law) Bottomley had had a hard time of it – left widowed with two small children, then giving birth to an illegitimate child a year and a half after losing her husband – and the two combined families tried to move on with their new life together near Robert’s shop at Pavement. One more loss was still to come though. Sarah, Robert and Sarah’s younger daughter, would die in 1848 from complications of bronchitis, and she was the final Walmsley buried in this grave.
The final Walmsley? Yes, because Mary died in 1868 and was buried at St. Peter’s with her son Thomas, who had died suddenly the year before. Was there no more room in the grave here at Christ Church? Maybe, or maybe Robert felt something for his second wife that hadn’t existed with his first. Poor Sarah indeed. But maybe not. Robert remarried a few months after Mary’s death (the man had form) to Mary Sutcliffe, another Mary, and when he died in 1878 either she or his remaining children made sure he was buried at St. Peter’s as well. The final Mary Walmsley died in 1881 and is buried with him there as well.
Spare a thought for Sarah next time you pass her grave, where she lies with some (but not all) of her young, young children. Infant, eight months, eight months, fifteen months, sixteen days, seven years…a hard life. But life was hard then.