41.8 – Jane and Hammond Geldard Metcalfe, and James and Alice Stansfield

From a tiny village in North Yorkshire to bustling busy Todmorden, this family’s journey was really something.

Hammond Geldard Metcalfe was born in 1777 in Carlton, a little ways southwest of Leyburn. The current population is estimated at about 232 people and is also the largest village in Coverdale, so you can only imagine how sleepy it and everywhere around it was in 1777. The Metcalfes were land rich (and maybe also money rich) and when Hammond’s grandfather – also Hammond – died in 1789 there was a lot of land to parcel out to his sons James and Henry, and money and items to remember him by to parcel out to the grandchildren. Our Hammond received a silver watch, which was probably a rather precious heirloom for the twelve year old boy to be handed. The elder Hammond hadn’t been shy about sending his sons out to learn a trade, though, and as early as 1765 Henry Geldard was apprenticing in Halifax as a tin plate worker under iron founder William Bolland. Henry and his wife Alice (Geldard) would retain roots in the town and lived out their later lives there. This explains how the younger Hammond found his way down to the Calder Valley and eventually to Todmorden.

Hammond began to work in the Hebden-Todmorden-Burnley area by the mid-1790s and became a member of the Loyal Halifax Lodge of Freemasons in 1796. In 1798 he married Halifax lass Susannah Swift in Burnley. The couple had two children, Henry and Mary, before Susannah’s death in (we think – we can’t be 100% sure) 1806. Henry would later go on to marry into the Law family and poor murdered Clara Law is buried with him and his wife up at Cross Stone, but that’s a diversion. The main story here is that Susannah died, and Hammond surprisingly waited a few years before remarrying.

Jane Green was born in 1787 in Liverpool, and sadly her name is common enough for us to not be able to be sure of her parentage or any further details. All we know is that Hammond went and did some work in Liverpool and the two met, and in March 1810 they were married there by banns. Hammond is described in the marriage register as a “tin man” – he does seem to have had a heart though. Lots of men remarried within months of losing their wife when children were involved. Jane gave him two more children, Alice in 1811 and John in 1812.

Jane kept the house and Alice received an education good enough for her to become a schoolmistress, in her case of the Wellington Road Baptist Sunday School, a position that she would more or less constantly hold from 1833 onwards. Hammond and Henry, as he grew, quickly established themselves as expert tin workers, and by the 1830s began appearing in town directories. Hammond set himself up on North Street, aka Burnley Road, and Henry on York Street, aka Halifax Road. One of them would have been the one to make first a professional acquaintance with James Stansfield, a whitesmith (working with softer metals like lead and tin) living at Bridge End. James was the illegitimate son of weaver John Dawson and (we think) Betty Stansfield of Millwood who had been born in 1804 or 1805, so was about six or seven years older than Alice. When the two decided to marry at Christ Church in July 1837 Alice was 26 and James was 33 – old for a first marriage.

James and Alice moved to York Street to be near her brother Henry, and the couple started a family. Thomas was born first, then James Henry in 1843, and Mary Elizabeth in 1845. Henry and his wife Margaret had no children so no doubt they made the most of their nephews and niece, and Hammond and Jane would have enjoyed their grandchildren. But in 1846 Hammond died and was buried here, and Jane…well, Jane was not left in a position where she could fend for herself, it would seem. And for some reason her children were unable (or unwilling?) to take her in. When 1851 rolled round, Alice was working as a schoolmistress again despite having three children, and Jane was lodging with John and Sarah Banks and their children at Salford. John was a cordwainer and Jane is a lodger, occupation “boot and shoe binder”, but also tacked on to the end of her occupation is the word “pauper.” Did Hammond leave his family nothing? Or did he leave something and Jane was somehow locked out of it by the children? Did she and Henry – remember, not her biological son – have such a bad relationship? If so then what did it have to do with Alice and John, who himself is noticeably absent from Todmorden in 1851? Quite a series of questions to be asking.

Without sufficient information to figure things out we can only guess. But Jane disappears from the record after this and frustratingly we have been unable to locate her on the 1861 Census.

Meanwhile as we said, Alice had gone back to teaching to supplement her and James’s income. The Stansfields lived at Bank Top and would by 1861 move down to Patmos, where both James and Alice were still occupied as before. Patmos was very convenient for the Sunday School. Their children were unsurprisingly educated and following occupations that used their heads in a different way than whitesmithing did; Thomas had become a cashier for a distillery and moved away, James Henry was an accountant’s clerk and later commercial traveller for the same firm Thomas worked for, and Mary Elizabeth was a teaching assistant.

By 1871 only Mary Elizabeth was left at home. She had married John Lord, the eldest son of Abraham Lord who was one of the less involved of the Lord Bros. of Canal Street, and the 1871 Census has her down as a widow but John was definitely not dead. This was more wishful thinking on Mary Elizabeth’s part than reality, and you can read why here at the story of his life and death. The Stansfields now lived at Wellington Road, and Mary Elizabeth was also supplementing the household income working as a music teacher. Jane Metcalfe died in February 1871 at their home there at the age of 84. We ordered her death certificate in case it held any clues as to what she had been up to, but no…the cause of death was old age, there was no medical attendant, and James was the informant. She hadn’t even remarried. Where she went between 1851 and 1871 remains a mystery, but at the end she was welcomed into Alice’s home to die there in peace.

Unfortunately for Alice she would have more bereavements soon. First her son James Henry died, in London, in February 1874. James died two months later. James Henry was buried in Camden so only James went into the grave here. Given the amount of lead that a whitesmith handled over the course of their career he did well to get to the age of 70, but that wouldn’t have been much consolation to Alice, who decided to start afresh in Accrington. Mary Elizabeth went with her, and Alice would have a few years there before her health began to fail. She died in June 1880 from a combination of heart disease and emphysema.

Strangely there was nothing put into the newspaper about her passing either in Accrington or Todmorden – we say strange because having been the Sunday School mistress for over thirty years you would expect there to be something. But there’s only what’s on the gravestone. Go back and follow the link to John Lord’s life, however, and read about what sort of man he was, and then ask yourself if Mary Elizabeth did the right thing by not openly advertising her mother’s death…