A grave where we know little about the inhabitants, but we’ve done our best to bring them to life a little bit.
Robert Suthers started out life with only one parent – born in Mereclough in 1807, by the time he was baptised in October of that year his mother Mary had already died. An inauspicious start to be sure. His father Robert was a weaver and at first our Robert followed along. He married Betty Bentley at Heptonstall in 1828 and within two years their large family was started. Nine children in told that we know of, and while we don’t have any information about Robert or Betty’s beliefs, their two eldest daughters would be baptised as adults at Patmos Congregational, so perhaps a vein of non-conformism ran through the family.
Their third and fourth children were Elizabeth, born in 1832, and Ellen, born in 1833. Just like the two Ratcliffe children in the grave to the right, these two girls died within a few days of each other in late March and early April 1836. They were buried just under two weeks apart.
These burial registers show the family living at Pudsey in Cornholme. Were they working at Pudsey Mill? Possibly not. Power looms were coming, were there in fact, but hand loom weaving was still clinging on, and the 1841 Census shows Robert was still doing just that. At this point the family were living at “Proud Row” in Lydgate; on the Census it’s sandwiched between Nazebottom and Hartley Royd, and perhaps was another name for some of the cottages along Knotts Road. It wasn’t Bowed Row which was still a few decades off of being built.
By 1851 Robert had given up hand loom weaving and moved to an entirely different career: that of barber and hairdresser. The Suthers family had also moved house into the town centre and were set up with a shopfront and house on Church Street, between Timothy Roberts the cabinet maker and Edmund Roberts the tailor and draper. This is where he and Betty would stay, and it makes sense now why the two daughters who were baptised at Patmos were baptised there and not at some other Congregationalist chapel elsewhere. It was a posh location and their continued residence there in 1861 means he really must have had a talent for it. Many hand loom weavers struggled to make the jump to power looms and their advent meant longer hours and less pay, so Robert was lucky to be able to pivot to something else, and with such success.
Strangely there is little to no mention of Robert in any newspapers around that time, local or otherwise, so we know nothing else about him. He died in January 1862, just before the Todmorden newspapers were in full swing, and joined his two little daughters here. Betty was now an annuitant, so not merely a widow but a widow with money in the bank that she was earning interest on. In 1861 only daughters Ann and Selina were left at home, but now Ann had moved on and Selina had gotten married to Thomas Uttley, “warehouse man” of Eagle Street, and so Betty went to live with the Uttleys. Thomas died in 1876 and Selina was now also a widow, albeit with less income. The solution was a change of scenery. Daughter Harriet had moved to Stretford at some point to become a confectioner, and so Selina went to help her with her business, with Betty in tow. But in 1882 Betty died, and her daughters brought her body home to Todmorden to be with their father and sisters.
Not the longest story, but there’s plenty unknown; if you have more information, please share it!