Londoners, coming up here, taking our jobs, stealing our women! Well, you don’t hear that last bit these days, but for the sake of accuracy in this story we’ll pretend that’s still a relevant gripe in Todmorden. But people have always travelled for work and to try and do something different with the skills they have and William Gunn Sr. was no exception.
Having said that, he might not have had a choice. William was born around 1798 in London, in the St. Giles area which is now part of the West End and just south of Camden Town. His parentage is unknown as is how he became a weaver’s apprentice, and we also don’t know the exact mechanism by which he made it to Todmorden. What we do know comes from John Travis many years later, when he wrote in the Todmorden and District News in 1904:
The houses at Butcher Hill, named above, were erected by John Lord, butcher and skinner, of Swineshead, mainly for the accommodation of Mr. Kay and his employees at the Gauxholme cotton mill. Mr. Kay had several lads sent from London, to work in the cotton trade who were apprenticed to him, and amongst them were some very well known men in after times, namely, Joseph Brewer, Thomas Rickson, William Gunn, and others; who, later, married and settled in this district.
It’s worth remembering that sometimes such apprenticeships were ways of getting young poor boys and teens out of the city and off the Board of Guardian’s books, in this case so far out of the city that it would take them a lot of time and money to come back. And that’s why in 1823 William was no longer in London but in Todmorden, and getting married at St. Chad’s to Betty Marshall of Langfield. Betty was William’s age and the daughter of Eli and Grace Marshall of Stoodley. She had been baptised at the now-demolished Myrtle Grove Congregationalist, and later the family moved further towards Todmorden and she ended up (somehow) meeting William. They must have gotten along well, since in 1821 their first child, James, was born, meaning he was baptised as James Marshall rather than James Gunn. Marriage followed eventually as we can see below. Within a year their first daughter, Sally, was born. Mary followed in 1828, and William Jr. completed the set in 1831. True to working at Gauxholme cotton mill, the Gunns lived at Watty Hole first before ending up at an address in Shade, where they were found on the 1841 Census, next door to James and his wife (also a Betty) and their daughter Sarah.
The 1840s were a difficult decade for the Gunns. Mary died in 1845 and William Jr. in 1846, both young. Mary had been working as a weaver and William as a printer’s apprentice, and both died from phthsis. Sally seems to have been particularly hard hit by Mary’s loss and in 1847 she found herself dealing with a different sort of problem – an illegitimate pregnancy. For whatever reason marriage wasn’t on the cards and in June of that year she had a daughter who she named Mary. She made sure little Mary was baptised at Christ Church and will have relied on Betty to help raise the child with apparently no father in the picture. William and Betty will have had to keep any objections to the whole thing to themselves, since they were hardly experts in waiting until marriage.
Mary is one of the many children buried here who didn’t see out her toddlerhood. She died in 1849 and is buried at Christ Church, but if she’s at this grave she isn’t recorded on the stone.
The 1851 Census saw William, Betty and Sally living at Shade with William now working as a grocer, having left the weaving trade altogether, and Sally working as a domestic servant. James and Betty Marshall had moved away but in 1850 continued the family tradition of remembering their lost Marys, with their daughter who was born that year named after her lost cousin and lost aunt.
Sally, sadly for her parents, died in 1853. You win no prizes for guessing the cause. William and Betty were now left with only one of their four children still living. They carried on, of course, and as time went on Betty’s faculties began to slip. Their granddaughter Mary Marshall, who we mentioned just in the last paragraph, became a dressmaker and moved in to help William look after Betty since it wouldn’t have been easy for him to run a business and attend to her needs. By 1871 Betty had “imbecile” next to her name on the Census – a difficult word to see nowadays, but that was the terminology used then. William and Mary’s efforts kept her home though and out of Stansfield View so they really did do the best they could by her.
In the end death comes for us all and it came for William and Betty in quick succession. Betty went first, in February 1873, and William followed her at the end of March the same year. His estate was settled and the two were buried, and a small piece in the newspaper mentioned his passing – and his origins – and lauded his “diligence and carefulness”. We should all be so fortunate!
