From meat and sweets to pub landlording; this family made sure quite a few of the town’s basic needs were met.
At this grave we first find Edmund Farrar and his two wives, Sarah (Taylor) and Elizabeth (Ibbotson). Both these women came from very different backgrounds. Sarah is a little bit of a mystery – her father John was a plasterer, and she was born at any time between 1825 and 1835 depending on which record you look at. We suspect she was born in 1828 and at times fudged her age to get away with marriage…or marriages! Her first husband was Shade butcher John Lord, who she married in 1854. John was a man of some repute in the town, mentioned in the same breath as Hammertons and Eastwoods, but her time with him would be short. They had a son, Charles, in 1855, and John died in late 1856 while Sarah was pregnant. Their daughter Ann was born in the spring of 1857. Sarah resisted remarrying for some time so she must have been reasonably financially secure, and in 1861 she is actually noted down on the census as being a “meat and provisions dealer”. 1864 brought her joy and sorrow, as her daughter Ann died and she married eligible bachelor and fellow butcher Edmund Farrar.
Why would she lie about her age? Probably because she thought it was one thing to be six years older than her second husband – as their marriage certificate states – but it was another thing to be seventeen years older than him…
Edmund was a Walsden lad, born at Gorpley, and the son of a butcher, so two family traditions were now combined. We don’t know what happened to Charles Lord but by 1871 there were only two children in the couple’s life, their new daughter Annie and son Arthur. Edmund was in charge of the new butcher’s department at the Bridge End Co-operative Society building and it was a roaring success. He and Sarah worked hard to make it work and probably, as we all do, thought they had years ahead of them. But in 1878 Sarah died at – supposedly – the age of 53. The cause was bronchitis. Nothing special or rare, but in those days a common cause of death.
Edmund was pragmatic about things and knew he needed a wife to help with the children and his business. How he met his second wife is a mystery but in 1880 he married spinster weaver Elizabeth Ibbotson. Elizabeth was a Burnley-born lass whose father William was a sawyer who died while she was in her teens. Her oldest brother John, supposedly the one who would look after his mother and siblings, had obvious problems with alcohol and was in and out of the magistrate’s court across Burnley, Nelson and and Whalley. Elizabeth first went to live with her older sister Eliza (yes, confusing) and then later lodged with some other female weavers with a widow at Habergham Eaves. Somehow she and Edmund crossed paths and she decided that being his wife and taking on his children was preferable to anything else on offer. That sounds harsh, maybe they did fall in love! They at least fell into like…and the marriage was a successful one. They had no children together but they did decide to embark on a small adventure, and left Todmorden centre to take up a new home and new occupation. Edmund’s widowed sister-in-law Mary Ellen Farrar was the landlady of the White Lion Inn at Wadsworth Mill and must have talked him into giving the publican trade a punt. In 1891 we find Edmund, Elizabeth and Annie living at the Summit Inn, while Arthur is lodging with his aunt and cousins while working as…you guessed it…a butcher.
Arthur had a good reason to be slow in joining his family outside of Shade, and that was Alice Crossley of Dobroyd. She was the daughter of Abraham Crossley the confectioner (who is buried with her mother Elizabeth at 26.21, and so is also the niece of Esther Crossley Fielden who is buried just next door) and worked alongside him at his shop helping to make and sell sweets and bread. She and Arthur were married in August 1891 and soon had a small family of their own – Sarah in 1892, Ellen in 1894, and Charles Taylor in 1897. It’s nice to see Arthur commemorating his mother in both forenames and middle names. Butchering was lucrative but so was innkeeping, and by 1901 Arthur and Alice were the new landlords at the Summit Inn. Edmund had given it up and gone back to butchering, moving to the interestingly named but now sadly neglected and demolished Grey Mare Lane in north Manchester. Annie had married James Haigh of Todmorden in 1893 and gone to Rochdale with him so now it was just Edmund and Elizabeth on their own together.
Eventually the two decided to return to Todmorden and in 1911 were living at 115 Hollins Road, which is now part of Clewer Place. Elizabeth died there in May 1911, and Edmund immediately moved back to Rochdale to be near his children. He followed her into the grave here in February 1912. The families came home to bury them and mourn them, and then went back to their lives elsewhere. Arthur had moved on to take over the running of the St. James Tavern in Rochdale – another lost building – and amusingly on the 1911 Census their eldest daughter Sarah’s occupation is given as “daughter”. Was it a full time job? Her actual job, helping Arthur in the pub, definitely was. In 1912 there was an assault that took place in the pub and unfortunately Sarah got a mild rebuke by her father during his testimony. The judge asked him if men who were “sharp fresh and half drunk”, as Arthur described the defendant, usually got served at his pub? Arthur’s reply was “we are not supposed to … I didn’t do so. My daughter served him”. Whoops!
By the mid-1920s the Farrars had moved on, perhaps tired of the drama that comes with running a pub in Rochdale – Arthur did seem to appear in a lot of coroner’s inquests and magistrates’ courts to explain how this or that argument came to pass, or how someone behaved shortly before their sudden death. They had been lucky enough to get their son Charles back from the war in one piece and he ended up taking over the license for the Tavern – he had seen some real drama and the drama a pub in Rochdale brings probably felt like a cakewalk in comparison! Arthur, Alice and Sarah went to Blackpool where the two parents were able to enjoy their retirement together for a decade or so, until Arthur’s death in 1933. His body was brought back here to be buried and Alice and Sarah remained, joined by Arthur’s sister Annie who had also lost her husband by this point. They took in lodgers and made ends meet that way until Alice’s death in 1943.
Sarah remained in Blackpool and died in 1988 at the very impressive age of 96! Whether she was brought back here or not we do not know.