43.56 and 43.57 – Thomas and Esther Fielden and family

This double plot has two gravestones, and each one names a host of people. It “begins” with Fieldens but also incorporates Hollinrakes, so strap yourselves in for an occasionally convoluted tale of leatherworking, firefighting, early deaths and ripe old ages. Most of all it’s the story of one of the church’s most fierce and loyal defenders. Not Christ Church, but St. Mary’s. And as we all know, he had the last laugh.

This story jumps back and forth across the stones. 43.57 holds Thomas and Esther (Crossley) Fielden, their son William, and his wife Ann Hollinrake Fielden. 45.56 holds some of Thomas and Esther’s other children – Emma, John Crossley and Ruth, and Ruth’s husband John Hamer Hollinrake, and his and Ruth’s daughter Nellie. Rather than treat the stones separately, we’ll do our best here to tell the tale from the start and pull everyone in as we go. So here we go: Thomas Fielden was born in 1834 to William and Sarah (Greenwood) Fielden of Shade (and currently of grave 39.23), a saddler and leatherworker. He was also the brother to Ann Fielden, later Oldroyd, at V7.12. Thomas initially became a block printer working on cotton textiles but eventually he followed in the trade and was a well-known and moderately successful saddler in his own right. He was not a sole trader but employed several men and apprentices, and would have been an attractive match for Esther Crossley of Milking Green. Milking Green was along Bacup Road, just beyond Frithswood Bottom and Jacob’s Well. Some of her story has already been told at the grave of her brother Abraham and his family; what we didn’t tell there was that father Abraham ended up leaving cotton mill work and becoming a “provision dealer” at Pavement just near his son, and so the Crossley family’s fortunes really had improved rather sharply by 1861, and all around. Esther was a frame tenter in 1851 but a housemaid in 1861, and given it was for her parents it was likely a little less difficult than if she had been a professional servant. Pavement isn’t far from where the area known as Dobroyd touches the valley floor, where Thomas was setting up his business, and so the two met up and in 1867 the pair were married at St. John the Baptist in Halifax.

The couple lived at first with Esther’s widowed father and Esther, rather unusually, lists her occupation on the 1871 Census as “schoolmistress”. Esther was a busy bee, keeping a “dame school” at Dobroyd, which was an informal sort of school where children (usually girls) were sent to learn in a very small classroom environment taught by a respectable woman. The couple still had no children by this point, at least no living children, and it wouldn’t be until 1873 that their first child whose name we know was born – John Crossley Fielden. Children followed quickly after this with only a year or sometimes two between them: William in 1874, Abraham Haigh in 1875, Emma in 1877, and Ruth in 1879. Emma’s life was a short one; she died in January 1878, only just six months old. Esther was kept busy with her remaining children and with working on the side for her brother making confectionary and increasingly with running a branch store of his business, and for a time after this she had better luck with her children. There were no more losses until 1896 when John Crossley died.

Thomas meanwhile kept a relatively low profile, as his work spoke for itself. The move was eventually made to 108 Rochdale Road, aka Crescent. Thomas took on work for the Town Board along with Anthony Greenlees of Church Street – the Town Board did have its own horses, for the use of the Sanitary and Nuisance Inspectors – and became a strong Conservative locally. He also joined the Oddfellows and took on the sidesman role at St. Mary’s after it officially reopened and was involved in their Sunday School as well. He even spearheaded a drive to try and make St. Mary’s a parish of its own right, entirely separate from Christ Church! All these things kept him busy but also meant he was well-respected and it’s no wonder that his appearances in the newspapers are confined to Town Board meeting minutes and the occasional event where he or Esther were witnesses in a case.

The issue around St. Mary’s is an interesting one; the decision to designate it as a chapel of ease so that Christ Church could have primacy was not popular amongst many, further entrenching some opinions that Christ Church ought not to have been built in the first place, and Thomas was so devoted to this cause that he even went to the trouble in 1878 of colouring in the boundaries on an OS map and marking out where new parish boundaries between Todmorden, Walsden, Cross Stone and Harley Wood were currently and could be situated in the future, and presenting it to the current Bishop of Manchester. He and others led a deputation and the Bishop promised to put a clever man onto the job, and they left feeling satisfied…but either the man wasn’t clever enough or it was placating words only, because the plan came to naught.

As we said, the other early bereavement for Thomas and Esther came in 1896, with John Crossley Fielden’s death. He had been busily working under Thomas and was so skilled that he became a journeyman saddler, able to travel and command a good price for his work. Unfortunately he was also a child of his time and in those days all sorts of diseases went undetected until too late. In John’s case it was Bright’s Disease, aka kidney disease. He may have had a few more years in him but he also had the poor luck to develop another illness of the time, phthsis. The two together carried him off and he was 23 when he died. This left Thomas grieving but also professionally on the back foot, since his other two sons hadn’t decided to become leatherworkers. William had become a cotton mill worker and Abraham was a warehouse boy. What would come next?

Before we figure that out, let’s detour back to William and Ruth. William was a keen sportsman who played cricket, rugby and football for various clubs around the town. An active and healthy chap, in other words. He was perhaps already considering a career change before his father’s death, or he had an attack of the guilts, because he left his work at the mill following this and became a saddler himself. In 1898 he married Ann Barker of Ridge Steps. Ann was born in 1872, the illegitimate daughter of Mary Ann Barker and William Webster of Oldroyd. Her parents would take another three years to marry, and she occasionally took her father’s surname, but on her marriage certificate she dutifully left her father’s name and occupation blank and named herself as Ann Barker. It wasn’t as big a stigma as we like to make out – it was certainly more common than we think, and at least her parents DID marry – but still, Ann and others like her were always in a bit of a pickle when it came to official documents. At least she was described as the head of the household’s daughter on the census returns and not as a lodger or visitor. She worked as a weaver, and after her marriage and even after the birth of her daughter Ruth, she followed Esther’s example and continued to work. The family’s work ethic was strong indeed!

Meanwhile, Ruth (the older Ruth) continued to live at home and work. She was good with her hands as you’d expect the child of a leatherworker to be, and she went into the thematically similar dressmaking trade. She was the baby of the family and so it’s no wonder that her other siblings were married and out of the home before her. But sometime around 1899 or so she finally met her man: John Hamer Hollinrake, a twister and drawer at Waterside but also a volunteer fireman and keen cricketer. Firefighting was his main passion which makes sense as his father, Sam, was a well-known fireman in his day as well as two of John’s older brothers. Later in 1911 he would be able to leave the mill altogether when he was elected as the new full-time Superintendent of the local Fire Brigade. The two were married in 1905. He and Ruth, like William and Ann, only had one child: Nellie, who was born in 1907.

1907 was also a sad year for the Fieldens as it was the year Esther died. The Parish Church Magazine carried a glowing obituary for her that gives us some more intriguing clues about the family:

It turns out that Esther never forgot her roots further down Rochdale Road and was involved in the Shade Mothers group (whatever that was); it also appears that she was usually the healthier of the couple, and that Thomas had a number of dangerous illnesses over time that she had nursed him through. That sheds an interesting light on her son’s Bright’s Disease. Bright’s, aka nephritis, is an umbrella term for a number of kidney diseases that are sometimes environmentally caused and sometimes hereditary. Would this have been known then? Good question. Esther was 70 years old, no spring chicken, but was active in the community right to the end. Thomas will, of course, have lost heart on her death. Time was also marching on for him too, and he died three years later in 1910. His death received considerably more column space than hers but that’s only typical of the time.

Both newspapers ran obituaries for him (the District News simply has a better looking scan online) and the Advertiser mentions more specifically that he was incapacitated for work after Esther’s death, which goes to show how important she was not just to him as a life partner but in the everyday running of the business. He was also, apparently, strongly interested in church business right to the end. The church paid back his years of service with one heck of a funeral. The bellringers rang a muffled peal at Christ Church, the coffin was covered in wreaths, and his loss was mourned by far more people than just his children. Ramshaw’s Concerning Todmorden Parish, published a year later, refers to Thomas as “our lamented friend who stood by the old church until his death”, and also says that “months before the end came, he was permitted to witness the fulfilment of his long-cherished hopes in the concession of that for which he had through by far the greater part of his life earnestly and consistently fought”. He may not have seen it carried through, but he’d still have died happy. Today Christ Church is closed and a private residence, and St. Mary’s is refurbished and active.

They did mourn though, and then went on with their own lives. Ruth and John Hamer were particularly living an exciting life, with just one child and his work with the fire brigade. Ruth’s brother Abraham had married John’s sister Mary Jane in 1899 – hence how we know when John and Ruth probably met – and in 1911 the two couples and little Nellie were living together in the house and shop at 108 Rochdale Road. Abraham had also changed trades and gone in for saddlery, but the family had sold the house to Fielden Bros. after Thomas’s death and were now just renting it. In 1911 John was, as we said, made the Superintendent for the fire brigade, and when WW1 broke out he got involved in fundraising for the Nursing Association and the Hospital Fund. Much like Lifeboat Saturdays, these were opportunities for people to get creative about digging deep for money to help keep places like Centre Vale Hospital going. If everyone did their bit then everyone’s young men would have a better chance at recovery, or so the thinking went.

John was spared the war, but unfortunately he died relatively young, and not in the line of duty but from peritonitis. It was 1928 and, strangely, the only thing about it was that it was “on time”. Why? Because Hollinrakes in his family had a strange habit of dying on October 26th, John being no exception. It was so unusual, and widely known, that the Advertiser included this detail in their obituary for him. He had retired two years previously after some ill health but in the end it wasn’t his chest, or a fire, that got him after all.

The following year Abraham Haigh Fielden died, and this left William in a quandary – sell the saddlery business or try and keep going without his brother and partner? He chose the former (wisely realising that cars were the future) and went back into manual labour, this time at the Market Hall. He did, also, keep his hand in as a volunteer fireman, which we hadn’t found any mention of until the 1939 Register where that is included as one of the occupations he was retired from. John must have talked him into it in previous years! William, Ann and little Ruth stayed at Dobroyd Place for as long as they could but eventually moved to Laneside Street at Shade. Meanwhile Ruth and Nellie weren’t far away, at Oak Street in Shade, where Nellie and cousin Ruth had become a warp dresser at Fielden Bros. at Waterside.

We don’t know much else after this, as again, if someone isn’t active in a way that gets them mentioned in the newspapers then their actions disappear from the record. What we can say is this: William Fielden died in 1950, after going into hospital for an operation which presumably either went wrong or failed.

The following year Ann died, a “sudden” bereavement according to the acknowledgement notice placed in the paper by daughter Ruth, although at the age of 79 she must have been very healthy and active for it to be considered sudden. Sadly no more detailed obituary for Ann exists.

What about the older Ruth? She soldiered on and died in 1967, nearly forty years after John. Her death was also in hospital and seems to have been a less sudden affair than William’s and Ann’s. Also, the younger Ruth must have grown closer to her and Nellie during that time, as she is also mentioned in the acknowledgments as thankful for the attentions shown to her aunt.

After this, again, the movements of these two daughters become unclear. We know that Nellie never married, but what about the younger Ruth? She either married elsewhere or moved away; no death notice ever appears in the papers that we can confirm belongs to her, and if she’s buried here at Christ Church we can’t find the place. The burial registers after 1980 online are very sparse and incomplete. Nellie, in keeping with her grandfather’s passion for St. Mary’s, continued to be very active in the church and appears occasionally in reports of festivals or retirements. She was the oldest person into these two graves in the end, dying in 1993 at the age of 88.