This simple flat ledger belies its owners – these Holts were perhaps the most well-off Holts in the graveyard, at least in the public area. Not everyone here was the manager of Waterside Mill and lived at Dawson Weir, after all. Those of you who aren’t keen on the Fieldens, browse to another story, sharpish!
John Holt was born around 1795 in Todmorden to Edmund and Betty (Newall) Holt. Edmund was a overlooker at the Fielden’s mill at Lumbutts, a Chartist and agitator against the Poor Law, and also a keen amateur botanist – he was in fact the “Old Ned” who took a young moss enthusiast named John Nowell under his wing and taught him everything he knew about the mosses and lichens of the district, and started him off on his botanical career…but that’s a story for another day. If John inherited Old Ned’s apparently devout enthusiasm for flowers and moss then he kept it somewhat to himself. His interest was cotton and in making his way up the career ladder. And in his father’s radicalism he found the way forward, because he stepped up and attended events, joined deputations, became part of the Todmorden Political Union which pushed for expanded suffrage for men, and also became an overlooker at first Smithyholme and later Waterside Mill.
In all his efforts he was successful (apart from suffrage – that would be won after his death) and he came the general manager at Waterside. By that time he had been married to his wife, Jane Firth, for nearly thirty years. They had wed in 1815 and had six children, five daughters and a son. Their son was named Edmund, of course. The position of general manager came with a home at Dawson Weir, formerly the Fielden family home, and what an honour that must have been. The house overlooked the mill, and even though today it overlooks a Morrisons, it’s still a fine house.
But even if you had money, health was fickle. In 1848 John and Jane’s no doubt beloved son Edmund died. The cause was hydropericardium, aka fluid around the heart restricting its movement. This could have been a complication from an infection or physical injury, but the newspapers are silent on the matter so there doesn’t seem to have been any sort of dramatics around the case. Edmund had also been working as an overseer, probably under his father, and it was both a career an
And a few years later, in April 1852, Jane followed her son into the grave. John and his daughters were left bereft, and John particularly seems to have been at sea over things. Was it grief for a beloved wife though, or something else? Because within six months John was married again, this time to the complete mystery that is Susannah Wilman. Susannah was 28 years his junior, unmarried, and on their marriage certificate has no occupation and no father. And on the 1861 Census later on, her birthplace would be recorded as “n. k.”, aka not known. Who on earth was she? She might have been the Susanna Wilman of Dewsbury whose father Joseph was a clothier in 1841, but how did she get to Todmorden if so? And why not name Joseph? Questions abound. Maybe she just didn’t like being put on the spot…
Seriously though, did John follow in the footsteps of his former employer’s son, another John who fell in love with a millhand? John Fielden the younger and Ruth Stansfield were already courting by 1851 so the precedent was there. That’s only a clue as to who though, not to why. We think the why though can be explained from a small mention in the August 20th 1853 edition of the Halifax Courier:
The birth of a son and heir. Holt knew the value of a dynasty firsthand and he wanted one. Such were the times. He and Susannah had two sons, John Wilman Holt and Edmund Newell Holt, before his death in 1857. Susannah and her two sons would eventually inherit a great deal of money, but in the meantime both sons excelled – one becoming a wealthy landowner in Ireland, the other spreading Fielden Bros.’s product and reputation in the US and becoming the mayor of a town in Florida. Their stories are too long to tell here.
What of Sarah Holt though? Sarah was left an independent woman on paper but not in reality. That money we mentioned earlier…well, for some reason John’s estate went unadministered after his death. Even though his daughters were all inheritors, as well as his two new sons, it wasn’t until 1884 that whatever legal issues had cropped up were dealt with. Sarah was the only unmarried daughter at this point and she went first to live with her sister Hannah and her husband James Lord (now the cotton manager at Waterside) and their children at their home at Bridge End, near the Co-operative Store there. Her occupation on the 1861 Census? “Gentlewoman”. It was the truth after all; none of the Holt girls had an occupation, and likely never expected to have one. Sarah died in 1865 with her address then being the Oddfellows Hall in Todmorden, which may have meant she had gone to live with her other sister Emma near the end (Emma’s second husband was pharmacist Robert Clarence Buckley, whose chemist and druggist business was there). Her death registration reveals the probably reason why she never married or took on work: she had epilepsy, from birth apparently, and this was given as her primary cause of death.
Some of the other Holt children, Jane’s daughters, are also here. Emma is in the private area with her second husband and some of their children; so is Betty, with her husband John Shackleton and more children. Jane, who married printer John Bentley, died in 1862 and is buried at Cross Stone (although curiously John Bentley is buried here at Christ Church, all alone!), and Hannah Lord is also at Cross Stone.