Three generations of women in one family rest here, and their story is one of wealth and heartbreak.
Mary Hollinrake was born in 1802 in Todmorden to either Samuel and Mary or John and Hannah Hollinrake; unfortunately she was married by banns and so there’s no father’s name on any paperwork. Her marriage came in 1826 to Samuel Lord, mechanic of Stansfield. At this point Mary was living in Langfield but again, no further detail emerges. Her marriage to Samuel was a stroke of luck for her and perhaps she didn’t know it at the time. Samuel was the son of John and Martha (Scholfield) Lord and he had many brothers, including Thomas and James Lord. Industrial history enthusiasts will recognise them as the Lord Bros. who ran the Canal Street Works and at one point blew up a dozen of their employees…but that’s beside the point. The point is that this particular Lord family was creating a tiny ironworks empire and Samuel was a part of it. This meant that Mary was marrying not just into relative security but actual self-made money.
She and Samuel seem to have struggled to start a family and by 1841 they had only two children, Edward (born in 1836) and Amanda (born in 1841). And this would continue. Samuel died in 1849 and Mary was left in a better position than so many widows who were left with children to support in a time when work for women was undervalued or difficult manual labour. Mary’s occupation on the 1851 census was “annuitant” – someone living off of the income of investments. Come 1861 and she and Amanda were both described as “fund holders” – again, living off of the income from investments and property. An envious position to be in! Their home was on Raglan Street, so not a grand house, but this allowed them to be comfortable and not have to work which was what Samuel had intended, and his brothers had honoured. As Lord Bros. expanded, so did Mary and the children’s bank accounts.
Now, William Thomas Butterworth enters the picture. The son of a druggist and chemist, he had a guaranteed solid profession behind him and probably seemed like a promising young man. As it turns out he was anything but. He and Amanda were married in 1862 at St. John the Baptist in Halifax and moved to Dale Street. Two children came along, Mary in 1863 and Kate in 1866. But by 1871 William was nowhere to be found, and Amanda and the two girls were living with Mary on Wellington Road where many of the houses were owned by Samuel’s brother John. Amanda’s occupation is now “druggist’s wife”, but where was the druggist?
The 1870s were a terrible decade for Amanda. In 1872 both the little girls caught strep B, aka scarlatina, and they were unlucky enough to have it develop into what was called “scarlatina maligna” at the time. Maligna is what it sounds like: fatal. Kate died on February 5th, and Mary on February 6th. On their death registrations, their father is named as “William Thomas Butterworth, formerly a chemist and druggist”. He wasn’t there.
Amanda would then lose her mother Mary in 1875. In just a few years to lose those she loved the dearest…it’s a shock few readers will be able to comprehend. Even in a time when death was all around it was still a great deal. We also know from the 1911 Census that Amanda and William had three children all told, all of whom died, although this third must have been stillborn as we cannot find a birth or death registration or burial record for them. Her losses were great indeed. And again, where was William?
The answer is that we don’t know, as it appears whatever he went off to do he did under another name. The last we hear of him is in 1880, when Amanda was granted a protection order against him so that he could not access her money on the grounds of desertion. She did have money after all, and if he had turned into a ne’er-do-well then of course he was going to try and take advantage of things. Once the money was denied he was gone altogether. She was probably better off. But having lost the only good things he had ever done for her, her children, she may not have felt that much of a victory had been achieved.
By the 1891 Census Amanda had started to refer to herself as a widow so we can only assume his death came sometime before then. If so then he had either dropped his middle name or was going by another name altogether, and had definitely left Todmorden by this point. His parents are buried in the private grounds at Christ Church but his name isn’t on their stone. So we can move on from him.
Amanda, left alone, decided to take on the care of her niece-in-law Martha Jane Lord. Martha Jane’s parents Abraham and Sarah had died over the past two decades and Martha Jane was what the censuses charmingly termed an “imbecile from birth”. She had been born in 1853 and was in need of some sort of sustained support all throughout her life by the looks of it. Rather than being sent to Stansfield View or a private asylum like Wakefield or Storthes Hall she ended up with Amanda, and would live with her for the rest of Amanda’s life (which had many years yet to go). The two women found Wellington Road to their liking and stayed there, at number 44, for many years. They would occasionally take in another relative or lodger to keep things interesting, and the owners of their house stopped being Lord family members at some point and presumably put the rent up a little, but the two women persisted. Amanda’s wealth was slowly running out and she may have been selling stocks or property here and there over time, which we can guess at fairly confidently because when she died in 1921 her estate only amounted to £242.
We don’t know how much of Amanda’s money William made off with before the magistrate blocked his access, so perhaps her story would have been different if he had been blocked from it sooner. Still, she made it to 80 with a roof over her head and being able to support her disabled niece, so she managed well enough.
Where did Martha Jane go? We don’t know, and we don’t know when she died either. Like William, she has disappeared into the paperwork void.