From Dulesgate to Shoebroad, the Lord family were Victorian farmers who had the sadly usual Victorian struggles with child mortality.
There are four sons of John and Sarah (Crowther) Lord here, and we know little about them. Even Walter, the eldest to predecease his parents, didn’t die in a way which required a coroner’s inquest. Their deaths were sadly typical of the time; they were victims of medicine not being advanced enough and the conditions under which farmers lived at the time. John and Sarah had five children who lived to adulthood so even though they lost more children than statistically average during this time they were still able to see the rest of their family thrive.
John was well acquainted with mortality. Born around 1844 or 1845, he was illegally registered at birth as John Lord even though we suspect his parents weren’t yet married when he was born. Elias Lord and Mary Feber were married in August 1845 and had five children together before Alice’s death in 1855. Elias remarried in 1857 to widow Alice Sutcliffe Hartley, who gave him a son but then no more living children before her death in 1871. He would go on to marry again. John was a little luckier in the wife department, marrying Sarah Crowther in January 1867 at Heptonstall…but less lucky for children. His witness, Peter Hartley, was his stepbrother.
Sarah Crowther was a few years younger than John and was also born and bred in Todmorden, the daughter of farmers Thomas and Susannah (Hirst) Crowther of Todmorden Edge (who are both buried at V13.10 with her brother George Henry Crowther). The Lords were farming at Spring Well, near Bacup Road, so their paths would certainly have crossed here and there. The Crowthers were not as committed to farming as the Lords though and by 1861 had given up on the tops and moved down to Mill Street in Cobden, where Thomas had found work as a cotton twister and Sarah as a cotton spinner. Old acquaintances would have visited though and she and John still found a way to intersect and form a relationship.
After their marriage they began starting their family but were plagued with infant mortality throughout their marriage. Their first children Mary, Willie and Ada started off well, with John and Sarah having initially settled at Saunders Clough, Dulesgate, before moving along to Hazelgreave which is nearer to Cloughfoot. But their next son, Henry, died when he was three years old. The son afterward, Thomas, died when he was five. John and Sarah relaxed a little, maybe, as more children came. But in 1887 Sarah had a terrible shock, when her brother George Henry (a popular cricketer) died suddenly at only 24 years old. When she gave birth to a son in 1888, her last child, she named him George Henry. Sadly little George Henry wouldn’t see out the year. So a double loss, and perhaps that’s one of the reasons why he was her last child. Having said that she had been having babies for 21 years at that point and more likely she was simply exhausted.
By 1891 the Lords had left Hazlegreave and moved to the other side of the valley, to Shoebroad Farm. Their time there was punctuated by a spell of dramatic weather which earned the family two mentions in the newspaper, each time because of terrifying lightning strikes that destroyed chimneys and parts of roofs and, on one occasion, struck Sarah through the window while she was undressing for the night!
If you’re wondering why Sarah would be so foolish as to be taking a bath by an open window during a thunder and lightning storm, she was likely distracted. She and John had just lost their last child who would predecease them – Walter, their youngest, who was eleven years old. The reason was peritonitis, which could have had any number of causes. Child loss was a reality then, and it wasn’t their first, but to lose a child outside of their first few years was new for the couple. Four years later Sarah followed him. In the years between she had suffered a stroke and although her death was considered sudden it doesn’t seem to have been a surprise. No inquest was held and she was buried here with her four lost children.
John was left with five children and a farm, but after having been married for 32 years seems to have been cautious about remarrying. Now the youngest child was Albert who in 1899 was 17 years old and the need for a wife to keep house and look after children didn’t exist. Time did move on though and after a few years the thought must have started occurring to him…fortunately for him, his next wife was less than a stone’s throw away. John and family lived at 1 Shoebroad Farm, and at 5 Shoebroad was a widow, Margaret Townley Nutter, and her little daughter Margaret Isabella (aka Bell). Margaret was a Burnley lass who had married a Burnley lad, John Nutter, who brought her to Mytholmroyd through his work as a gentleman’s coachman. He died not long after Bell was born. By 1901 Margaret and Bell had moved to Todmorden and to Shoebroad where Margaret found work as a charwoman. The acquaintance gradually changed to genuine affection and the couple were married in 1906 at Cross Stone. It’s good that John had a second chance at happiness because it seems as though the marriage was a happy one. It will have been too short in that case; John died nine years later, in 1915.
John’s death meant that Margaret had to figure out what to do next, since farming was hard work and she wasn’t young anymore, although she was 15 years younger than John! The will must have taken some time to work through and resolve because it wasn’t until September 1916 that she sold everything by auction. Everything from the 14 dairy cattle to the two bay horses, all the way down to the turnip pulper (slightly heartbreakingly described on the auction list as being a new one). She John was fondly remembered in the newspaper later that year.
Margaret moved on from Shoebroad eventually, to Edge End Farm, when Bell married dairy farmer Frank Trafford in 1920. What happened to her after that is unknown.