45.59 – John, Betty and Sarah Ann Cropper

Some of the Cropper family story has already been told with David Cropper under the school, but this is about how David got here – the story of his parents and of his only sister.

John Cropper was born in Todmorden in 1825, the oldest child of his parents David and Nancy (Riley) Cropper. His parents weren’t Tod folk themselves, having both come from outside the area – Newchurch and Accrington respectively. Six more children followed him and the family settled themselves at Meadow Bottom where David and young John worked as stonemasons.

Betty Lawson, meanwhile, had been born a few years earlier in 1822. Her parents, Benjamin and Sally (Stansfield) Lawson, were half Tod folks…Sally anyway…and Benjamin was a farmer at Stile. The Lawsons were unlucky in starting a family and Betty was, in 1841, their only living child. In the 1840s both Betty and John lost a parent – Sally Lawson and David Cropper both died in this period – and when the pair married in 1847 there must have been an agreement to remember these parents. They too took a while to get their family started but the first two children were named David and Sarah Ann, which we can guess was probably a reference to Sally.

John and Betty initially moved in with Betty’s father Benjamin at Flailcroft on Todmorden Edge, a farm known for its Quaker connections (and Fielden Quakers, at that) and which in 1851 included 34 acres which Benjamin farmed seemingly on his own. If he had help they didn’t live at the farmhouse like most farmhands tended to. John was still working as stonemason and at this point only four month old David had been born. Within the next two years the family had left Flailcroft and gone back to Meadow Bottom to live at Cote. John had become a farmer himself now, farming eight acres, and Benjamin Lawson was a mechanic working in a machine shop. On the 1861 Census poor little Sarah Ann’s occupation is given as “nurse” – it’s not clear who exactly she was nursing, but also, she was eight years old. Maybe helping with the baby, since the last Cropper child Benjamin was four months old at that point.

The Croppers kept to themselves and when John died in December 1879 it was pretty much the first time he appeared in the local papers. The family had done well for themselves though, with houses at Fox Bank and Willow Bank owned by them periodically being up for rent, with people asked to apply to either John or (more often, and even long before his decease) Betty. But again, when Betty died in 1884, there was nothing in the papers except the brief notice.

What about Sarah Ann? The little nurse from 1861 became a cotton weaver for the rest of her life. She and little brother Benjamin stayed with Betty after John’s death, and after Betty’s death stayed together too. Even after Benjamin married in 1892 they stayed together, with Sarah Ann continuing to work as a weaver. You can probably guess what happened next. Sarah Ann died in 1914, and her brief death notice was her only appearance in the newspapers. Betty in the end had the most exposure with her small handful of “to rent, apply to Mrs. Cropper” advertisements.

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