An only child and her parents rest here, next to the child’s grandparents and aunt and uncle. Graveyards are family affairs.
Hannah Proctor’s early life story is told in the story of her parents and siblings next door, but a quick recap: Hannah was born in 1850 and became a dressmaker, living with her family in their home at Stackhills (where Baltimore Marina is now, next to the Health Centre). Her wages, along with those of her siblings, helped keep the family together after her father’s sudden death in 1873. In 1878 she married Frederick Woodhead, a young architectural draughtsman. Let’s find out more about him…
Frederick Woodhead was born in 1852 to Edmund and Sarah (Crossley) Woodhead. Edmund was a millwright and worked for Lord Brothers at Stackhills, and the family lived at York Place – not so very far from Stackhills. Hannah’s brother Robert was a mechanic, so perhaps that’s how the two met. Frederick also found work at Lord Bros. and stayed with them for his entire working life. The Woodheads were lucky to escape the boiled explosion of 1875, although Edmund came in for a great deal of criticism at the inquest for disregarding a report into the boilers that said they were unsafe and needed to be replaced, swearing that they were perfectly safe and he had never noticed any problems with them before then. A cynic could say that Frederick benefitted from his father’s loyalty to the millowners, but who’s to say.
After Frederick and Hannah married they settled at Cambridge Place. Frederick would have been making a good wage and they were likely happy to be starting their family, with daughter Mary Ingham Woodhead born eight months after their marriage. Mary would be their only child though. Whether Hannah never got pregnant again or had miscarriages is unknown – all we know is that on the 1911 Census they reported that they had only ever had one child born alive.
The Woodheads were mainly linked to Cross Stone, but Frederick and Hannah both found plenty to do at Christ Church, both with the choir and with the married ladies group. Frederick’s brother Alfred lived next door – he was also a draughtsman – and things seemed to be going well for the family. But the 1890s would bring much pain for them both. First, on June 1st 1890, Mary Ingham died. She was 11 years old and the cause of death was pneumonia, so common and nowadays so avoidable. But back then there was little that could be done.
Hannah by this point had also lost her parents and siblings and must have felt very alone. Frederick then embarked on what the courts would later be utterly perplexed by, but make sense to an outside viewer who can see the circumstances; he started to recklessly invest in stocks and shares in what would turn out to be a dud company. Just like Nathan Ogden, grief and stress meant he was an easy target for something exciting and that he believed would make his and his wife’s lives better. He wasn’t a poor man, but he wasn’t rich either. Maybe he thought that if he’d been better off things wouldn’t have happened the way they did. We can only guess. His bankruptcy took the better part of 1891 to get sorted out, but it did, and as always very publicly in the newspapers.
Frederick built his business back up and he and Hannah moved from the town centre down to Stones Villa in Walsden, otherwise known as 346 Rochdale Road. He continued to work for Lord Bros. and the pair continued to stay active with Christ Church, but the town centre was no longer somewhere they wanted to live. Life carried on for them both until 1919 when Frederick, on realising his train was not going to stop at Walsden, got so angry about the fact that he suffered a heart attack and died after being taken off the train at Rochdale.
Hannah only lived for another two years, dying in 1921. Frederick had left her a hefty £2300 on his death as both his brothers had already died and not had any children of their own either, and not much seems to have been spent in the interim. She left £2200 behind, and intriguingly two beneficiaries who seem to have had no relation to either her or Frederick’s families – a Betsy Shackleton and Jane Newell (who is specified as “the wife of Fred Newell”, in case there was any confusion we suppose?). The Newells had been neighbours of the Woodheads at Stones Villas
She also, though, left a £100 bequest to Christ Church. After her death Betsy and Jane had her household goods sold at auction and from the sounds of it Frederick’s bankruptcy was only a brief rainy period in his finances. Mahogany beds and chairs and tables, easy chairs, sewing machines, walnut suites covered in “old gold Utrecht velvet”…whoever benefitted from her estate was truly fortunate, and you wonder what furniture wasn’t auctioned!
For all that wealth and comfort, though, their most valuable “asset” had long since left them and been buried here. Their estate went to friends because there was no family left. If they had been childfree by choice then it wouldn’t seem so tragic.