46.55 – Sam, Matthew, James and Sarah Greenlees

More of the smithing Greenlees family here, this time two brothers and the wife and son of one of them. How much ironwork in the town can be traced back to them and to the Scholfield family? Someone ought to take a count at some point.

We’ve already discussed some of this family’s origins at the grave of Sally Mitchell Greenlees at 52.55. One of her children, a blacksmith named James, was Sam and Matthew’s father. He married Betty Stansfield in December 1837 and their first child, Sam, was born the following year. Matthew followed the year after, and sisters Alice and Elizabeth followed in 1842 and 1847. Betty died on Christmas Eve 1847 and James and the children left on their own. James remarried the following year but it wouldn’t be long before he followed Betty to the Greenlees family grave in what’s now the private area at Christ Church – he died in July 1854. The Greenlees family had been living at Roomfield Lane and School Lane where they had a smithy that produced a wide variety of goods ranging from horseshoes to railings, and you’d expect that Sam and Matthew, now 16 and 15 respectively, would be in the business too alongside their uncles. And you’d be right!

After James’s death his new wife Hannah continued to look after her four stepchildren, and by 1861 Sam was working as a blacksmith and Matthew as a tinner, or whitesmith as you might find similar workers named elsewhere (although specifying Matthew as a tinner implies that he worked exclusively with the material rather than with a general range of soft metals). Tin wasn’t Matthew’s only interest though; both he and Sam were finding that there was money to be made not just shoeing horses but tending to their needs as well. The first mention of either brother comes in the Todmorden and Hebden-Bridge Weekly Advertister (as it was known then) on March 28th 1863, when poor Matthew lost both the top and bottom rows of front teeth and, from the sounds of it, was lucky to escape without a broken jaw. His injuries would have been terrible though, and definitely left him scarred for life. Horses are serious business and whatever he did wrong we’re fairly certain he was careful never to do it again…

And because all things at Christ Church are connected, of course, Samuel Scholfield put him right again. Which is good because in 1866 Matthew headed up to St. John the Baptist in Halifax to get married to Sarah Thomas, a corn miller’s daughter from Heptonstall. Sarah had been born in 1842, the eldest daughter, and the family had moved from Halifax to Hebden to Walsden and finally to Lob Mill, where they can be found on the 1861 Census. Sarah was working then as a weaver. Something about Matthew’s very lopsided grin must have caught her eye (in a good way!) and they went on to have seven children of their own at their first home on Wellington Road. They populate the graveyard the same way their great-grandparents and other ancestors did; Samuel at 17.16, Charles Henry, Henrietta, Sarah and Alice at V1.5, and of course James here. Only one child isn’t buried here, Thomas William Greenlees, who died in Manchester in 1946. Meanwhile Sam never married, instead putting his energy into his veterinary surgeon qualifications. James was both in 1867 and Sam began officially advertising as a veterinary surgeon that same year.

By 1871 Matthew, Sarah and their first few children had moved back to Roomfield Lane, although he was still working as a tinner at this point. Stepmother Hannah and their sister Elizabeth had continued to live with Sam, Hannah working as a housekeeper and Elizabeth also bringing in money as a milliner. Sam was also busy as part of the Vale of Todmorden Agricultural Society and with giving evidence in various cases regarding sick or inaccurately described livestock. Sadly for him though his life was cut short and he died in June 1875, leaving behind £300 and the estate in Matthew’s hands. Matthew took the opportunity to rebuild the smithy on Der Street. The business was now his and he intended to make the best of it.

By 1881 Matthew’s occupation had changed to farrier, and eldest son James (then 14) was listed as an apprentice farrier. James was also still a student at Roomfield Board School where in 1882 he was able to study animal physiology – useful for his chosen trade. Matthew made money supplying horseshoes and medicine for the Town Board, alongside his saddler Greenlees cousins over on Church Street who provided other horsey accessories and other Greenlees cousins who provided tinplate work. James continued to do well at his studies and worked alongside his father and for a few years things went well. Then, bad luck began to dog the Greenlees family.

First, Matthew died in March 1886. Sarah and James decided to continue the business, with Sarah contracting the veterinary medicine side of things out to a firm of veterinarians from Rochdale, Howell and Herbert, who would come to Todmorden on Tuesdays and Fridays for consultations. A month later a storm blew a chimney pot and some stones off the roof of an adjacent building and they crashed through the smithy roof, with the newspaper breathlessly reporting that “had the smith been near his anvil at the time his life would have been imperiled”. Not what a widow wants to hear about her eldest son, who is holding things together. Their contract with the Town Board continued, with meeting minutes now noting payments being made to “Mrs. M. Greenlees” as opposed to “Mr. M. Greenlees”. If James was doing the hard work, Sarah was running the business itself. But then the final piece of bad luck came to them in April 1888…when James, only 21 years old, died from phthsis.

Fortunately Sarah’s second eldest son, Samuel, had followed in the family trade as well and was able to pick up much of James’s work, and so Sarah and now Samuel continued to run the smithy and provide services to the town and Town Board. The other two children of working age, Charles and Henrietta, were also still living at home and working as an office clerk and dressmaker, so enough money was entering the household for them to not lose everything. They were lucky; not every widow and group of children were able to have the right skills at the right times to keep their lives from being turned inside out. Later Charles would also become a blacksmith, and the fourth son Thomas William became a saddler. This along with the girls taking on dressmaking, millinery, and working as a buttonhole machinist, meant financial security for the family.

They even had fun sometimes…for example, Lifeboat Saturday in 1895 featured many wagons in the parade which were put together by local businesses to show off their wares. Sarah and the children put a little shoeing forge together for theirs. And not just a replica, but a working one, with either Samuel or Charles hard at work on it as it tootled down Halifax Road! Interestingly it also mentions there being a smithy at Crescent, showing that the business wasn’t just doing well enough but was thriving enough for expansion

Sarah and the children stayed at 2 Der Street and Sarah continued to handle a great deal of the business contracts until her death in 1904 following a cerebral haemorrhage. She had quite a life, and a life that could have ended up quite different, but definitely stands as one of the luckier widows in the graveyard here. Having been left just shy of £400 by her husband, she was able to leave her children about £800 herself on her death – a testament to her hard work and that of her children.