These four were in a grave with three Scholfields, and at first the connection wasn’t obvious. Thankfully the story of the Scholfields of Todmorden helped us figure out the missing link – William and Mary Scholfield of Church Street. This story will explain why an older stone has a more modern inscription on its lower half, and also a tablet with further names at its base.
William was an ironmonger who originally started out in a shop on North Street, aka Burnley Road, opposite where the Town Hall would later stand. He had quite a few children, including a few sons, and one is also buried here; Samuel, who became a respected doctor in the district. But another son was named James. James was also an ironmonger and when his father died in 1848 he took over the second shop which had not long since opened on Church Street, opposite…well, you can probably guess. This did not last for long; James died in 1851 and is buried with his parents and many of his siblings at St. Mary’s. But his son William took over the business along with his widow, Mary (Overend) Scholfield.
James and Mary had married rather young and by 1841 had eleven children. One of the younger children was named Joshua Sellars Scholfield. Born in 1839, Joshua grew up to become a mechanic. We won’t go too far into his story as he’s buried at V3.6 and it can be told another time. But he married Jane Barrett in 1861 and they had ten children, the youngest of whom was Alice Scholfield, born in 1883. And that is where this story begins properly, with her birth.
Alice was born on March 30th 1883 and by this point the Scholfields were living at Gledhill Street. They were a very close family, and curiously all took rather a long time to spread their wings and leave home. Joshua died in 1907 and Jane in 1908; on the 1911 Census, seven of the eleven children are still living in the house at 6 Gledhill Street, all unmarried, ranging in ages from 46 to 28 (Alice there still the baby of the family). This was unusual. More unusual is that four of the children are men now and three are women. It isn’t the case of the unmarried daughters staying home to help their parents, it’s just all the children (or at least almost all of them). As we say, it’s a little outside the norm.
Alice was a weaver, as were almost all her siblings.
In 1912 she married at last, to John Marshall of Vernon Street. John was a hairdresser as it was called then, something a little fancier than a barber. He was also late to marriage. Two years younger than Alice, he had been born in Walsden in 1885 to William and Mary Ann (Wells) Marshall. William was a loom jobber and John followed the same fate at first before moving to a profession a little less physical. There was a good reason for this – John was somewhat unwell, never enough for it to be mentioned on the census but enough that a physical job like weaving was going to be a problem. Alice wasn’t in the best health either. The couple had a single child, Mary Ann, in 1916, and Alice took a while to recover afterwards. John meanwhile had a “gangrenous knee” supposedly, and it was this and the apparent lack of hairdressers in Todmorden that kept him from the front lines in WW1.
John’s case is actually a good way of showing how truly desperate things were getting towards the end of WW1. The man who was granted an absolute exemption in 1916 was called up again in August 1918 and only given six months then to get his act (and gangrenous knee) together. You almost echo John’s confused “why am I being called up again?” in your head when you read the mention of it!
From here we start to go places where we get closer and closer to the present day where it’s harder to find vital records, although easier to find newspaper mentions. John was involved in the choir at Christ Church and, as Mary Ann would later recall, would go around different churches and chapels singing. He also instilled a love of singing in his daughter.
John later became a plumber’s labourer, and he and Alice remained at Gledhill Street until their deaths in 1958 (John) and 1964 (Alice).
In 1947 Mary Ann married Albert Edward Alletson. Albert had been a steelworker during WW2 and lived at Merrybents Street in Walsden with his parents and sister Marjorie. The couple stayed in Todmorden for the rest of their lives, moving to – you guessed it – Gledhill Street, with Albert later finding work as a postman and Mary Ann working at Castle Hill School as a (the) dinner lady. A letter in the Todmorden News lamented her passing in 2000. Albert had predeceased her in 1995.
