This is one of three linked Leek/Orrell graves, and the first we’ll cover on this website. Not our first set of brothers who married sisters and no doubt also not the last!
The Leek story starts with James Leek and Ann Bartran, two Bowling residents who married in 1846 and settled in Horton. James was a labourer and mechanic and the pair had three sons, James, John and Jeffrey. Admittedly two of them turned up before the pair married, but we won’t dwell on that. He and Ann had travelling in their blood; both weren’t Bradford natives, with James hailing from Stanningley and Ann from Skipton, and by 1861 they had made the move to Todmorden and Brook Street. The three boys were all cotton operatives and no doubt times were tough during this time, the beginning of the Cotton Famine. Maybe the Leeks thought their conditions would be better in Todmorden than elsewhere. They were probably right – for all the Fielden sons’s wealth and arrogance, they did at least try to keep their workforce from famine.
The Leek boys were decent enough, although there was some mischief going on. In 1863 John and James were amongst a number of young men hauled before the magistrate for allegedly breaking into the home of Betty Butterworth at Heyhead, near the Shepherd’s Rest. John was caught in Todmorden but James fled to Bradford along with one of the others, but they turned themselves in. It’s worth remembering that they were 18 and 19 at the time, silly boys really.
Son James died in 1867 and father James and Ann moved back to Bradford, but John and Jeffrey stayed here. We’ll leave Jeffrey for now and focus on John.
In 1868 John married Sally Taylor. Sally was a few years older than John, having been born in 1841 to John’s 1845. That’s all we know of her though because the marriage took place at a registration office in Rochdale and there was no recorded church or chapel event to tell us what her father’s name was or her address. The 1871 Census, the only one where we can pinpoint her as definitely “her”, tells us she was born in Todmorden at least – on the Lancashire side. She and John stayed in Rochdale and had three children. First came James, named for John’s dead brother and born in 1869. Then Elizabeth Ann, and finally Jeffrey, named for the other brother. Interestingly in 1871 little James was living with his grandparents back in Bowling. Why? Who knows. It might be because John never quite grew out of his youthful indiscretions and was appearing occasionally in the Rochdale Observer charged with drunken escapades. All of the being drunk or messing about variety, with only a theft of lead going further, but still. Sally must have had her hands full.
Three years after Jeffrey was born Sally died, ending her very short story. She and John had been married for just over eight years. Somewhat shockingly John remarried within a month, this time to Sarah Orrell, a spinster from Knowlwood near to where John had resettled with his children. Sarah would have been known to the family for some time as her sister Ann married Jeffrey Leek (again, more about them later). The couple married at Eastwood Methodist chapel, now long gone, and we do wonder if any Leeks or Orrells are buried in the graveyard there which is now in private hands. Sarah was born in 1837 in Walsden to John and Mary (Firth Orrell) and was their oldest. Mary Orrell and one of her grandchildren are in our third linked grave so we won’t go into too much detail, but Sarah was left without a father at a young age and she and her siblings, sister Ann and brother Henry, had to go to work to help support Mary and themselves.
After she and John married he slowed down on his drunken appearances in court and the couple moved first to to Swineshead Clough and then up to Sourhall along with their children. One factor in John cleaning up his act might have been another death in the family; because in 1881 his son James died at twelve years old. His death wasn’t notable, and the ever-tactful 1881 Census makes mention that James was an “imbecile”, the nature of which is of course unspecified. After this we stop seeing John in the newspapers for anything at all, until 1895 when he got drunk and disorderly at the Spinners Rest. By this time Elizabeth had left home and he, Sarah and son Jeffrey were living at Lower Knowl Farm and he was working as a spinner. No rest though until he was put in a cell for assaulting the landlord! John, what on earth are you doing…
Two years later he and Sarah both died within a few days of each other due to pneumonia and they were buried here in this grave on the same day, December 15th 1897. Whatever sins John may have committed in life were forgiven in death by his children, who also gave Sarah credit as their “mother” in the in memoriam published in 1898.
