38A.32 – Mary, Mary Jane and James Blomley

Two little girls and their sad father – this grave is yet another cautionary tale that would fit nicely into a temperance pamphlet.

James Blomley was, like the Howorths and Greenwoods, part of a great Todmorden innkeeping family – but not from birth. His father Edmund would become the landlord of the Golden Lion sometime around 1821 but when James was born, back in 1806, Edmund was a chaise driver – a horsey chap. He was known later for keeping more horses than the Lion would hold so that tracks (thanks as always to Barbara Rudman’s Todmorden Old Pub Trail for the little details like this). James was a horsey boy and later a horsey chap, becoming a coach driver and opening a coach business with his brothers that provided people with journeys between Rochdale and Todmorden as well as to Blackburn and back.

In May 1823 James married Mary Schofield of Todmorden, whose own origins are unclear. Her father’s name was William and he was an ironmonger, and we think she might have been the Mary who was baptised in 1805, the daughter of William and Martha of Doghills…wherever that is and whoever they are. Ancestry suggest her mother was a Mary Whittaker. Either way, she and he caught each others’ eyes and that was that. And their marriage couldn’t come soon enough! The two welcomed their first child as little as a few days later: little Mary, who was baptised at St. Mary’s on July 13th and buried at St. Mary’s nine days later on the 22nd. She was 9 weeks old.

James kept working hard, also joining the local Harmony Lodge of Freemasons, and Mary kept keeping house, and no more children seem to have come for a decade. In 1834 Mary Jane came, and a year later Ann, their final child. James was, by 1834, styling himself as an innkeeper, so was possibly helping his father at the Lion…and developing a taste for it. In 1836 he took the leap from horses to houses and used his connections to secure the license at the Old Bull Inn in Blackburn. He went north first with Mary and the children set to follow, but before they could, Mary Jane died in 1837. She was buried here next to her sister, and Mary and Annie made their way to Blackburn without her.

A little side note: poor Mary. At the end of 1835 she and the other Blomleys had fallen prey to a practical joker who had burst into the Lion saying that James had been taken ill at Littleborough and was at death’s door, and anyone who wanted to see him again one last time had better hurry up. She and some others sped to the Boro only to find him perfectly well. Maybe this was part of the reason they planned to leave Todmorden…too many people who thought themselves clever.

Anyway, on to Blackburn! James made a success of his time at the Old Bull and featured in a number of newspaper articles about messy drunks and arguments over who owed what to who. He did so well that by early 1845 he also took on the running of the King Hotel, but this was a tactical error perhaps fuelled by alcohol. Because James…poor James…he’d fallen for his own propaganda and developed a problem with drink. While in the middle of an attack of delerium tremens he had taken a surgical knife meant for working on horses and cut his throat with it. The inquest is truly sad to read, with multiple witnesses giving evidence as to the nature of James’s delusions. There was an old man and three children who were chewing sovereign coins to bits, and he told Mary he would have to kill her with a poker if she went looking for the bits of coins or else the man and children would kill him; there was an old woman looking at him through the walls; a big stout man and some small boys setting fire to a haystack to the right of him while he was in bed; the list goes on, and one wonders if there was some other neurological condition influencing him. Whatever the true answer, the inquest found he had killed himself while temporarily insane, and so his body was released to be brought back to Todmorden and laid to rest with his little daughters.

Later that year his sister, Sarah, would name her newborn son after him, in remembrance and also almost certainly hoping for better.

Mary carried on at the Old Bull for a few months before marrying widower James Forrest, a weaver who was himself from an innkeeping family who had once been the landlords of the pub itself! He died in 1852. Mary never remarried but stayed in Blackburn and was buried there in 1880 on her death. Interestingly her remaining daughter, Annie, married one of James’s sons from his first marriage, James Parkinson Forrest, in 1871! He died in 1885 and Annie, on her death in 1896, joined him. Both she and her mother left their Todmorden roots well behind and so it’s just James and the two girls here, with a fine looking ledger that tells you nothing about the lives it’s here to represent. It seems like that bit is down to us.