You may have encountered these Sutcliffes before – Lydgate Baptist stalwarts, we’ve already told the stories of their sons Thomas and Joseph.
Joseph was the son of local grocer Robert Sutcliffe, although Robert hadn’t always been a grocer. At Joseph’s baptism at Patmos Chapel in 1816 he was described as a cotton spinner. Later though he became a grocer, and while Joseph’s whereabouts in 1841 aren’t known, Robert was living with his wife Mary and his younger children and a granddaughter at Canteen and keeping his neighbours fed. He also had two young ladies lodging with him: Betty Midgley and Grace Rigg.
Grace was the daughter of labourer William Rigg and why she was lodging with the Sutcliffes is unknown, but at least it explains how the two met! In 1845 they were married in Heptonstall and started a family. They would have nine children and never left Lydgate; and due to their strong Baptist faith, were some of the very first members of Lineholme (Bethel) and later Lydgate (Mount Olivet) Baptist when it first opened. In fact Joseph was the first member at Mount Olivet, or at least the very first Trustee of the new denomination.
The Sutcliffes weren’t rich but they were locally respected, and a now-demolished street to the west of Mitchell Street today was known as Sutcliffe Street originally, likely for this family since other streets in the area also bore the names of Baptist regulars.
Joseph would die in December 1873, and Grace resolved to continue the business without him. This proved difficult for her though. First we see an auction held on the premises a few months later, although it’s for carts and joinery tools rather than the tools of a grocer; but in May 1877, bankruptcy proceedings began against Grace and the business. She owed just shy of £700 and only had about £177 in assets – whether those were only the business’s assets or included her personal estate is unclear. It took two years for the affair to be fully wound up, with creditors eventually having to settle for 1 shilling and half a penny in for every £ they were owned. 1/20th of what they were owed. Things must indeed have been hard for her.
On the 1881 Census Grace is living with her four remaining unmarried children and a lodger at 2 Well Street in Lydgate, now better known as Plane Street. She kept the house while they went to work and licked her wounds from having to give up Joseph’s business. She died in May 1887.
Joseph and Grace’s last two children, Fred and Lucy, share this grave with them. Lucy was their final child, born in 1868, 23 years after her parents had first gotten married. She only lived for ten months. Fred, the second youngest, made to adulthood but died suddenly in April 1887 at the age of 23. Grace’s death a month later takes on additional weight now doesn’t it? The space of time between was so short that their names appeared on the same page of the burial register.
You may wonder why all these strong loyal Baptists weren’t buried at Lineholme or Vale or Shore? The answer might lie in the intra-denominational fallouts that kept occurring. Shade was the original chapel in the Lydgate/Cornholme area, and the attendees of Lineholme were breakaways from there. Some of that congregation then had a dispute and started a small gathering that met at Arch View Picker Works, Joseph and Grace amongst them, and they were the founders of Mount Olivet (which did not have its own graveyard). The two chapels were apparently friendly with each other but perhaps there were some lines to be drawn still. Why they didn’t purchase a burial plot at Vale, were that the case, is unknown. If they had then at least they’d still be there; those at Lineholme who fell out with Shade might have been glad, or maybe cross, to find out that 100 years later their remains would be dug up and reinterred up on the hillside so that some flats could be built on the site…