V1.5 – Charles Henry, Sarah and Alice Greenlees, and Arthur and Henrietta Corbett

Right at the front row of vaults stands this cross commemorating four siblings and a man who married into their family – the branch of the Greenlees family that was concerned with shoeing and veterinary practice at Der Street. This story is one of sisters who were doing it for themselves and a brother whose decline and death is something of a small mystery. We’ll treat their stories in turn, starting with the eldest, Charles Henry Greenlees.

Charles Henry Greenlees: Charles Henry was born in 1871, the third child and third son of Matthew and Sarah (Thomas) Greenlees, and at first did not follow precisely in the family footsteps. Matthew was a tinner-turned-veterinary surgeon, and uncle Sam and brothers James and Samuel were alternately farriers, veterinary surgeons and blacksmiths. Charles was perhaps more of a creative soul though, with his first appearance in the local newspapers in 1884 for doing well at freehand drawing at Roomfield Board School. After apprenticing with his father for a spell he became an office clerk – perhaps with the family business? He was still a horsey sort of chap though, like the other men in his family, and after some time he returned to the fold and went back to being a shoeing smith. He also found time to play billiards with the Todmorden Church Institute team, joined the Harmony Lodge of Freemasons, and in 1903 took his love of horses to the next level and became a Farrier Sergeant with the Duke of Lancaster’s Own Yeomanry. In between all this, he and brother Samuel continued to run the shoeing forge under the direction of their mother Sarah and kept things ticking over.

1909 was the start of difficulties dogging Charles, though. They started with a prosecution brought against him by the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons. The case was fairly simple; there was an old faded sign in the forge window reading “veterinary establishment and shoeing forge”. Charles maintained that this was an old sign from the days of Sam and Matthew Greenlees running things and that after Matthew’s death some veterinarians from Rochdale had been attending to do that work, and he had not. This was still held to have violated the 1881 Veterinary Surgeons Act and he was fined for it.

Eventually his time with the Yeomanry came to an end and Charles settled into life in Todmorden at the forge. Business was good enough for a second smithy to be opened up at Crescent, on Rochdale Road, and it was this branch that Charles managed and worked at. A photograph from Roger Birch’s A Way of Life roughly dated as circa 1912 shows Charles sat with a number of women, who from our best guesses are his sisters Sarah and Alice, sister-in-law Elizabeth, a fourth woman who is either sister Henrietta or sister-in-law Emily, and three of his nieces. Charles looks relaxed and fit, well dressed, with interesting shoes made from cow or horse skin based on the dappling (perhaps made by his brother Thomas William, who was working as a saddler with his leatherworking Greenlees cousins on Church Street). We know from his army record that he was 5’7″, had a “fresh” complexion, light brown hair and blue eyes, and was relatively trim at 122lbs. This photo might be hiding a secret though. It certainly doesn’t give the viewer a clue that in four years Charles would be dead. Not from the usual cause of death in 1916 for men with army connections, although whether the war was the reason for Charles’s death is something the reader will have to decide for themselves.

When WW1 broke out, Charles was quick to re-enlist and offer up his services. His army record shows that he attested on September 7th 1914, just over a month after Britain entered the war. He was 43 years old. Despite our popular ideas of the horrors of the trenches, it was still a war which in the early stages at least seemed very winnable, and not at all unsuited to men on horseback. Horses were crucial to transporting all manner of goods and weapons and as late as 1917 there were over 380,000 horses at work for the British Army. Charles no doubt expected to be a part of all this, and saw it as a part he could play as a healthy man with experience, even at his age. But for reasons never divulged fully in the record, fate wouldn’t allow it. On reenlistment he did well, quickly earning a promotion from Farrier Sergeant Major to Riding Master in November and another promotion in December…but in January 1915 he “reverted” to Farrier Sergeant. And in March 1915 he was discharged from the Army altogether as medically unfit for service.

Once home he clearly found it hard to cope, and turned to drink. Or perhaps that was something which had started earlier and contributed to his medical discharge. There’s maddeningly little detail to be found about it, and in a sense it doesn’t matter, but the nature of how drinking affected Charles raises questions. According to Samuel he spent two weeks drinking increasing amounts of alcohol and was suffering from delerium tremens whenever he had too much, and in June 1915 Samuel had to dive into the canal at Sandholme (even though he couldn’t swim himself!) and fish him out, after Charles threw himself in thinking he was diving for a bomb that would otherwise go off and kill women and children.

Charles never left the country, never even out of Stockport, so his ideas of the war will have only come from what he read and heard from others. But clearly he was preoccupied with war and with service, and you have to wonder again about his discharge. Was he already struggling with alcohol addiction? Had his nerve failed him and he found himself unable to leave for the continent, and discharged sympathetically rather than as a deserter or conscientious objector? Was he ashamed of his ill health and obsessing over the idea of doing something to redeem himself? It might not have helped that Charles, Sarah and Alice’s lodger, Frank Marshall, had also enlisted at the end of 1914 and was doing very well in the army and no doubt would have been writing to his friends about what was going on. Sometimes a graveyard story includes little details that lead you down all sorts of speculative alleyways with no idea which one is closest to the truth, or if you’ve even considered the truth as an option. Poor Charles though. Samuel and Elizabeth promised to keep an eye on him, and Charles promised to take the temperance pledge, and out of sympathy for him and his family’s good name the matter rested there.

A month shy of a year later, in May 1916, Charles died from pneumonia. His lodger Frank Marshall, for all his bravery and ability to serve, predeceased him – he was killed in France in March. Charles’s ill health didn’t save him, and Frank’s good health didn’t either.

Arthur Corbett and Henrietta Greenlees: Henrietta, or Hettie, Sutcliffe Greenlees was Matthew and Sarah’s eldest daughter and fourth child. She was born in 1877 at 98 Roomfield Lane, aka Halifax Road, in a house long since demolished and replaced by the Factory Shop opposite the health centre. The family moved to Der Street where the shoeing forge had been rebuilt and following Matthew’s death it was all hands on deck for the children. Henrietta became a dressmaker and this was her occupation on the 1891 Census, when she was 15 years old. She was an outgoing girl, or so we assume, because she became active in the parish church choir and in the Sunday School as a performer. Perhaps she made costumes as well. That’s how she met her future husband, with the first mention of them appearing together that we can find being in 1899 when they both played parts in a skit called “The Imp of Mischief”.

Arthur Corbett was born in 1874 in Rochdale to a pair of solidly Lancastrian parents, John and Jane (Jones) Corbett. John was a native of Ashton-Under-Lyne and Jane hailed from Manchester, and John’s job as an insurance agent for Britannic Assurance Company meant that the family travelled, settling first in Rochdale and then in Todmorden, where the family can be found in 1881. They lived first at Barker Street and later at Stansfield Road, and Arthur went to work as a clerk for John’s business when he was old enough. Arthur was also a cricketer with the Todmorden Church team, also played billiards for the Todmorden Church Institute (another link to the family), and, as we saw, was a theatre performer. He appears in more accounts of performances than Henrietta does in fact! He later joined the Todmorden Church Brigade and was their branch’s Quarter Master. John was a Sunday School teacher so this explains the strong connection the Corbetts had to Christ Church. The Greenlees family doesn’t seem to have had as strong a link, but never mind; Arthur and Henrietta only had to find one way to meet, and they did, and in 1906 they finally married. Charles Henry Greenlees and Maria Corbett (one of Arthur’s sisters) were there as witnesses.

Arthur had left the insurance business and set up as a tobacconist, and perhaps the reason for them to wait until 1906 to marry was for him to establish himself enough to be able to move back to Manchester to make his money. The Corbetts immediately left Todmorden for Broughton. Three children followed; Alice Marian (known to all as Marian), Joan, and Kathleen. Henrietta wasn’t a stay-at-home wife though and when we get to the 1939 Register, we find a small surprise. Henrietta is the head of the house, and her occupation is given as “confectionery dealer manager”. Arthur is still a tobacconist. Marian is a confectioner, pastry cook and cake maker, Joan an overall machinist, and Kathleen a typist. The choice of confectioner is interesting as you’ll see later in this story; the Greenlees girls loved their baking it would seem.

It’s frustrating to not have much more to tell, but that’s the trouble sometimes with these more recent lives. Arthur died in 1942, suddenly.

Henrietta followed him in 1958 and her death made the Salford and Todmorden papers, although just a simple obituary.

Their combined efforts meant she had a decently sized estate left for her daughters – about £1492 to share amongst themselves.

Sarah and Alice Greenlees: finally, we come to the two youngest sisters, and in some ways their story is the most impressive. Sarah, born in 1882, and Alice, born in 1884, were the babies of the family. They were only four and two when their father died and so grew up watching their mother Sarah run a very male business, with their older brothers doing the hard graft while she ensured that paperwork and contracts were gained and sorted and that the veterinarian side of the business could continue thanks to outside contractors. It’s no wonder, then, that they made their own canny decisions.

Alice was the one who initially set up her own business at 67 Halifax Road as a confectioner. The back of Roger Birch’s Todmorden Album Volume 5 shows the front of her shop, selling “high class chocolates”, and inside there’s a photo of her in the doorway. The photo can be dated to prior to 1909, as that’s when she and Sarah decided to throw their lot in together and move further up the road to the town centre. Just past where the Yorkshire Bank stands now there used to be more buildings which incorporated W. Haigh’s drapery, Hartley’s chemists, and facing the roundabout and St. Mary’s, the Corner Cafe. The Corner was where the two sisters would work together for almost the entire rest of their lives. And it was a big success! Offering boarding to guests who could pay well, the sisters employed both cafe workers and servants to keep their quarter of the large building running smoothly.

Family was important to the sisters and for a long time after their mother Sarah’s death they lived with Charles and his boarder, Frank Marshall. They moved permanently to the Cafe – 1 Rochdale Road – after it opened as Samuel and Elizabeth Greenlees were then occupied with looking after Charles at the end of his life. In 1921 they were there with a visitor, 11 year old Sarah Cottam, and their three servants Ethel Stone, Rachel Knight, and Olive Booth. Sarah was the “housekeeper” and Alice the “manageress”. All four of these girls were from outside of Todmorden, so must have come looking for advertised work, or perhaps been sent from a workhouse or girls home that specialised in giving disadvantaged young girls and women a chance to learn a trade (even if the trade was service). Sarah and Alice must have been fascinating as women who owned and ran their own business and could (as much as was possible at the time) have independent lives.

The Cafe hosted many events over time, and some of the boarders stayed there for years and years. They tended to be well-to-do which will have helped the sisters keep things going. Popular legend has that the sisters owned a parrot that used to swear at people from time to time; we can’t ascertain whether the swearing part is true, but a “wanted” ad from 1941 helps us at least prove the parrot part of the tale.

Otherwise the sisters rarely appear in the papers unless they’ve done something wrong; dumping ashes in the river in 1919, the chimney catching on fire in 1921, and forgetting to turn the lights out in 1941. That last one might have been more dangerous than the flaming chimney…but they were too busy to be in the news, and only got a rare mention in passing in reference to their father. After an impressive 47 years, though, the sisters were tired and they retired from the business and moved to Hallroyd where they continued to live together. In accordance with popular wisdom, retirement took its toll on them, and Sarah died in 1960 and Alice in 1961.

Alice had no obituary like this one, but her family thanked those who had thought of them in that time, and quite a few people made donations to the Roomfield Baptist building fund in her name. What would the Baptists have made of the swearing parrot story, we wonder…