This war grave is one of our Remembrance Sunday 2024 stories, sitting alongside that of Percy Smallwood. Percy died only five weeks before WW1 came to an end; Harry here died about seven weeks after.
John Helliwell was born in Walsden in 1852. His father John was a railway porter and he and his wife Sarah were fond of unusual names for their sons in particular. John Jr. and his next brother along Joseph both got off lightly really – his other brothers were named Ratcliffe, Lord, Helliwell, and Greenwood. Lots of surname forenames. He grew up at Clough working as a throstle doffer and weaver but eventually followed brother Lord and his father into the railway business, becoming a platelayer. Hard labouring work but there was always plenty of it, so it was a good choice of career. In 1878 he married Betty Fielden of Walsden and the two of them had two daughters, Sarah Ruth and Alice. Sadly Betty died a year after Alice’s birth, in 1882, and little Sarah Ruth died in 1885 at the age of seven. Both of them were buried at their family plot at Walsden St. Peter and John and Alice were left to manage on their own. Interestingly John did not remarry straight away as so many young men did after the death of a wife that left him with a number of children. John had three sisters though and it may be that they helped shoulder the burden of looking after first both girls, and then just the one girl, while he went out to work. By the time of Betty’s death they were living at Hallroyd Crossing, so not near the other Helliwells, but it wasn’t the other side of the country so it’s very plausible. He did eventually remarry though in 1892 to the wonderfully named Fanny Timewell.
Fanny had been born in 1861, nearly a decade younger than John, and quite some ways out of the valley – in Wellington, Somerset, actually! Her father (also John) was a tailor, and a talented one; his sons were being trained up in the trade as well. Economic troubles in the Somerset/Devon/Cornwall region and the size of the Timewell family (Fanny was one of eight siblings) meant something had to change, and the Timewells made the move to Halifax. It was a successful move too, with John and then later Charles and Ernest able to start their own business, with the two sons carrying on as Timewell Brothers in their shop at 33 Hanson Lane. Both John and mother Elizabeth died in the 1880s and Fanny, who prior to their death had been working as a carpet setter, became the housekeeper for her brothers.
Her marriage to John Helliwell brought her a stepdaughter but also brought them three more children of their own within five years – Charles Henry, Amy Elizabeth, and Harry. Just Harry. It looks as though Fanny was also a Methodist, as the three children she and John had together were baptised at both Christ Church and Bridge Street Methodist Chapel. They lived at Hallroyd Cottage now and John had been promoted to foreman platelayer. Alice was, funnily enough, working in 1901 as a machinist tailoress. Perhaps Fanny had set her up with a professional contact? Come 1911 and now both Amy and Harry, who was now 13, were working in the clothing business either as a shop assistant or as a ready made machinist. Charles was a picker maker, bucking the trend a little. Again, you had to find yourself a trade where you’d never be short of work, and both tailoring and picker making was a less physically tiring work than railway labouring.
On the 1911 Census John is described as a “railway pensioner” at the age of 58, having retired in 1908 after thirty years as a foreman. He had seen a great deal in his time – if you search for his name and “foreman” in the newspapers on the British Newspaper Archive, you find him present at coroner’s inquests and magistrate’s courts as a witness to all sorts. Recalcitrant farmers who insisted on using the railway line as a pavement, accidental deaths such as that of Thomas Lingard at 35.21, and an inventor who stole his patent. Yes, that’s right. Don’t ever assume that a labourer or working man isn’t educated, because you might get a surprise, such as signalman Robert G. Marks of Osborne Place did when he claimed in the Todmorden District News in July 1898 that he was the sole inventor of an improved “fish plate” that would connect sections of rail more smoothly and easily.
Other railway workers jumped to support John’s assertion that he and Marks had taken an idea of John’s and drawn it out and developed it and that Marks had acted illegally and immorally in filing a patent without John’s knowledge after promising they would do it together. What came of this contretemps in the paper? Well Marks replied with a very snobby and snippy letter where he says that “Helliwell cannot read a drawing; his mode of reading such is worked by a rule entirely his own” and ending with “I shall take no further notice of Helliwell or his class”. Do you want to slap him? We do. You aren’t human if you don’t want to. The following week John accused him of threatening witnesses and of being a “collapsed jackdaw”, and the following week Marks writes back to mention that he personally knows three former Prime Ministers and that Helliwell is functionally illiterate and has someone writing his letters for him. At this point the editor steps in and asks them both to calm the heck down and take it outside.
How on earth this affected two men who worked for the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway on the same section of line, and lived in the same town, in sight of each other’s houses, can only be imagined. We haven’t been able to find out who triumphed legally but the Todmorden News in 1958 in its “50 years ago” column speaks of John as the inventor of the improved fish plate design, so their stance at least is clear!
When WW1 came along Harry didn’t join straight away. He had been working as the chauffeur for Dr. Thomas Southwell, a role which presumably might have given him some small temporary exemption. His older brother Charles had also joined although we don’t know the date; he would have initially also been exempt as a picker maker and married man – he married Ann Horsfall Thomas in 1915, but we’ll get to her later – but eventually neither condition was enough to keep him home. Harry’s service began in August 1916 when he was 19 years old. After two months of training he was sent to Salonika, Greece, with the Army Service Corps. For two years he served there and while his service record is partially burnt and hard to read in places, it looks as though for the last few months of the war he was transferred to the Motor Transport Service and was a driver for an officer. As his obituary later mentioned, once he left for Greece he never came home again. That means he missed the death of Fanny in April 1918. Fanny might have died wishing she could see her youngest son again, but in the end, her death wasn’t the reason for not being able to. It simply wasn’t meant to be. On New Year’s Eve 1918 Harry died in the hospital at Salonika from an intestinal obstruction.
He’s buried at Mikra British Cemetery in Kalamaria, with a CWGC stone to mark his resting place. Unlike Percy Smallwood, his body was not missing for a time and needing to be exhumed and moved…some small comfort for his family, maybe? The medical report on his final days revealed that he was suffering from tubercular peritonitis and it was a “mass of hard glands” and inflammation that had contributed to the initial obstruction, which although removed, had still weakened him to the point where he could not recover.
Charles meanwhile had done his service and returned home and was reunited with his wife Ann. What about Ann, then?
Ann Horsfall Thomas was born in December 1890. Her parents John and Annie (Scott) Horsfall Thomas had only married in February of that year at St. James in Hebden Bridge, so she was the result of them not apparently wishing to waste any time at all in starting a family. John was a butcher and the Thomases (all the children had Horsfall for a middle name) were settled in the rows of terraces that come off of Stubbing Holme Road in Hebden, between the river and and the canal. Flooding country as we know it today. The butcher’s shop was at 70 Bridge Lanes and was a successful venture involving family, so Ann would have had a nice childhood in economic terms. Ann also found herself working in tailoring as a fustian button holer and that could be how she came into contact with the Helliwells. Her and Charles were married in December 1915, probably with the war and his likely service in mind, and it’s touching to see Harry Helliwell’s name on their marriage registration as one of their witnesses.
Remember Leonard G. Ogden’s name, by the way.
Charles and Ann had only one child, a daughter named Joan, in 1922. John was at least around long enough to see this granddaughter born. He died in 1924 aged 72 and joined Fanny here. A few years later they would be joined by a grandchild who is not named on this stone at all but whose burial record was, surprisingly, held onto by someone. The TAS transcript from 2006 mentioned the burial here on December 3rd 1927 of a “stillborn child of L. Ogden”. Leonard G. Ogden had married Amy Helliwell in 1919 and this was one of their children who did not live long enough to be born alive. The story goes that most stillborn, ie. unbaptised, infants were buried in graves belonging to other people who were being buried around the same time, with a few pennies slipped to the gravedigger so he would quietly ensure burial in consecrated ground even if not with the family of the child. Things may have changed quite a bit by 1927 and the issue of baptism no longer a barrier to burial here, and so that’s why it was recorded. Baby Ogden is not in the burial register but is still remembered here.
Charles had been working for Young Helliwell and Sons at Gauxholme, making pickers and working on buffalo hides as well according to the 1921 Census! But he was beginning to fancy a change of scenery. Charles and Ann began spending more time in Romiley near Stockport around 1926 and sometime shortly after 1931 they moved for good. They lived out the rest of their days there, Charles becoming a newsagent. He had been a cricketer in his youth and it’s not clear why he stopped playing – if only we had his service record! – but his lifelong interest in the game was mentioned in his obituary. He died in Romiley in 1948.
He left behind a decent amount of money, £4300, to Ann and Joan (who had been working as the manageress of his tobacco and newsagent shop prior to her marriage) so they would be provided for. Ann was from long-lived stock and she carried on until 1960, when she also passed away. Her ties to Todmorden and Hebden Bridge had remained strong and a notice in the Todmorden News and Advertiser from Joan and her husband Norman thanked people for their sympathy and flowers at her death.
