The 1939 Register

This is the fourth and last post about the lives of Frank and Martha Hannah Hiley.

The 1939 Register was taken at the onset of the Second World War with the purpose of producing National Identity Cards. It was then used as an aid in the issue of ration books. and later helped officials record the movement of the civilian population over the following decades and from 1948, as the basis for the National Health Service Register. 

The 1939 Register helped to bridge a thirty-year gap in census data. The census taken in 1931 was destroyed during WW2 and no census was carried out in 1941 due to the ongoing conflict. The register is held by The National Archives.

Frank and Martha Hannah appear in the 1939 Register. Martha Hannah was to die the following year and Frank the year after that. The couple were living at 6 Peel Cottage Road with Frank still working at Birks Mill as a Cotton Weaver.

Next door at No.8 were living three other members of the family. Betty Greenwood (nee Fielden) was Martha Hannah's sister-in-law. Betty married George Greenwood in St Peter's Church, Walsden, in 1908. 

George worked in the cotton mill as a warehouseman. He enlisted to fight in WW1 in June 1916 but was not called up for service until May 1918 with the 15th Durham Light Infantry. He was killed in action on 23rd October 1918 and was buried at St Souplet British Cemetery in France. On that day his battalion was involved in the Battle of the Selle in the final advance in Picardy.

George and Betty had a daughter Annie, born in 1909. Annie married Leslie Chaffer in 1933.

1939 Register entry for Frank and Martha Hannah

original image obtained from Ancestry.com - used with permission

https://www.ancestry.com/

Grave of George Greenwood at St Souplet in France

(included with the permission of C and J Cosgrove)

Birks Mill in Walsden

Henry Hiley said that his Uncle Frank worked at Cockcroft's Mill in Walsden. This was Birks Mill, on Birks Lane near St Peter's Church.

We know that Frank's younger sister Annie was working as a Cotton Spinner at age 12, and it is likely that Frank and Martha Hannah themselves were working in the Mill at the same age. Most of the Hileys at that time living in Walsden who were working were employed in textile mills.

At one time there were over 30 textile mills in Todmorden and Walsden. The mills have all been converted for other purposes or stand disused, and the big industrial chimneys have almost all gone now.

Birks Mill dates from about 1800 and through the 1800s it was occupied by a number of owners. Originally a carding and spinning cotton mill, later owners concentrated on the spinning and manufacture of wool and worsted, a high-quality type of wool yarn. 

The lease was sold to John Cockcroft & Sons in 1899 and later the firm bought the mill and land. At that time the mill would have had a substantial local work force and been a busy place, situated next to the canal, loading and unloading goods, and keeping all the spindles and looms running. The owner was John Arthur Cockcroft, grandson of Henry, the first of the Cockcroft manufacturers and when he died in 1927 he left the mill to three of his five sons.

The name of another of his sons is remembered on the wall of a nearby house.

Production at the mill stopped in 1979. Among the products mainly produced at that time were bedspreads, the item Henry Hiley remembers his Uncle Frank making. Today, the mill stands derelict. 

Birks Mill

Birks Mill in recent times

© Copyright Alexander P Kapp and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

Next time: the 1939 Register 

Henry Hiley's memories of Frank and Martha Hannah

Frank and Martha Hannah were Henry Hiley's uncle and aunt - his father Harold and Frank being brothers. Henry and his family lived in Littleborough and Frank and Martha Hannah in Walsden, just a few miles away.

Henry recalls trips to Bankwood Cottage as a boy with his brother and sisters:

We all loved their house. It was called Bankwood Cottage. We always called it The Bonk and there was a big garden going down to the Rochdale Canal. Uncle Frank – I can't remember him growing vegetables, perhaps he might have grown a few peas, but he certainly grew flowers and people came from far away, well, from Walsden, to buy flowers from him. He kept hens as well. He had a greenhouse. He grew tomatoes in the greenhouse and always had one or two plants that produced yellow tomatoes. Those were a speciality. And the chickens – he used to hatch the eggs in his own incubator, then we children used to love to see the baby chicks pecking their way out of the shell looking pretty wet and sticky and bedraggled when they did get loose from the shell but quickly drying off under the lamp of the incubator and showing their fluffy, fluffy feathers.

Aunt Martha Hannah died early in the War, perhaps 1940 I think that was. I'd already been called up. I had a short leave, obviously went back home and cycled to Walsden to see Uncle Frank who was terribly cut up at having lost Aunt Martha Hannah and he died soon after. He died with cancer of the stomach. His working life had been in the weaving shed, he was proud of his work. He worked for Cockcroft's, a little cotton mill in Walsden whose speciality was weaving bedspreads, so that Uncle Frank wasn't on the drudgery of weaving calico, yards and yards of it, each of his bits of work were individual and he took a pride in them. 

But often enough, well I don't know because I never worked in a cotton mill, but I understood that when the thread broke then the loom had to stop and the thread had to be put back into the shuttle just like a thread must be put into the eye of a needle, and to get it in more quickly it would be sucked in and what with all the oil and the grease of the shuttle and the machinery I take it that weavers ingested quite an amount of grease and oil and that did their stomachs no good and cancer of the stomach was pretty prevalent in the weaving fraternity. 

I was unable to get to his funeral. He was buried in the Parish Church graveyard in Walsden with Martha Hannah. 

Frank, Martha Hannah and Grace Annie (Henry's stepmother)

(colourised on My Heritage)

Aunt Martha Hannah

(colourised on MyHeritage)

Next time: Birks Mill in Walsden (where Frank Hiley worked)

Uncle Frank and Aunt Marth' Hannah

The next few posts will feature Frank and Martha Hannah Hiley of Walsden, a great uncle and great aunt. This first one gives a brief history of their lives.

Frank has already been mentioned in this Blog. He appeared, as a young man in his twenties, in a Walsden Wesleyan Methodist group photo in the post of 9 September 2019, and his house, Bankwood Cottage, was mentioned in the post of 2nd September 2019.

Frank was born in 1875, the oldest child of Samuel and Elizabeth Hiley. The 1881 census showed the family living at 32 Hollins Mount in Walsden. Along with Frank lived his younger sisters Annie (aged 2) and Agnes (10 months). A brother Harold was born the following year.

Hollins Mount, Walsden

By the time of the next census in 1891, the family had moved to 54 Lord Street and Frank was working as a Cotton Weaver. His father Samuel had left his job as a weaver and was manging the Co-operative Store in Walsden. Annie, although only 12 years old, was working as a Cotton Spinner but Agnes had died at age 2.

In 1901 Frank married Martha Hannah Greenwood in St Peter's Church, Walsden. Martha Hannah lived on Rochdale Road with her mother, older sister Grace and younger brothers George and John Henry. It seems that Frank and Samuel's Highley surname was amended on the form to Hiley. The couple went to live at 45 Hollins Road and took in a boarder John Wadsworth, a canal warehouseman.

Frank, Martha Hannah and John Wadsworth

(colourized on My Heritage)

Frank and Martha Hannah's marriage record
(with the permission of West Yorkshire Archive Service)
www.wyjs.org.uk/archives

Frank and Martha Hannah moved to 6 Peel Cottage Road and their address is recorded here in the 1911 census and again in the 1939 Register. But when Henry Hiley and his family were living in Littleborough and visiting their 'Uncle Frank' and 'Aunt Marth' Hannah' the couple were living at Bankwood Cottage beside the Rochdale Canal.

6 Peel Cottage Road                                                                                     Bankwood Cottage

Martha Hannah died in 1940 and Frank almost exactly a year later. The couple are buried at St Peter's Church along with their niece Mary Hiley.

Gravestone for Frank, Martha Hannah and Mary

Next time: Henry Hiley's memories of Frank and Martha Hannah

Sir Thomas Alfred Hiley K.B.E.

Today's post continues the series on notable Hileys.

Tom Hiley

Thomas Alfred (Tom) Hiley (1905-1990) was an accountant, politician and public servant who was born in Brisbane in Australia in 1905, and is one of a select group of Hileys to be knighted.

Tom Hiley entered the Legislative Assembly of Queensland in 1944 and represented various districts until his retirement in 1966. He was Treasurer of Queensland from 1957 to 1965 and leader of the Liberal Party of Queensland from 1949 to 1954 and again in 1965.

Tom Hiley opening a Fish Depot in Queensland in 1959

He was knighted as a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (K.B.E.) for service as Deputy Premier of Queensland.

Tom's father William was born in Bradford in 1873, and his ancestry can be traced back to David Hiley, a weaver from Warley near Halifax, who married Dorothy Maud in 1720.


(Photos in the public domain)