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)