Mankinholes Chapel (Part 2)

This post looks at one of the Hiley gravestones at Mankinholes.

Ethel was Henry Hiley’s mother and the daughter of Henry and Martha (nee Parsons) Heap. The Heaps lived in Cornholme, a small village on the Burnley road going out of Todmorden. Henry Heap was a partner with James Ashworth in the firm Heap & Ashworth Cotton Manufacturers and they owned the Frostholme Mill in Cornholme.

Sam was the first child of Ethel and Harold. He was born in Walsden but moved with his parents to Victoria Street, Littleborough before the second child Edith was born.

Henry mentions Mankinholes in the very first chapter of his memoirs 'HH remembers', recalling his mother’s death in 1923 when he was just 4 years old.

………. I remember the day that she was buried at Mankinholes. The coffin was standing in our tiny living room and the relatives were standing round. I noticed grown men and women crying and I wondered how it could be that adults could cry. I thought crying was only for children. However I now realise why they were crying. It had been a bad, bad blow for the family.

Then Henry recalls the death of older brother Sam in 1929 when he was 10.

………..It was a great sadness to us when Sam had to go into hospital. He'd not been well but he was diagnosed with what I remember was called Gastric Flu. He went into the Infirmary at Rochdale. He was only in hospital a few days and, a calamity for the family, he died at the age of 21. Useless to speculate but I wonder what would have happened to the business if Sam had lived. He was an enterprising man. I can remember that funeral very well. Off again to Mankinholes, and I think I cried as never before.

Also buried in the grave of Ethel and Sam are Henry and Sam's sister Agnes and Agnes's granddaughter Caroline Emily.