Edith Hiley

The next few posts are devoted to Edith Hiley, a dear sister, aunt and great aunt. Edith was born in Littleborough on 9th December 1913 and died in Halifax on 30th October 2001. 

Today's post covers the time up to when she left school.

Henry wrote these notes about Edith a few days after her death:

Edith was always eager to tell us that, when I was born, she dashed into the street, excitedly telling everybody she met that she now had a baby brother. That was in January, 1919, when she was just turned five years old. We were a family of five children, the eldest was Sam, then Edith, Agnes, Mary, finally me.

The Hiley children
From L: Agnes, Henry, Sam, Mary, Edith

In the earliest times I can remember, Edith was first rate at making up stories and telling us them at bedtime, indeed at any time. I had a letter a few years ago from a lady who was a girl on our street in the 1920s, who mentioned particularly that Edith had made up stories for anybody who would listen.

Our mother died in 1923, Edith would be nine years old then. In a way, at that age, she became our surrogate mother, though probably not Sam's. We used to help out father in his pie making shop, I don't suppose I did much to help, but we were a close family, in and out of our neighbours' houses on the street. Three years later, our father married again. (How he managed to persuade any woman to agree to take on the work in the baking and selling of pies, looking after the house and becoming mother to five children I have never understood). Our stepmother loved us and cared for us all. Despite all the work, she likely preferred her new life to working in the weaving shed.

Mother had died of consumption at the age of forty. Sam died of the same disease at the age of twenty one. The rest of us were x-rayed, Agnes was found to be smitten as well. Edith was by this time at the Secondary School in Rochdale*. Now I am surmising. I believe that the sweatshop of our household, the deaths of Mother and Sam, the onset of the industrial depression of the late 1920s, all affected Edith's performance in school, though she did pass her School Certificate. Her History teacher called on my father, asking that Edith be allowed to continue at school, but he wanted her at home to help in the business. That time I think of as being the worst of Edith's life. She worked at home, making pies and such, and seemed to have lost heart.

* Edith won a County Minor Scholarship. She left school at age 16.

Agnes, Sam, Edith

The Life of Henry Hiley Part 11 - Victoria Street neighbours

Today we return to the memoirs of Henry Hiley and an account of the family's neighbours on Victoria Street, Littleborough in the 1920s.

The Hoyles were a great family. We called Mr Hoyle Mr Pip Pip. He worked for the council. He must have gone to school. School for him would finish when he was twelve, twelve and a half, yet on a Sunday afternoon when there used to be Shakespearean plays on the wireless he would sit and listen to them. Jim Hoyle worked as a secretary in one of the local mills, only a tiny mill. He wasn’t old enough to be called up into the Army until 1916 so that he had 2 years in the Army during the first War from 1916 until the Armistice in 1918. He’d served in the Royal Corps of Signals.

There was Maggie, we always called her Maggie. Later she didn’t like that name. She wanted to be called Margaret. She was a grand lass and she was a schoolteacher and I do believe that when Mother was very very ill and realised that she was shortly going to die that she wanted Father to marry Maggie. It never came off. She went and married Roy Godber and we liked him as well. We were often next door with the Hoyles, 74 Victoria Street. We used to play plenty of card games – Rummy and Snap and Casino, beggar my neighbour, lots of them. We used to play Ludo at home, and then we played Snakes and Ladders of course. Jim, I remember, used to like his egg fried in butter but ever he came across a blood spot in the egg he wouldn’t touch it.

No 76 Victoria Street – that’s where the Dixons lived. There was Johnny Dixon, he was the postman, and he used to like to take our dog with him on his rounds. The dog was called Paddy, a little wire-haired fox terrier, that was the guardian of us children. In fact it was so loyal to us children that if it thought anybody was threatening, particularly me, it would bite. And in fact it had to go away. I remember it going to a place in Todmorden. The Dixons had Doris, she was not very bright, and Freda, she was a buxom wench. They might both have worked in the silk mill at the bottom of the street. I don’t know.

The Parkers, they were in no 78, they were a nice family. I can’t remember Mr Parker but I remember Mrs quite well. And then there was Fred Parker. He was a postman. There was Harry Parker. He worked in an office I think. There was Emily. She was a weaver and there was Sarah. She worked in the Co-op café. She used to bake tea-cakes and cakes and suchlike.

And then the bottom house of the 5 houses in the terrace, that’s where George Henry Howarth lived. He had something wrong with his arm. I don’t know what it was. We were quite friendly and often if they had plenty of people in the house George Henry would come up and borrow a form, a bench, which if there were plenty of customers waiting their turn in the shop they would sit on this bench. George Henry would borrow it and take it down to his house so that the people who came could be seated.

It used to happen in our family particularly, there was a routine to the week, a sort of set routine to life then. Often on a Sunday we would go to Walsden for dinner. Probably take a tramcar up to Summit and then perhaps walk along the canal bank until we got to Uncle Frank’s. We might even go on the railway train. That was an excitement going through Summit Tunnel.

There weren’t always enough seats for us all to sit to our dinner so one or other of us had to stand up to eat. I of course being the youngest always had to stand up. It didn’t seem to matter all that much.

(I remember now that Freda Dixon worked as a scivy, she was a housemaid of some sort with one of the big families, one of the millowners’ families, the Harveys.) 

The photo below is of Victoria Street in 1970. The end house no. 72 (no longer a pie shop!) is where Henry and his family lived. Then, moving down the street, the inhabitants of the houses in the early 1920s were: no. 74 (the Hoyles), no. 76 (the Dixons), no. 78 (the Parkers) and no. 80 (the Howarths), all mentioned above.

The next photo was taken on 2nd September 1945. It shows, from the left) Harold Hiley (Henry's father), Roy Godber, Mary Hiley, ?, Edith Hiley, Agnes Hiley, Margaret Godber, Alec Fletcher.

Margaret (Hoyle) lived next door at no. 74 and married Roy Godber. Mary, Edith and Agnes were Henry's sisters. Alec was a friend. 

William Highley, the runaway convict

The following article appeared in The Maryland Gazette on the 21st and 28th June 1764.

Given that this was written in 1764, and that William's age was given as about 40 and that he had been in the country for about 4 years, we can say he was born in about 1724 and had sailed from Liverpool in about 1760, and was aged about 36.

It has not been possible so far to find out anything about William before he left England but we know more about his life after he was transported to the British Colonies.

William's service was bought by John Frederick Augustus Priggs of Prince George's County, Maryland but after 4 years William ran away and despite Priggs's newspaper adverts was not apprehended. 

There are records of a William Highley and his family in Virginia from 1765 onwards and since there are no other men of the same name living in the colonies at this time, this is likely to be the runaway convict from England. William married and five of his children lived to be adults. Along with his three sons William worked in the iron industry. 

William died in the 1790s. His descendants have since formed one of the main collection of Highley families in the United States today.

John Hiley the convict

Welcome to a new year of Hiley/Highley posts!

I am often asked if I have any rogues or criminals amongst my ancestors! This month there are two posts, each one about a Hiley who committed a crime and was transported to another country. But neither of the two is from my own family tree!

Today's post features John Hiley who received a life sentence for an unknown crime and was transported to Australia in 1800. So far it has not been possible to discover any details about John's life before the trip or what happened to him after he arrived in Australia.

John was convicted on 10th March 1800 at the Kent Assizes and received a life sentence, officially given as 99 years, His crime was not recorded. He was transported aboard the vessel Earl Cornwallis and was one of 296 convicts, of whom 77 had been given life sentences, and with an average sentence of 31 years.

The first convicts to arrive in Australia were part of the First Fleet, which sailed from England in 1787 and arrived in Botany Bay in Sydney in January 1788. The convicts were transported in poor conditions, with limited space and a lack of supplies. Many died from illnesses like cholera during the journey. Between 1788 and 1868 the British penal system transported about 162,000 convicts from Great Britian and Ireland to various penal colonies in Australia. Captain Arthur Phillip, the first governor of New South Wales, hoped the convicts would rehabilitate themselves and provide labour for the new colony.

From the collections of the State Library of New South Wales

The Earl Cornwallis was a three-decker East Indiaman launched in 1783 on the River Thames. She made seven voyages for the British East India Company. She then made one voyage transporting convicts from England to New South Wales. The ship set sail on 31st July 1800, was in transit for 316 days, and arrived in Port Jackson in Sydney, New South Wales on 12th June 1801. 27 male and 8 female convicts died of dysentery on the voyage and many of the survivors arrived weak and feeble. One officer and 20 men of the New South Wales Corps acted as guards on the trip.

Earl Cornwallis
By Thomas Daniell (1749-1840) - Yale Center for British Art
Paul Mellon Collection, USA, Public Domain
 https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36841826

Website sources

Convict Records

Wikipedia

National Library of Australia