A little late in coming, but as promised at the end of last year, today's post is the first in a series which will describe the life of Henry Hiley. These posts will be illustrated with some of the many photos which Henry left, and be accompanied with excerpts from his life story, 'HH remembers'. These were first recorded on to cassette tapes and then copied on to 24 CDs, and represent a wonderful collection of memoirs which cover Henry's entire life.
Henry was born on 10th January 1919 at 72 Victoria Street, Littleborough. His parents were Harold and Ethel (nee Heap).
Harold and Ethel Hiley - possibly on their wedding day in 1903. This is the only photo we have of Ethel
Henry as a baby
Henry at 72 Victoria Street
I can scarcely remember my mother who died of consumption in the spring of 1923. I was four years old. What memories I have are two, only two. One was of Dr Gorst, the family doctor, who used to let himself in at the back door, nip up the stairs to Mother’s bedroom. That was the room where I was born on January 10th 1919. He would leave his bowler hat on the chair at the bottom of the stairs, go up to examine her and then come down and go.
Another recollection I have is that when the weather was good, summer time, then Daddy would lift her, carry her downstairs and let her sit in a deckchair in the back yard.
The last, well there are now three recollections, because 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.
It tells the story of the gruesome suicide of William Henry Gledhill who married Elizabeth Ann Hiley in 1873. Elizabeth, born in 1851, was the daughter of John and Alice (nee Haigh), and was descended from David Hiley, born in 1700, and Dorothy.
Elizabeth's father John was killed in the boiler explosion at Lord Brothers in Todmorden in 1875. This was covered in the post of 5th November 2019. Click on this link to read the post.
Plot markers can be difficult things to work out – sometimes the initials are of the plot owner, sometimes of the person buried there. Christ Church’s fairly regular grid pattern allows us to occasionally make an educated guess, and in the case of the mysterious W.H.G. under the school, we can guess that it’s William Henry Gledhill of Watty Hole who died on November 13th 1882.
Or rather, who took his own life.
William Henry Gledhill was not the only William Henry Gledhill to be born in 1851. Another existed who was the son of Joseph Gledhill, headmaster of the National School – wouldn’t that be a coincidence – but there’s room for only one former head of the school under the extension and that honour is held by Mary Crowther. THIS William Henry Gledhill was the son of Robert and Hannah Gledhill of Brown Hill, located just a little north of Blackshaw Head and accessible from the road between there and Colden. Robert was a weaver, and William was the youngest son and the second youngest of ten total children. The Gledhills lived in the area until 1861 when they reappear living at Sharneyford. The reason for the move is unknown. Hannah died in 1868 and was buried up at Blackshaw Head Methodist Chapel, as was Robert when he died in March 1882.
(Side note: we know this because of the work we’ve carried out with Blackshaw Head Chapel to produce a MI transcript for their graveyard that incorporates their incredibly detailed burial records. Many thanks to them for their interest in our project, their enthusiasm for the concept, and their 170 years of meticulous record-keeping.)
As you can see, by 1868 the family were in Walsden, although by 1871 they had moved from Wood Bottom over to Friths Wood Bottom, so to Bacup Road from Hollins Road. William also went into weaving, and in April 1873 married Elizabeth Ann Hiley (or Highley). The couple moved to Watty Hole and for the next nine years lived happily, or happily enough, having two children of their own.
William lost his father in early 1882, and the loss sat with him for a while. He began to worry about work after a spell, and began to lose sleep. He also began mentioned to both Elizabeth and to his neighbour and workmate, Enoch Fielden, that he was worried about his father. Elizabeth’s response that “what occasion has tou to be bothered about him for; he’s been dead and buried six months, and he’s happy now” wasn’t sufficient to do more than quiet him. Why was he worrying about his father? What was the cause? Was his mind disordered, or was he pondering some long-ago event or difficulty or revelation about the man? On another night Elizabeth woke to find him awake and standing at the bedroom window watching a comet (the “Great Comet” of 1882) and asked her to get out of bed and watch it with him. We’d probably do the same in the circumstances, but after the fact something about the incident that perhaps didn’t make it into the newspaper made it stand out in his wife’s mind as unusual and worth mentioning.
Everyone thought that William would be all right, although Enoch had a moment of thinking that William was going to drown himself because he was so quietly unlike his usual self, although he waved the thought away after getting home the night in question and hearing from his wife that William had already returned. Thinking his friend was fine, he went to bed. But he was awakened in the middle of the night by William’s sister, Grace Uttley, banging on his door and telling him to go next door and help Elizabeth because William was dead.
William had gone downstairs in the night, assuring Elizabeth he’d be back, and then at some point had cut his throat so deeply that he died almost instantly. By the time Enoch made it into the house he was long gone. The coroner’s jury had no difficulty deciding that he had killed himself in a fit of temporary insanity, and so he was buried here in consecrated ground.
You always wonder what happened to the families afterwards; and why is he here on his own, with only a plot marker and never a full stone? Well many full stones only get put up after a few more people are added to a grave, or the grave is filled. His wife isn’t here because she remarried. In fact, she remarried Enoch Fielden in the autumn of 1883. His wife Ann had died in the first quarter of 1883, leaving him with three children, and not long before his death William had gotten Elizabeth pregnant – so she was left with two young children and another on the way. There was already a friendship of sorts there so it made sense. Tom was born in the summer of 1883, the marriage took place a few months later, and the pair went on to have another three children together.
The Fieldens moved to Milnrow and Elizabeth became a widow again in 1896 when Enoch died. She died in 1921, and the two are buried together along with their daughter Ada at St. James in Milnrow. William’s three children with Elizabeth either stayed in the Rochdale area or emigrated to the U.S., far from the father that only two of them even had any living memory of. That’s how a plot marker never gets replaced, and how someone gets forgotten before the digital age came along and gave us a fighting chance of discovering who they really were.
There are Hiley/Highley graves scattered all around Calderdale, and in many of the graveyards there is just a single grave. One such is in the graveyard of St Mary's Church, Cottonstones, Sowerby.
The Hiley grave reference at Cottonstones is CK21 - Section C, Row K, No. 21. A plan of the graveyard is available and Section C was identified from it - the large area south-west of the church adjoining Salt Drake Lane, and to the left of the church in the photo above. Row K is the last but one row walking away from the church. The row numbers go from 1 to 26.
Calderdale Family History Society has transcribed all the monumental inscriptions in the graveyard. Starting from the end of the row, no. 26 is a flat stone. nos. 25 and 24 are gaps. Nos. 23 and 22 are upright stones. No. 21 is the Hiley grave. Then there are two gaps, a flat stone and two more gaps.
But there appeared to be no flat stone at no. 21. Had the transcribers made a mistake? Had the stone become damaged and removed? No - the stone was there in the correct place but a rhododendron bush had grown over it and many years of rotting leaves and encroaching grass had completely covered the stone and its lettering.
Although not having the wherewithal to manage a proper cleaning of the stone it was still possible to remove enough of the debris to show that the correct inscription had been revealed.
In Memory of / Hannah Daughter of / James and Susanna Hiley / of Lower Oak in Sowerby / Who died April 26th 1854 / Aged 3 Yrs. & 3 Mths / Also James Hiley Father of the / above who departed this life / Septr. 26th 1872 aged 53 Yrs. / Also Martha Ellen Daughter of / William & Ann Haigh of Halifax / and Granddaughter of the above / Who died Feby. 11th 1874 / Aged 9 Yrs. & 5 Mths. / Also Susanna Wife of the above / James Hiley who died Nov. 22nd 1896 Aged 84 Yrs.
James Hiley was born in Halifax in 1819, one of the 11 children of Thomas and Mary (nee Feather). His ancestors can be traced back to David Hiley of Warley, born in about 1700.
James married Susanna Wild (nee Denton) in 1849. Susanna already had 2 children, Ann and Martha, and she had a further daughter with James - Martha Hannah, who died aged 3 and is commemorated on the gravestone.
The family lived at Lower Oak in Sowerby. James worked as a Woolcomber and later as an Engine Tenter in a Worsted Mill.
Ann Wild, Susanna's daughter, married William Haigh and their daughter Martha Ellen is the other child buried in this grave.
The Friends of Christ Church Todmorden are a community group whose aims include preserving the graveyard, improving accessibility, utilising the graveyard to educate all ages about the history of Todmorden and encourage emotional investment in the town’s past and future.
Their website contains research into the people buried in the graveyard and transcriptions of the monumental inscriptions of the gravestones.
I am indebted to F.O.C.C.T. for this post about George and Alice Ann Morris, reproduced from their website with permission. Alice Ann was the daughter of Charles and Betty Hiley and a younger sister of Samuel Hiley. Charles, Betty and Samuel have all featured several times already in this Blog.
It happens often that members of the same generation of a family can be buried in opposite ends of the graveyard, and sometimes even in drastically different style of grave. George Richard Morris’s father, George Samuel Morris, only has a small plot marker with his initials on it. George and his wife Alice Ann (Hiley) have something a little grander.
We know George’s childhood story already, so we’ll skip to his adult life. Adult life starts with work for us nowadays, but by that metric George became an adult at 13 in 1871 when he went to work as a creeler in a cotton mill. Creelers wound thread onto bobbins for use in weaving (either for the warp or weft, both of which would then be mechanically wound off the bobbin and onto the warp beam or shed) and this was a sort of entry-level job for children who needed to bring in money but who weren’t large or strong enough for more complicated and heavy work. George’s father died in 1876 so it became even more important for George to be able to bring money home.
George will have met his future wife Alice Ann Hiley fairly early on in his life, we suspect – this is because her older brother Samuel worked alongside George Sr., and was friendly enough with him for George to have made a drunken stop at his house shortly before falling into the canal and drowning. George Jr. and at least two Hiley sisters were also active at the Wesley Chapel at Knowlwood in the choir – was Alice one of them? Alice was three years older than her future husband, born in Walsden in 1855 to Charles and Betty Hiley. All the working Hileys in the house at Alma Street were cotton weavers of some description, and in 1871 Alice was already weaving. She and George got married in 1877 at St. Peter’s, with her brother Charles and sister Grace witnessing the marriage. Samuel stayed home as Alice was 22 and free to marry who she pleased; and Alice’s siblings could be trusted with a secret, which was that George lied on the certificate and gave his age as 21 when he was actually 19. He could still have legally married without permission so why he felt the need to lie is beyond us! But a man has his pride after all, we guess.
The Morrises first settled a few doors down from the Hileys on Alma Street, and their only child, Emily, was born in 1879. They would later move to Hollins Place and later Hollins Road. Emily got older and, no surprises here, became active in the Wesleyan Chapel’s choir. By this time George had also become heavily involved in the Todmorden Musical Society and took part in many performances around town as a tenor and bass singer and sometimes humourist. But in August 1899 Alice died; and George, clearly mourning, buried her here in this large vault grave…
…he then, though, for reasons known only to himself, remarried in early December of the same year, to Hannah (also known as Annie) Kershaw of Pollard Street in Lydgate. A whole other valley! Annie had been born up at Lumbutts and they may have met via the Methodist circuit one way or another. The possible context for this swift remarriage is that Emily had married her beau Edwin Robinson in early November, and perhaps he was just lonely, suddenly alone in the house when he had been used to two women being around to keep things tidy and interesting. Don’t knock us about the gender roles, it’s how things often were back then! He and Annie moved away and he became an insurance agent. He must have travelled at first because in 1901 Annie was boarding with a family in Wardleworth, but in 1911 they were back together and living on Oldham Road in Rochdale. In 1913 though George died, and he was brought back to Todmorden to be buried alongside Alice.
Where did Emily go? She and Edwin stayed in Todmorden at first. Edwin was an ice cream manufacturer and was very busy around town. (Unrelated to the story here, but he was the person who found Rose Gibson‘s body in the library lock just two weeks after he and Emily got married) The couple had two children by 1911, both of whom had died, and had also gone to Rochdale for Edwin to pursue more ice cream related opportunities. Two years later, after George died, they emigrated to New Zealand, and never came back. As for Annie? We don’t know. A Hannah Morris of the correct age died in 1923 and was buried at Christ Church, but she had a Burnley address; it’s more likely that she’s buried with family somewhere else in town but we haven’t identified where.
This is the next post in our series on Hileys/Highleys buried at Christ Church, Todmorden.
Alice Finch, the daughter of James and Alice, was born in Heywood near Rochdale in 1863. She was one of nine children and her father was a Whitesmith, or Tinsmith - someone who makes articles out of metal, especially tin. The family moved to Knowlwood near Todmorden soon after Alice was born. In 1881 they were living in Inchfield Buildings in Walsden and Alice was working as a Throstle Spinner.
In 1886 Alice married William Henry Robinson, a Wheelwright, in St Peter's Church in Walsden. The couple had 3 children, Edith, Annie and William Henry. William Henry junior was born in 1891, three months after his father had died.
In 1905 Alice married again, this time to James Thomas Highley, a Carter living in Rochdale Road in Walsden. He was the son of James and Ellen (nee Harrison). In 1911 James Thomas and Alice were living in Maitland Street in Walsden, along with Alice's three children. Alice died in 1940 and James Thomas in 1945.
Gravestone in Christ Church William Henry (snr), William Henry (jnr), Alice and James Thomas Highley
William Henry (jnr) grew up in Walsden, working as a Picker Maker at Inchfield Works. He enlisted in September 1916 in the 207th Battalion Machine Gun Corps and served on the Western Front from March 1917. He was killed in action at Messines, aged 25, on 11th July 1917 and buried at Messines Ridge British Cemetery, Belgium, but his name is inscribed on the gravestone at Christ Church along with those of his parents.
William Henry's grave at Messines Ridge, Belgium
William Henry's name in the Todmorden Garden of Remembrance
This post continues the series on Hiley/Highley graves at Christ Church, Todmorden.
William Highley was born in 1846 in Northowram, Halifax. His parents were John, a Cordwainer, and Mary (nee Eastwood). William was the youngest of 8 children. His brother John (Jack) Highley was the subject of a post on 7th December 2021.
Jack and William moved to Todmorden and followed in their father's footsteps by working as Boot, Shoe and Clog Makers.
William married Betsy North in 1869 and the couple had 6 children - Arthur, Fred, Thomas Edward and Mary Emily, Hannah Maria and Sarah.
The 1881 Census described William as a Master Clogger.
In loving memory of William Highley, Garden Street Todmorden, born July 23rd 1846 died August 27th 1888. “Thy Will Be Done.” Also of Betsy, his wife born August 30th 1846, died March 25th 1911.
This post continues the series on Hiley/Highley graves at Christ Church, Todmorden.
Charles Hiley died in 1922, aged 79, and was buried on the 20th November that year. In the family grave are buried Charles, his wife Sarah, and children William Campbell, Emily, Mary Jane, John Walter, Mabel and Amy Elizabeth (wife of Sam Baldwin).
In affectionate remembrance of Emily, daughter of Charles and Sarah Hiley of Crescent, Todmorden, who died September 15th 1878 aged 2 years and 7 months. Also of William Campbell, their son, who died November 8th 1878 aged 9 months. Also of Mary Jane, their daughter, who died May 15th 1887 aged 5 years and 11 months. Also of John Walter, their son, born January 16th 1874, died December 10th 1904. Also of the above named Sarah Hiley. Born May 9th 1842, died February 17th 1909. Also of the above named Charles Hiley. Born March 14th 1843, died November 16th 1922. Also of Mabel, their dearly loved daughter, who entered into rest February 13th 1945 aged 73 years. Also of Amy Elizabeth, their daughter and the dearly beloved wife of Sam Baldwin, who died May 5th 1952 aged 72 years.
There have already been posts in this Blog about Charles, a musician and noted figure in Todmorden for many years: Professor C.J. Hiley -19th August 2020. Professor Hiley (part 2) - 2nd September 2020.
His son John Walter was the subject of a post on 13th January 2021. Type 'Professor' into the Search This Blog box to read these posts.
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