Death in the Hayfield

The old cottage on Mount Pleasant, Lacey Green. (picture courtesy of Google Maps c. 2009)

In the middle of the graves that cover the 19th-century extension of the Cemetery towards the Bollin is a relatively plain stone, shaped like a Gothic window.

It records:

IN MEMORY

OF

JOSEPH BAYLEY

DIED JULY 1876

AGED 67 YEARS

SARAH HIS WIFE DIED APRIL 19TH 1907

AGED 79 YEARS

HENRY MASSEY DIED MARCH 8TH 1920

AGED 62 YEARS

MARY HIS WIFE DIED MARCH 30TH 1919

AGED 62 YEARS

TO THE MEMORY OF GEORGE HENRY

THEIR SON KILLED IN PALESTINE

MARCH 26TH 1917 AGED 27 YEARS.

The stone originally attracted our attention as it is one of about a dozen in the cemetery that records the death of family members in the First World War, but are actually cenotaphs, rather than actual war graves, as the majority of British War dead were buried close to the place where they died.

We will discuss George Henry and his family in more detail elsewhere, but for today and because of the current topicality we will concentrate on Joseph Bayley, the first person to be commemorated.

Joseph Bayley (or Bailey, there seems to have been a life long debate with officialdom how to spell his name), was born in Wilmslow, and by the time we first find him in the Census records in 1841, he worked as an agricultural labourer in Morley. Married to his wife Mary, they had a 6 year old daughter, Elizabeth Ann.
Ten years later, Joseph had changed farms and was now working on one of the farms close to Lacey Green. The family had grown with John (b.1842), Mary Ann(1846), Joseph (1847) and Hannah (1850), while the Census description is very sketchy, and the area has changed a lot since the mid 19th century, but it is quite likely that they Bayley lived in one of the cottages that originally surrounded the white cottage at the end of Mount Pleasant road and which served as accommodation for the farm of the same name.

By 1861 Joseph’s first wife had died and his oldest daughter, Elizabeth Ann, who had been married and widowed herself in the meantime, was running the household and looking after the family. Their direct neighbour was the Massey family, George Massey (also a farm labourer) with his much younger wife Sarah (née Holt) and their three boys George, Henry and William). Relationships were clearly friendly and the families appear to have had a lot of contact because when George Massey died between 1865 and 1868 Sarah married Joseph Bayley. The new marriage did not last very long.

On the 22 July 1876 the relatively new Wilmslow and Alderley Advertiser (Also the Knutsford Gazette) reported that “a man of the name of Bailey (sic!) who had been working in the hayfields during the recent and continued sultry weather, was seized with sunstroke early Saturday and has since been in a precarious condition”

A week later the paper reported that despite medical car under Dr. Shaw and initial ‘favourable reports’ Joseph Bailey of Mount Pleasant died on Monday 24th July 1876.

The gravestone is one of the earliest in the graveyard extension that records a member of Wilmslow’s working classes. Before the extension, no permanent graves were granted except to the highest tithing members of the Congregation. Less affluent members were buried in temporary graves and after a while moved to the mortuary chamber, under the main altar (now the chapel of Peace). It was only, with the creation of the extension that room became available for more permanent burial plots for all members of the congregation.

However, having a permanent plot and having a headstone are two different issues and it seems many of the earliest graves were only marked with small or non-permanent markers. The fact that this grave has such a substantial marker might suggest that the interest generated by the newspaper article in the Community helped to raise the money to buy this stone of Joseph Bayley, the man who worked too hard in the heat of the July of 1876.

Birgitta Hoffmann

Eliza, Ann and Sarah Mottershead, a mother from Northenden and her two daughters

From our Secretary Kathleen Morris: 

In memory

of

Eliza daughter of Henry

and Ann Mottershead who died

June 24th 1871, aged 21 years

Also the above Ann Mottershead

Who died Septr 30th 1879

Aged 59 years

Also Sarah their daughter

Who died March 19th 1908

Aged 63 years

It is often accepted that women were semi-invisible in past centuries. Is this always the case? Well, not if you look around in churchyards.

The inscription quoted above is one taken at random from St Bartholomew's churchyard; it commemorates three women from one family. Henry, their father/husband, is only mentioned in passing.

Why isn't Henry mentioned here? A look at the burial registers of St Bartholomew's parish church shows that in fact he is buried there. He was actually the first member of the family to be buried there. He died at the early age of 27 in 1851, and was buried on 23rd December.

The census taken earlier in the year shows that both he and his wife Ann were handloom weavers of cotton, members of a diminishing profession at that time, as power looms were becoming more common and weavers were moving from a home-based economy to being factory workers.

Henry was born around 1824 - on the 1841 Census he is listed as being 17 years old. He was already working as a weaver, as was his elder brother. His mother seems to have been a widow by then.

Henry married Ann Hudson at the Collegiate Church in Manchester (it became the Cathedral three years later) on 16th November 1845. Their marriage entry is a most unusual one - there is the signature of one witness, but the space where they should have signed or made their mark says 'This party left the church without signing the register'. We could speculate for a long time about how this happened- did they not realise they were supposed to sign? Could they not sign their names, and did not want to let anyone know that? Were they just carried away by the excitement of the day, or in a hurry to get to a celebratory party? It didn’t affect the validity of their marriage, but it must have created an administrative problem for the church.

By 1851 they were living in Northern Etchells (now Northenden), their address given as Outwood. It is at this point that Henry gives his place of birth as Wilmslow, so we can see the connection with the town. Henry and Ann had three daughters by 1851, Sarah, Mary and Eliza, who was just one year old. The daughters, like their mother, were all born in Etchells.

Only a few months later, Henry was dead. As if being a widow at the age of 30 wasn’t bad enough, Ann was pregnant when Henry died. Their last daughter, Elizabeth, was born early in 1852.

Ann remained in the Etchells area, but as handloom weaving was dying out, she could not continue earning her living at this. In the 1861 Census she is described as a charwoman. By 1861, her second daughter, Mary had disappeared from the census. It may be that she too had died young, as two people called Mary Mottershead died in the Wilmslow area in 1857.

Sarah and Eliza were earning their living as fustian cutters in 1861. This was a low paid job; fustian was not an expensive fabric. It was a hard wearing cloth, usually, by this date, made from cotton and used in working clothes, rather like a corduroy material. The cloth was woven with a looped finish, and the fustian cutter’s job was to cut the loops to give the material a pile finish rather like that of velvet. Sarah and Eliza would have spent their working days walking up and down alongside a workbench on which a length of cloth was laid out, wielding a long thin blade which they inserted under the loops of the pile to cut them. A monotonous and wearying job, and one for which they were probably paid piecework rates. If they made a mistake and spoiled a length of cloth they were probably docked part of their pay. There were many fustian cutting workshops in Cheshire in the 19^th century, so we cannot identify which mill Sarah and Eliza worked in.

By 1871, Ann and Eliza were both working as laundresses – still in Etchells (Northenden). Sarah and Elizabeth were no longer living with them – perhaps they had married, or just moved away to other jobs. Eliza. Like her father, died soon after a census, at the age of 21; she is the first name on the grave marker in St Bartholomew’s.

Her mother died 8 years later, and the third member of the family to be buried, Sarah, lived into the 20^th century. However, although we have an exact date of death for Sarah, this does not tally with any official entries for anyone called Sarah Mottershead. There is a possibility that she married but that her married name does not appear on her gravestone. 

Although we know Henry is buried there, his burial is not recorded on the stone. This raises a likely scenario that the stone was not placed there until many years later, when perhaps either Henry’s burial had been forgotten or the details of it could not be remembered. Given what we know about the family’s circumstances, it does not seem as though Ann could have afforded a memorial when Henry died. It must have placed there later when other members of the family had a little more money. Thus, only the women in the family have their details listed and  Henry is given only a passing mention.