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