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.

...more on the Holbrooks grave

The family of John Holbrooks of Etchells.

In June 2015 a large flat gravestone was discovered at thebend of the river at the bottom of St.Bart’s cemetery. It is 183cm tall and 90cm wide, and clearly was moved here in the 1980s during the then reordering of the church and cemetery. In the intervening 30 years it had become overgrown and about 10cm of soil and grass were covering the slab. Its position was only discernable from the more solid feel underfoot and the fact that all along the path large slabs had been placed about every 10 feet/3 metres, and in this location, one was clearly missing.

The stone was originally one of the large number of stones that had been laid between the church and the lychgate. This part of the cemetery is the oldest, and while there were some later adjustments, it originally contained many stones first laid down in the late 17^th/early 18^th century.

One of the striking characteristics of this part of the cemetery is that most of the stones here represent either the large tithing families of Wilmslow parish or benefactor tombs, like the vault bought and set up by Samuel Greg for the children of Quarry Bank Mill. Very few of the people buried in this area are outsiders or of what we would now call working class background. In fact it seems that throughout the 17/18^th century the majority of parishioners were buried in unmarked graves and after twenty or thirty years removed to the ossuary below the choir (since c. 1985 rededicated as a small chapel, the bones having long since been removed to a communal tomb on the north side of the church).

So the expectation of a large stone like the Holbrooks grave had to be that it represented one of the long established Wilmslow families. But when we did further research, the actual history of the graves owner’s came as a surprise:

John Holbrooks of Etchells is anything but a long established landowner, having been born in Lostock in Lancashire (now part of Bolton) in around 1793/6. He moved to Cheadle Parish before he was 25, as we know that he married Betty Faulkner in Stockport parish in 1821. The couple seems to have established themselves in the small hamlet of Outwood, which today survives in the name of Outwood Road between Heald Green and Handforth, and which could then be described as part of Etchells, which lay between Heald Green and Cheadle. We do not know, what profession John Holbrooks originally followed, as we only gain detailed records with the Census of 1841. By this time, Betty had died, possibly in childbirth and John had been left with four surviving children, one of which must have been a babe in arms (Ralph (born c. 1825), William (c.1832), James (c.1835) and Elizabeth (c.1837)). It is thus not surprising to find that he quickly remarried Ann (we have not been able to establish her maiden name), but both his first and second wife appear to have been born in Cheadle Parish, which included at  this time Heald Green, Cheadle, Handforth and several smaller places. More children quickly followed the wedding: Nathan (born c.1838), Sarah (1842), Eli and John (both born apparently 1848), survived childhood. At this time John Holbrooks described himself as an agricultural labourer and a hay cutter, while his wife Ann, worked as a hand loom weaver for cotton. By 1861 most of the younger children were helping with the weaving or working with cotton. The oldest daughter Elizabeth entered service in Hulme in the household of a rich spirits and alcohol trader. The older boys had started out as agricultural labourers, before becoming carters. In 1855 John Holbrooks died and Ann became head of the household. At around this time her stepchildren decided to move away, the boys joined the LNWR, Ralph as a railway labourer in Cheadle, James working in Salford as a railway porter, while William moved to Liverpool and became a railway clerk. All three soon started large families of their own, but the two younger seem to have dropped their connection with the area. Only Ralph, who had moved out by 1841 and had established his own family in Outwood/Heald Green/Long Lane, continued to live close after he left the railway after 1861, and this might explain, why his daughter Jane was buried with his parents, when she died aged 16 in 1865.

The other children continued along the Wilmslow Road, working as agricultural labourers and Sarah as laundress. For 1869 there is a baptism record for Sarah Holbrook, who was christened in Cheadle Parish as an adult. But interestingly when she married five years later her neighbour’s son James Moss, they did so in Stockport Registry office, not in any of the churches. Thus the link to Wilmslow Parish Church appears to have been tenuous, despite the burial here of her father and his first wife.

Sarah’s mother, Ann, died 15 years after her husband in 1870, leaving Sarah in charge of her younger brothers Eli and John, who however, appear to have died two years later in 1872. John is buried in his parents’ graves, it is not clear what happened to Eli.

Now pretty much on her own, Sarah decided to marry James Moss, a close neighbour and like her brothers a local farm labourer. The link with the Moss family was long established as for several years an unmarried uncle of James had lived as a lodger in the Holbrooks home. James and Sarah continued to live in Outwood till at least the First World War and had two children, John, who survived and Annie. The latter died at the age of 25 years and is the last one of the family to have been buried in this grave. Her death also appears to be the only one recorded in the Wilmslow Advertiser (26 May 1899, p.5).

It is striking how this is such a ‘normal’ Wilmslow/Handforth family for the 19^th century: life was dominated by the agricultural work, with additional income being provided by the cotton industry and the railway. The very late baptism of Sarah and her marriage in the Registry office might also point to a certain non-conformism or even “can’t be bothered with religion” attitude, which was apparently very common among the working classes in and around Manchester in the early 19^th century. Even if the Holbrooks were religious, living in Outwood, it would have been easier for them to attend Cheadle Parish Church, rather than St. Bart’s, unlike many of the families in Handforth, who preferred Wilmslow since at least the 15^th century, so why are they in our cemetery?

We have not been able to identify the families that John Holbrooks’ wives came from. Faulkner is a well established name in both Wilmslow and Cheadle n the 18^th century. Was the tomb granted to his first wife because of her origins? Whatever the reason, here it is, originally next to the Lychgate and now down at the river, a beautiful monument to the aspirations and self respect of the normal people of Handforth and Wilmslow in the 19^th century.