Saturday 2 January 2016

Of cotton weavers and policemen

Wilmslow population in the 19th century is fluctuating. On the other hand we have with the mills, amongst which Quarry Bank is the longest lived, a magnet for workers who wish to better themselves, by leaving their precarious jobs in the rural countryside behind, on the other hand the higher wages in Manchester and the wider range of opportunities increasingly led to workers drifting away from Wilmslow. The following is an example for this push-pull effect in the town.

At the bottom of the cemetery close to the river in amongst hundreds of similar stones, is a fairly plane stone, whose burials all date to the period of 1874-1876, close to the extension of the cemetery, when it became possible for the less well off residents of Wilmslow parish to be commemorated with headstones in the cemetery.

The stone is a comparatively simple head stone, rectangular with a central semicircular extension in the middle.
The text reads as follows:

In Memory of
Sarah wife of
Jonathan Hammond of Styal
Who died April 5th, 1874
Aged 21 Years
Also Walter, their son, who died 
April 11th 1874. Aged 2 months
Also Walter Henry Potts Son
Of Ezekiel and Emma Potts died
August 30th 1876 Aged 4 months
Also Ezekiel Potts, who died
November  27th, 1876. Aged 37 Years
(Old register Plot Bq3 - new register: 6622)

The mention of Styal  in the inscription suggests that this stone commemorates some of the many hundreds of people who worked in the Cotton Mill in Quarry Bank, and a quick search though the records reveals that this indeed the case, although the story appears to have several twists.
The Hammond family  have been in Handforth since the 18th century and the first time they occur in the Census, they lived in Hall Lane.  The father and the older brothers worked as agricultural labourers, but the youngest of the sons, James,  is listed as working at the Handforth printworks.  Interestingly, he is also listed as married, but his wife, Jane Hammond, lives next door with her mother, five siblings and their three children Emma, Jonathan and Maria.

Jane had been born in 1823 in Handforth as the oldest of children of George and Ann Wardle, and her eldest daughter Maria birth year is given as 1845.  Two years later Jane married James Hammond in St. Mary in Cheadle, and in the same year Emma Hammond was born. Jonathan, the only boy, followed a year later.

During this time, Jane also lost her father George, although the exact date remains so far unknown.  By the late 1850s the whole family with the exception of the mother and the tiny children work in the cotton industry, possibly already at Quarry Bank, although at the time other mills were also operating in the area, not least the spinning mills in St. Bartholomew’s churchyard (incidentally very close to the position of the gravestone here discussed) and the mill at Mill Lane, opposite the Wilmslow War Memorial.

Tens years later the Wardle family, complete with Jane and the children, but without James has moved to Styal and lives in the Shaw Fold cottages and worked at the mill,  Jonathan is listed as a Bobbiner. Jane still records herself as married in the census of 1861 and 1871, but there is from now on no evidence for the presence of the father in the children’s lives, to the extent that the Census recorder actually records all three children with the name of the grandmother, Wardle – not Hammond.

Between 1851 and 1861 a number of the children’s aunts had married and set up their own households in Styal and life must have seemed very much centred on the life of the village and the mill.

The second family mentioned on the stone, the Potts, had been in Styal since c.1820, when Thomas Potts, who was originally from Northwich and Martha Sumner, who was born in Wilmslow returned to Wilmslow to look for work. Both had married in the Cathedral in Manchester, this may suggest that hat they had both moved to Manchester in search of employment, but it is just as likely that both may have used Manchester as a convenient place to get married by special license, prefering it to get married in the bride’s home parish, similar to many other couples at the time. 

By the time their first daughter Sarah Ann was born, the Potts were living in Styal. In addition the Potts’ family, too, was surrounded at home and at work by several of Martha Potts’, (nee Sumner’s) siblings and nephews and nieces. Thomas, however, was working as a husbandman (a farmer) rather than in the mill, and would continue to do so for the rest of his life. 

By 1841 the Potts were living in Farm Fold Cottages with at least 7 children, Sarah Ann (*1817), Samuel (*1821), Esther (*1829), Robert (*1833), Priscilla (*1835 and died *1847), Enoch (*1837) and the youngest Ezekiel (*1838).   We know that at least some of their later children were christened in the Methodist Chapel in Stockport and that the children would join the workforce of the mill from the age of 10 as spinners and weavers.

Thomas Potts, died in 1853 and in the next 8 years  many of his children married and set up their own households. By 1861 only Ezekiel (at 22 years 10 years older than Jonathan Hammond, discussed above) was still at home, together with two of his sister's children and a Sumner cousin.

1867/8 was a bad 18 months for both families: Jonathan’s aunt Dinah lost her husband in January 1867, a year later his grandmother Ann was buried in Wilmslow cemetery, Ezekiel’s mother Martha died at about the same time and the Farm Fold cottage appears to have been abandoned by the family, but not, it seems, the link to Styal, as we find Ezekiel within three months working and living in Manchester within the parish of St.John, where in June he married Emma Hammond, Jonathan’s older sister. Ezekiel, had at this point decided not only on a change of place, but also on a radical career change and had joined the Manchester police force. By 1871 he had become an inspector, who lived in Platt Street in Manchester, which is now part of the Angel Meadow area of Manchester, close to Victoria Station.The wedding seems to have been a happy, or at least a productive one, as the five children that were born in the next 8 years attest. 

In the meantime, Jonathan had continued in Shaw’s Fold with his other sister and cousin and had become a mule spinner in Quarry Bank by 1871.  He clearly must have kept up contact with his sister in Manchester and eventually chose to move there himself. He married Sarah Earlam on 11 May 1873 in St.John’s, Manchester, the same church Ezekiel and his sister had married in.  Their first child, Walter, was born in February the next year. There must have been complications after the birth, however, because Sarah died on April 5, and their child a week later. 

Both were brought back to Wilmslow, St.Bartholomew’s for burial and given a plot in the newly extended cemetery. Ezekiel’s  and Emma’s fourth child Walter Henry would join them in the same grave on the 2 September 1876, only four months old and so would Ezekiel himself, when he died only a few month later on November 27, 1876.

The surviving spouses, Emma and Jonathan appear to have decided to continue their life in Manchester and Lancashire, where a few month later Ezekiel youngest child Walter Ezekiel was born. Jonathan, left the cotton industry and for a time joined the railway as a porter, working at Beswick. By 1878 he had remarried another Sarah and would eventually be the father of three daughters and one son Ernest.


Maria, Emma’s oldest sister and her mother would join Emma in their new house in Peel Street, Ancoats, where they would continue to work in the cotton industry.  Ezekiel’s only daughter Martha Ann, would eventually marry another Manchester police man, Charles Robbie, who had moved here from Forfar in Scotland.