Milnrow

John Ward and his family left Rastrick in Yorkshire, sometime before 1901, and returned to Lancashire. They settled in Milnrow, not far from Littleborough, where they'd been living before they went to Yorkshire.

Cottage handloom weaver at work.
(Image from Wikimedia.org)

Milnrow, located in a valley on the River Beal, was similar to Littleborough in many ways. It had once been a quiet sheep-farming village, nestled in the foothills of the Pennines. Until the 19th century, local people produced woollen cloth in their own homes and sold it to the traders in Yorkshire. (Have a look at this video to see what was involved.)

Over time, fellmongering (processing sheep skins and hides) became an important industry and Milnrow was home to what was, reputedly, the largest fellmongering yard in England, owned by William Clegg Company. Tens of thousands of hides were brought in each week for processing.

Cotton milling, along with factory-based woollen milling, came to Milnrow in the early 19th century. The damp climate and ready access to coal to run the engines that powered the mills made this region ideal for cotton milling. Multi-storied brick edifices with tall chimneys dotted the landscape. Long rows of new houses went up, many of them built by the mill owners, to accommodate the workers. The railway line arrived in Milnrow in 1863. Originally part of the Butterworth township in the Rochdale parish, Milnrow gained its own Urban District Council in 1894. By 1901 the population had grown to about 10,000 people.

Tram car in Dale Street, maybe c1910,
with one of the mills in the background*

John and Mary Ann Ward must have arrived during the 1890s, since they were there for the 1901 census. Were they simply born-and-bred Lancashire people yearning to be back in their own home county? Or did they have some other reason for moving to Milnrow? As is so often the case, I don't know the answer to that.

Their son Matthew, who had married in Rastrick in 1890, was already living in Milnrow when his wife Elizabeth gave birth to their second child, Annie, in June 1892. So it's possible that Matthew and Elizabeth moved to Milnrow first, and John, Mary Ann and the rest of the family followed.

The 1901 census suggests there were just as many cloggers and shoe makers in Milnrow as there had been in Littleborough, when John lived there in the 1880s. Despite this, he and his son Thomas (my grandfather) set up shop as cloggers in the main street, at 2 Dale Street. John's name appears at that address in the 1905 Kelly's Trade Directory. They apparently found enough work to keep the family settled in Milnrow. Various members of the family lived in the same house at 17 Clifton Street for at least four decades.

Dale St, Milnrow. This photo is from a later date,
but the Ward's shop must have been on this corner*.

St James parish church,
Milnrow*

When John died in 1905, Mary Ann and Thomas continued running the business, although they turned to repairing shoes and boots, as clog-wearing became less common. Despite some family disagreements, all of John and Mary Ann's children remained in Milnrow or its vicinity as adults. Many of their graves can be found in the graveyard around St James Church, including that of John, and Mary Ann, who died in 1916.

During World War 1, many men from Milnrow enlisted. The local war memorial shows that 144 of them never returned. John and Mary Ann's two older sons, John Willie and Matthew, were too old to join up. The youngest, Thomas, already in his thirties, probably thought he too would be overlooked. But he was enlisted, and sent to Mesopotamia as a member of the Royal Army Ordnance Corp. He did his training in Colchester, in Essex, which is where he met his future wife. That is where we will go to next in this series.

And since we are now leaving the clog-making Ward family of Lancashire, I thought I'd share this poem (in dialect) about clogs.

IT DIDN’T SEEM REET - Anon. 

Wen a fella cum walkin’ deawn eawr road,
‘Is clogs went "er—clatt, er—clatt."
An’ it struck mi, as Ah’d never knowed
A pair o’clogs t’seawnd like that.
Soo Ah waited wile ‘ee getten close,
Fer t’see wot wer th’matter,
Clogs doant "er—clatt, er—clatt" tha knows
Thi should guh "clatt—er, clatt—er!"
Ah thowt, "Just wen ‘as passes mi
Ah’ll ‘ev a looka’t’greawnd,
Cause Ah wer fair reet wonderin’
O’er th’reason feryon seawnd.
Sos wen ‘ee sad, "Nah then theer,"
Wen ‘ee passed mii’ th’ street,
Ah looked, an’ does ta know
Booath ‘is clogs wero’t’wrong feet.

*My thanks to Steve, owner of the wonderful Old Milnrow Pinterest board, for allowing me to use these photos.

Littleborough in Lancashire

The so-called Roman Road on Blackstone Edge near Littleborough.
Photo by Humphrey Bolton

Let's follow John and Mary Ward, as they leave Walton le Dale in the 1870s and move to Littleborough, close to the Lancashire border with West Yorkshire. How different they must have found this village in the hilly, sheep-grazing moorlands of the Pennines, to the flat farmland and market gardens around Walton le Dale, where they had both spent most of their lives.

Like Walton le Dale, Littleborough had been a quiet village until the 19th century. It was on a trade route that crossed the Pennines into Yorkshire, with the remains of an ancient road (once thought to be from Roman times) still visible in places on the moorland of Blackstone Edge. The main industry in the 18th century was woollen milling and weaving. Wool "pieces", woven on handlooms in people's homes in Littleborough and the nearby hamlets of Calderbrook, Smithybridge, and Summit, would be carried over the hills to the Piece Hall in Halifax, in Yorkshire, for sale.

Map of Littleborough and surrounds
from Vision of Britain 

Littleborough remained an important link in several trade routes as the industrial revolution got underway. In the early 1800s,  the Rochdale Canal, linking Sowerby Bridge in Yorkshire with Manchester in Lancashire, was completed. Littleborough became the site of one of the locks along the canal. A large reservoir, Hollingworth Lake, was constructed nearby to feed water into the canal, and this became something of a tourist attraction over time.

Hollingworth Lake
Own photo

In 1839 the first section of the new Manchester to Leeds railway was built as far as Littleborough. It was extended to Leeds by 1841. Soon the home-based woollen weavers were replaced by steam-powered mills and factories. By the late 1870s, when my great grandparents John and Mary Ann Ward moved to Littleborough, there were numerous cotton and woollen mills in the area, along with associated industries such as bleaching and dyeing, and the population was growing. By 1879 there were nine schools, many of them denominational, with over 1000 students between them.

I still have no clear idea why John and Mary Ann decided to move their family from Walton le Dale sometime between the birth of their fifth child, Edward, in 1874 and their sixth, Mary Ann, in 1877. Was it something to do with the depression in the cotton industry around Preston in the mid 1870's, the result of disputes between the employers and the operatives? Perhaps Littleborough was faring better economically.

Or could they have been trying to remove their family from the smallpox epidemic which struck Preston and surrounding areas in 1876? When she was three years old, Mary Ann had lost two older brothers in the same week, during what was probably an epidemic. She may have been keen to move her young family to a healthier place. Sadly, if that was their reason for moving, it was in vain. Their infant daughter Mary Ann and their seven-year-old son Richard died within days of each other in April 1879, probably from some type of infectious illness. They were buried in the graveyard near the church of St James, Calderbrook, just north of Littleborough.

This was close to where John and Mary Ann and their family were living. In the 1879 MacDonald's Directory, John was listed as a clogger, living in Caldermoor.  The 1881 census records their address as Crabtree Street (no longer in existence). John was just one of at least fifteen cloggers and bootmakers listed in the MacDonalds Directory who were living in the Littleborough area at the time.

Moving on again

John and Mary Ann had three further children born to them in Littleborough, after the deaths of Richard and baby Mary Ann - Fanny (1879), Thomas Henry (my grandfather, in 1882) and Henrietta in 1886. But Littleborough wouldn't remain their home for decades, as Walton le Dale had been for previous generations of the Wards. Sometime after Henrietta's birth they moved to Rastrick in Yorkshire, where they stayed only a short time, then settled in Milnrow, on the other side of Hollingworth Lake.

Again, there's nothing to indicate why they moved. John's widowed brother, Richard, married Elizabeth Clarkson, one of John and Mary's neighbours from Crabtree Street, in 1886. John was one of the witnesses at the wedding, so it seems unlikely this caused any sort of family conflict. Perhaps there simply wasn't enough work in Littleborough for so many cloggers. John and Mary's eldest son, John Willy, had most likely become a clogger and bootmaker by this time, since that was his profession in 1891.

Old mill by the Rochdale Canal, Littleborough
Photo by Tim Green from Bradford

By a series of co-incidences, my husband and I lived just outside Littleborough for a while in the 1980s, By then, the mills were no longer operating and many stood derelict, but it was still a thriving small town. We had no idea then that my father's family had ever lived there, although I was aware of their association with Milnrow.

As I've described before, one of our daughters was baptised in the same church as her great grandfather, Thomas Henry, even though we didn't realise it at the time. Hollingworth Lake was one of our favourite spots for Sunday afternoon walks, and the tow-path along the canal was the easiest and most pleasant way to push a pram to the shops.