Interesting choices of names for the two sons born after the trial, William and Joseph, neither the name of any close Isherwood or Gardner relative. The Dockerys from next door in Dalton had sons called William and Joseph.
Hunting up William’s birth certificate, we were able to learn that he was born in August 1886, twelve months after the end of the trial in Leeds. At the time of his birth, the family was already living in Haslingden, on Deansgrove, and his father John’s occupation was listed as a cowman.
What a world of information and speculation can be entered through documents like birth certificates and simple census entries. By 1891 John had progressed from humble work as a cowman to being a farm bailiff. Grace and John were living together and steadily producing more children. Matthew, although only sixteen, had left the family. And Margaret had become a mill girl.
If Maggie had gone into the mill to work just after the school-leaving age of twelve, she had three years seniority by then. Thinking back to her 1899 certificate of marriage, where her occupation was listed as weaver, she likely worked in the mill for eleven years. Eleven years of deafening racket and inhaling cotton lint.
Between them, John and Maggie were supporting the family, although Matthew would have sent some of his earnings home as well. Home, a simple two up, two down, was full to overflowing. The boys probably slept in one room, although the very youngest likely shared with John and Grace, and Maggie may well have had to sleep in the kitchen. The front room was for “best.”
None of grandma’s grandchildren, nor, to my knowledge, any of her children, ever were told stories of her life in the mill, and now that I realize how long she worked there, I also realize that we must not have heard about it because it just caused her too much embarrassment. Like the dreadful experiences suffered by my husband’s great-grandfather, who, at eighteen, was transported from Wales to Tasmania, where he was systematically starved and then whipped for complaining by the farmers to whom he was assigned as free labour: for those closest in time to the actual event, such information is often something to be obliterated from family history, hopefully forgotten and buried — at least, until a later generation finally digs it up.
Carrying on as Best She Could
Isabella feared she would be a jinx, but Grace insisted, so Isabella again set off from her father’s house in Cumbria to wait with Grace for the birth of her next child. This time, as she journeyed to Haslingden, Isabella felt awkward about John, though he was always kind and friendly toward her. Maggie was a bit put out that her place as “next in charge” was being usurped by Isabella, but they did enjoy giggling together about boys while they did the washing up.
The relief over the live birth of a little boy was shared by all, but his birth had special meaning to Grace, John, and Isabella. He had a lusty cry and a fine royal name. “Fit for a prince, I’d say,” said the neighbour next door but one, and it seemed as if little William had sealed the pact. They were all going to have a new life.
Back home in Dalton, though, Isabella found it hard to get going again. In her whispered talks with Grace they had agreed that for her to find a new situation she needed a story about the “accident” and the misunderstanding and confusion that had followed. Between them, they agreed that the troubles she had suffered with Grace had to be left in the past, but she had yet to find anywhere where ugly versions of the crime of which they had been accused had not preceded her.
She found it hard to summon up the will to look for work away from her parent’s home. For one thing, the cough that had started during her time in Preston Gaol just would not go away, and at times her slight frame seemed barely able to withstand its force. For another, she was thought too peaked to seek new work as a farm domestic, and had been reduced to taking the few odd jobs she could find around home in Dalton. She tried to help Jane with her dressmaking, but Isabella had never been very good with a needle and now her eyes often refused to focus properly.
As Isabella’s mother whispered to her sister Jane, “The life has gone out of her. She used to be so quick and bright. Now she just coughs and sighs and looks out the window.”
Isabella rarely left the house, and there were no young men to walk out with. She realized she had no interest in the young sons of her parent’s friends, boys who were already working long hours in the mine. When she did venture out, she saw prettier, livelier girls who would be happy at the music hall and the pub, but the men that they were flirting with had rough hands and even rougher accents.
Only news of a visit from Grace could bring a sparkle to Isabella’s eye, and Grace did try to go to see her as often as she could. While they had always been close, that dreadful summer had created a bond between them so close her mother joked, “You’d need one of Da’s biggest chisels to break them two girls apart.”
Life in Haslingden
As time passed it almost began to seem as if Meanley Farm had never really existed. Their new reality was defined by the bleak and sooty buildings of Haslingden. The people on the street looked tired and grim as they dragged themselves home from work in the thick twilight. Seeing them made you feel tired yourself.
Grace and John did slowly realize, however, that the hard lives and fatigue of their neighbours strangely helped their family. Their new friends and neighbours had no energy to inquire in detail about how the Isherwood family came to be living in a mill town. Their story of tough times on the farm and the need to find work for the family was readily accepted. With Grace being a miner’s daughter, people found it easy enough to believe.
Maggie found it particularly difficult to adjust to her new home and new school. Da seemed strained and weary. Stepmother was very quiet and often ill. Maggie had to herd the little boys to school in the morning and back in the afternoon. Then she had cooking and darning to do. She was grateful that the teacher let her take home a book to read in the evenings.
When her da came to talk to her about working part time, Maggie was excited at the prospect of such a big responsibility. She welcomed the chance to work in the mill and bring home money to buy better food for her brothers. Matthew was already at work on a farm and doing his best to send money home, and Maggie was proud that she would get a chance to contribute too.
But she still felt a little sad. She liked the feeling of mastering her lessons in arithmetic and learning history. She was really sorry to be leaving school early, and knew already that she would miss it. Father had told her that she was a big girl now, and didn’t need much more schooling. He said he was plenty proud of how well she could read and write and do sums. But back at the school in Newton there were girls and boys as old as fifteen, at least for parts of the year, and she had always thought she would go to school there for at least that long too.
On the other hand, it would be good to get out of their crowded house, even if it meant going to a noisy, cold, and damp mill every day. At home the cooking and washing seemed endless, and there was no place she could go where there weren’t little boys wanting her attention. She had to wait until everyone had gone to bed at night before she could lay out her pallet in the kitchen, and sometimes she was so tired that the waiting seemed endless. She would sit over her darning by the fire and try to will the boys to settle down so that she could lie down in turn.
At work she was small and quick and very useful to the foreman. When she started he could send her scuttling under the looms to help twist up broken warp, certain that she would be nimble enough to not get caught by the machine when he started it up again. She sensed it was dangerous, little Lilly got a bad knock on the head that made her permanently silly, but she took pride in her proficiency and agility.
Maggie missed Matthew. He was never much of a talker but they used to have good fun when they played in the barn. Now that she was working in the mill she discovered she had no time to see her new school friends. Some of them, like her, were starting to work at jobs in the mills, and she had quickly learned that if you didn’t work in the same mill the long hours
meant there was very little chance to see each other.
Grace wasn’t much company for her either. Grace never talked about what had happened during that scary summer, and Margaret was still confused about what Grace and Isabella were supposed to have done with the child. She had overheard some of her relatives gossiping about Grace when they thought Maggie was out of hearing. As a result, when Grace had tried to act like a mother and tell her about growing up, and what the boys would be wanting to do with girls, Maggie had smirked at her in an ugly, knowing way, and said, “Just who would you be to be warning me about boys, I wonder.”
Still, Grace was the only other female in the house, and she genuinely tried to help Maggie, warning her about the arrival of her monthlies, and scrimping and saving so that Maggie would be free to spend some of the money she earned at the mill on some worsted to make herself a nice dress for best. While repeated pregnancies sapped Grace’s energy, and the boys often refused to mind her, Grace did make an effort to get along with Maggie, especially since she felt that it would please John.
Another Lost Boy
Originally, I had obtained William Isherwood’s birth certificate to see if he could by any chance have been the baby Grace was carrying when she was taken into custody. From it, I had learned that the family was already residing in Haslingden by the time he was born. The 1891 census information listed a brother, Joseph, four, but I could not find him mentioned anywhere subsequently.
I decided to try to obtain the certificates for Joseph’s birth and his death, to try and see what had happened to that little half great-uncle of mine, and I was surprised at the difficulties I encountered in tracking him down in the records. Finally, I went to the original census document, instead of the transcription that I had used earlier, and, at last, found clarity. There had been a transcription error — Joseph was not four years old at the time of the census, he was only two months old.
Knowing Joseph had only been born in 1891, it was comparatively easy, though very sad, to find that his death had occurred only a year later. Yet another lost little boy for Grace and John to mourn.
Then the implication of the birth of Joseph in 1891 struck me. Clearly Grace was no practitioner of any kind of birth control, so why were there no new Isherwood babies between the birth of William in 1886 and the birth of poor little Joseph in 1891? I could only guess that Grace and John had conceived other babies during those five years, and that they had not survived.
Next, I went looking for Isherwood babies who had died in Haslingden in the time between William’s birth in 1886 and the birth of Joseph in 1891. I found three: Mary Ann Isherwood, dead at the age of zero in 1888; Mary Isherwood, dead at the age of one in 1889; and David Isherwood, dead at the age of zero in 1889. Poor little mites.
Surely at least one of these children belonged to Grace and John, if not more. I know John’s mother’s name was Mary Ann and his sister was named Mary, and that John did like to keep names in the family.
How much loss and pain had there been in the Isherwood household in the years that followed the trial?
Grandma never mentioned dead infants — perhaps they were part of the past that she and her husband William had tried to leave behind by going to Canada.
The Inhabitants of Grave C 999
Rita Hirst of the Lancashire Family History Society is a resourceful woman who has lately become famous in her community for her pivotal role in the installment of BBC’s ancestor search program Who Do You Think You Are? that features Sheila Hancock.
Well before the BBC recognized her talents I had met her online, and I had the good fortune to spend time with her in person in the Haslingden Library.
Rita came up with the next important piece of information in our quest to learn what happened to Grace and John. Through our queries and her reading of the Slaidburn Child Murder site, she had been drawn into our web of investigators, and her on-the-spot knowledge proved invaluable.
On my very first trip to Haslingden I had looked for Isherwood graves at the site of Saint James Church, where my grandparents had married, but had been unable to locate any. As it turned out, Rita knew that a fellow member of the Lancashire Family History Society has an index to Holden Hall, another Haslingden cemetery, and in that index she hit pay dirt (if it’s appropriate to use that phrase where graves are concerned).
What Rita uncovered was that in the Holden Hall Cemetery in grave C 999 — a portentous number — are buried six people:
James Edward Isherwood, died age twenty-nine, buried July 24, 1913
Mary Isherwood, died age five months, buried October 11, 1913
Grace Isherwood, died age twenty-three, buried July 18, 1927
Grace Isherwood, died age sixty-eight, buried June 5, 1928
John Green Isherwood, died age eighty-three, buried January 15, 1930
Ada Halstead, died age fifty-two, buried March 5, 1947
All in all, a fascinating list of occupants.
Sadly “my little brother James,” as Maggie referred to him, Grace’s second illegitimate child, died an early death at twenty-nine. And, some months later, a tiny baby called Mary died — was James her father?
Then we have a namesake Grace, also tragically young at death. At twenty-three, she was of an age to be the last child of Grace and John, but she could possibly also have been the daughter of one of their boys.
Grace Isherwood, once described in a newspaper as the wife of a respectable farmer, lies in this same grave, dead at sixty-eight. My immediate reaction was that, despite bearing so many children and the awful early stress of being imprisoned and on trial for her life, Grace lived a fairly long life, especially for one of her generation.
The information about John Green Isherwood made me smile. By all reports, he was a good, hard-working man, and he lived a long life. You could also say he lived a full life, although he could very well have done without some of the things that filled it.
My great-grandfather John outlived two wives, and by the time he died, in addition to his British descendents, he had four healthy grandchildren — two teachers, one scientist, and one engineer — living in North America. I wonder what he knew about them all, and I wonder what they knew about him. Much too late to ask, I’m sorry to say.
And who on earth, I wondered, was Ada Halstead? And why was she interred with all those Isherwoods?
In our online discussions about Rita’s most recent fascinating information, David declared that the story became more like a cross between D.H. Lawrence and Catherine Cookson all the time. Personally, I had been thinking more along the lines of Thomas Hardy, even if it was the wrong end of England.
David Sat Bolt Upright
Now that we had the details of the cemetery and the gravesite, Catherine and David wasted no time in going over to Haslingden to see what they might learn. I think we were all hoping for tombstones with inscriptions that would reveal attitudes toward the deceased.
I wondered about who had attended the funerals and the various causes of death. My heart went out to James and Grace the younger, and little baby Mary, and I tried to let them live a moment or two again in my thoughts.
The Higham’s report of their field trip and its aftermath was very thought-provoking and a bit funny.
Subject: From Slaidburn
We had a trip to Haslingden Cemetery today to look at grave C 999. Looking at Rita Hirst’s email there are 6 burials in the plot.
UK graves usually hold up to three burials so they obviously bought a “double plot.”
Holden Hall is a small cemetery about a mile from 9 Helmshore Road.
We found the grave in no time (the grave digger scraped the grass back to show us the plot number) and had expected to see a tombstone. However, as you can see there isn’t one, just two “empty plots” with a small flower vase marked “In Loving Memory.” …
You mused a while ago: How could John stay with Grace and allow her to raise his children after what had happened? David couldn’t sleep last night, m
using over the case, and suddenly sat up and said “It was Isabella.”
After finishing the chronology today we are both drawn to thinking that if any malicious act was carried out it was done by Isabella. Perhaps she smothered Thomas in the back of the trap just to resolve the situation.
After all, Isabella had “brought the problem to her sister” and she wouldn’t want to take Thomas back to her parent’s home (just another mouth to feed, etc.) It is only our (and perhaps the Court’s) assumption that Grace had most to lose and would therefore be the most likely person to carry out any criminal act. Who knows what went through Isabella’s mind as she sat in the back of the trap whilst Grace would have been driving the horse. John seems to have stood by Grace, maybe because he knew that she hadn’t done anything.
Also, it appears that Isabella is the one who seems to have “lied through her teeth” to the police in her statements….
We still feel that if nothing else, they were guilty of concealing a body and the story of placing it where it would be found quickly is a complete fabrication. The spot where Thomas was found is invisible from the road and it seems pure chance that Farmer Bargh’s wife happened to be walking up Langcliffe Brook side. Hopefully a visit to Langcliffe Bridge when you come will bring it to life….
Cathryn
The image of David sitting bolt upright in the middle of the night and proclaiming, “It was Isabella” is both endearing and enduring. Even though I identify slightly with Isabella as the younger, less lovable sister, I suspect that he is right.
The Slaidburn Angel Page 18