Poor, poor Isabella. What a dreadful fate. Dead from tuberculosis at twenty-five, attended by her sister Grace, with whom she had shared so much during her short life. Whether she smothered the baby or not, she paid the price.
Subject: Wow! What a great amount of information
Dear Cathryn
First of all, we sure owe Mr. Henshaw a debt of gratitude. Does he have an email address where I could write to thank him? Second of all, it is interesting that even though her mother was still alive at that date, Isabella’s sister Grace came to nurse her.
As you may recall, Grace’s daughter born in 1892 was named Elizabeth Isabel, and her daughter born in 1894 was named Isabella.
Do you think that Isabella might have contracted TB in the goal? Can you by any chance see where Isabella was living in 1891, was it the same Lord Street address.
What a sad short life.
I have come to think, like David, that Isabella “did it,” probably with her feet on the rug on the floor of the trap. My personal theory is that women do not like to get up close in physical violence.
Then I think that Grace lost her baby while they were in goal, and she was indisposed when the trial came around. Isabella read the statement at the trial and they got off, so I think Grace owed her a great debt of gratitude.
Thank your sister for me for the advice about “contused.” …
Sheelagh
The fact that Isabella died in 1892 meant that there was still another bit of information out there to be found about her — her whereabouts in 1891 at the time of the census. Back I went to the census with renewed determination.
The sophistication of the census data and indexing was improving by the day, and this time I found her quite readily. In 1891 Isabella Gardner was living in a part of Blackpool called Layton with Warbrick, at 7 South Parade Promenade. South Parade Promenade was clearly a good address, and Isabella was working as a domestic servant for an elderly retired man named Henry Howorth and his sister, Hannah. The explanation for her particular employment seems to be down to family connections. Isabella’s mother, whose maiden name was Cartmell, was from Blackpool and the Cartmell household at 6 Waterloo Road, just down the way from South Parade Promenade, included an Isabella Cartmell, nineteen, a general servant also born in Blackpool. It seems a fair guess that Mrs. Gardner’s relations had helped to find a position for Isabella with the elderly brother and sister. A household without children was a good choice.
How quickly poor Isabella had declined from employment to death, working as a domestic in Blackpool in 1891 and dead by 1892.
Elizabeth Isabel Isherwood, John and Grace’s first daughter, was born in Dalton-in-Furness in 1892. The picture I am left with is that of a somewhat enfeebled Grace, either just having delivered her daughter, or soon to give birth, sitting at her dying sister’s bedside. She must have felt so sad and sorry for the life that Isabella never got to live.
While their mother hovered nearby, it was likely Grace who felt the loss of Isabella and her debt to her most keenly. Only Isabella and Grace knew the truth about what had happened on that Saturday in May 1885. And then only Grace.
Grace’s Vigil
Until the baby on her lap started to whimper for attention, Grace sat simply staring at the wall, holding Isabella’s chill and stiffening hand.
It had been some time since Isabella had even been able to recognize anyone, but that didn’t lessen Grace’s present feeling of desolation. She and Isabella had shared so much misery together, enough for several lifetimes, but Isabella had not had much joy.
Grace nursed the child as she reflected on Isabella’s life. She had been such a clever girl, but her intelligence seemed to deny her more pleasure than it had provided.
Grace thought back to the dreadful summer after she and John had first been married. It was hard to remember the details: all she remembered was pain and anguish. She owed her life to Isabella, of that Grace was certain, but it was the ridiculous story that Isabella made up and then told to the police that had put them at risk in the first place.
Only James was left to her from the sorry trap load that went to the Clitheroe workhouse that day, and he was just now eight years old.
Even if pressed, she couldn’t separate what had really happened from what she wished had happened. Fear, time, and telling had caused her to lose her hold on the events of that day. And there was no one pressing her to get it right anymore; not now.
She looked over at the final peacefulness of Isabella’s pale face. Instead of a dead young woman, she saw the lean, dark-eyed girl with her crown of braids, who had stood straight and tall before the court and told them all that she and her sister did not murder that child. Grace smiled slightly at the recollection of the expression on the face of the young lawyer as Isabella had so resolutely spoken her piece. His eyes, behind his wire-rimmed glasses, were quite tender and his look was proud.
Initially, Grace had been reluctant to remind Isabella of that time, so she refrained from mentioning to her what she had observed that day. Later, when she had come to understand how important knowledge of the advocate’s admiration, however fleeting, was to Isabella, Grace was willing to describe the scene as often as it was requested.
Grace cried silently, not only for Isabella but for all the grief and loss through which they’d had to wade.
Drying her eyes, she gave the baby a quick pat on the back and went out to find someone to help her with the laying out. She felt eager to get back home to Haslingden and take charge of the household again. With John and Maggie in charge, there was no telling what kind of unsettling new order was now in place.
Margaret Leaves the Mill Behind
Margaret was impatient to get to the church. William’s sister Jane had arranged to walk over with her, to stand up for her and sign as her witness, but it was getting late and she was not yet in sight.
She had first thought to ask William’s sister Margaret Ann to be her witness. She had met Margaret Ann working beside her in the mill, and it was this friendship that had led her to Jane and then to an acquaintance with their brothers John and William.
Margaret Ann had been surprised that Maggie didn’t fancy her brother John, he seemed a livelier match, but it had been William who showed himself extraordinarily determined to win her. Maggie had put him to the test: give up drinking and smoking and come back to see me in a year. To everyone’s amazement, he did, and then solemnly insisted on their marriage as his prize. A man that resolute was just what Maggie had been looking for.
Margaret Ann had just been married herself, ceasing to be a Margaret Whittaker just as Maggie was about to become one. It seemed only fair for Jane to get preference as witness, being the only remaining one in the trio who had to go back to the fearsome racket in the mill on Monday and go on trying to keep warm and dry.
It was a chilly mid-December day, but she was pleased that they had chosen to get married in the old century. The prospect of a new life as a married woman in the twentieth century sounded like something out of a book by Jules Verne, and Maggie could hardly wait.
Her thoughts turned to her da, already waiting for her at the church. Unlike the fathers of many of her friends, he had always been kind to her and concerned about her health and happiness. But it was Fanny and Isabella demanding his knee and his stories nowadays, and it was time for her to have a man of her own.
Shivering under her cloak, Margaret could feel the fit of her lacy dress, tight over her shoulders and through to her waist, but she worried that the snow would wet her new shoes. She had saved for months for her finery, and she didn’t want it spoiled before William had a chance to see it and, she shivered at the prospect, to remove it later.
At last, there was Jane Whittaker coming down the road. Margaret almost slipped on the icy road running to meet her. She’d have plenty of opportunity to face the consequences of marriage later.
The thin winter sun was setting as Margaret Isherwood, weaver, married William Whittaker,
bleacher, at Saint James’ Parish Church in Haslingden. The church was filled with Isherwood and Whittaker relations, all celebrating the newlyweds. The fact that William was eight years older than Margaret was generally thought a good thing; he had a little money put aside, and his widowed mother could be left in the charge of his brother.
Margaret Isherwood had departed from the crowded family home at 26 Lincoln Street. William had lived over with his mother on Blackburn Road. But now, as husband and wife, they had a place of their own and the prospect of privacy, a space for just the two of them, even if it was only one room.
Her father looked on thoughtfully at the ceremony. He felt as if he was cutting one of his last ties to Jane, and he was surprised to find he was having a little conversation with her in his head, something he had given up doing long ago. Well, Jane, there goes our girl, off on her own now, he thought. She has your spirit and your smile. I dearly hope she finds the kind of happiness with her William that I found with you, and that she gets to enjoy it for a lot longer.
John felt a little freshening in the air around his head, as if someone had disturbed it by passing, and he nodded his head. He hoped that Jane and Maggie both knew that he had done the best he could.
The wedding tea in the parish hall, prepared by Grace for their friends and relatives, was ample and well laid out, but of course that was one of Grace’s arts — she did have the knack for laying out a gracious tea.
As Margaret had feared, the boys began to get rowdy, but William whispered to her to relax, this was her day and she did not have to worry about those boys anymore.
Her half-sisters, Fanny and Isabella, looked solemn and pretty with their hair in curls, dressed in their Sunday best. Fanny had wanted to know when she might get married, but stepmother had just laughed and told her she should stay a little girl for a while yet. Hearing that, Margaret had wished that she, too, had been allowed to stay a little girl for longer. She still missed Meanley Farm and the Quaker school in Newton.
But today Margaret’s mind wasn’t on the rowdy boys or her two pale little girl shadows, her mind was focused on the prospect of life in Canada. William’s brother had gone ahead and sent them word of the beauty of the mountains with their rich mines of silver, but she knew in her heart he had no mind for assessing the practicality of things. Jack wouldn’t have worried about how you might set up a home and raise children in that wild place. His thoughts would be on the adventure of it all.
A Very Long Journey
Waiting in the summer’s heat at the station for the train to Liverpool, the wedding already seemed long past. It had taken almost seven months for the business matters to be completed and she had watched nervously as William finally set off one morning to meet with Mr. Watson, the secretary of the company in which they had been convinced to invest. William had taken with him with all their savings and he had returned home hours later with two boat tickets and a document attesting to their ownership of 12,000 common shares and a hundred preferred shares in the Arrow Lake Mining Company, corporate address: 6 Spring Vale, Haslingden.
As the train pulled in, William and his brother prepared to load their trunk into the carriage. Frightened, excited, and feeling a bit nauseated by the smoke and the crush of people, she looked about for her father. When will I see him again? she worried. But the press of goodbyes from her friends and family quickly distracted her, and when she looked up briefly, instead of the sky she encountered a wall of sooty brick.
Goodbye to all this, she thought. Goodbye to the soot and the noise and
Margaret Whittaker — Kaslo pioneer.
the dark house bursting at the seams with children. I am never going to set foot in a mill again.
At last catching her father’s eye, she waved and blew him a kiss. Hurrying toward her, he gathered her to his heart, almost forgetting the strength of his stonemason’s arms. “Go well,” he whispered hoarsely in her ear.
Almost three weeks later, William and Margaret boarded the paddlewheel that took them on the last leg of the journey to their new home in Kaslo, British Columbia. The mine was supposed to be across the lake between Golden and Radium, but they were not going there yet. They were going to see the booming frontier town in which they planned to settle.
Margaret knew she was expecting her first child, and she was eager to have a home in which to welcome the baby. She had heard that winter was harsh in the Rocky Mountains and she wanted the family to be set up safe and warm long before the first snowfall.
By the time Ellen Hazel Whittaker, Jane and John Isherwood’s first grandchild, was born on February 13, 1901, Margaret had learned some difficult lessons. The first was that a person who has never experienced a winter in the Rockies cannot possibly even imagine the snow and the cold and the whiteouts, and the sheer sense of isolation and hopelessness it can engender. Another, perhaps even greater, lesson was that mineral mines are fickle and they can suddenly run out of ore.
It wasn’t exactly a swindle, more of a gamble you might say. William went across the Kootenay Lake and into the hinterland to help work the mine, and came back on foot across the mountain valleys, half-frozen and lucky to be alive. He had been lost and had walked for days in winter conditions to find his way home.
Margaret was so grateful to have William home safely, and a healthy baby of her own to raise, that she had no will to regret or recriminate. She had already begun to love the blue skies and the big lake outside her door.
“We can make a good life here,” she assured William.
Marked with a Cross
Although I was blessed with the name Margaret, Penny is by birth order and predisposition the curator of our family’s historical bits and pieces. She has a generous spirit and has had some big houses with space for pieces of our heritage. Her care for such treasures reveals a deep vein of sensitivity for the arts and crafts of the past.
I don’t know where Penny got some of the photos she has saved of our grandparents on both sides, but she kindly spent a lot of money on reproductions of the photos so that lighter travellers like myself could have some historical documents of our own.
I had a vague recollection of looking at some of the photos before, and marvelling at my Grandmother Sadlier-Brown’s beauty and my Grandma Whittaker’s little waist. There was a famous one with Grandma Whittaker and her four children, dressed in their Sunday best, beside the family cow. Penny has come to believe that photo was taken to send to grandpa overseas during the First World War.
Photos of Grandpa Whittaker, who had died before I was born, reveal a handsome, serious man, whom I had come to think of as a man of few words based, I suppose, on the fact that I never heard a sound emanate from any of his photos.
As I became more and more immersed in the travails of John and Grace and Isabella, a vague recollection of one of the photos started nagging at me. During a family reunion, my brother, John, his wife, Nancy, and I had been looking at old photographs and we had come upon one taken back in England that featured a smiling young Maggie, another woman, and two solemn girls. I remember asking John if he knew who the other people were, and he said that he thought the other woman was grandma’s half-sister Isabella.
At the time there was no reason to doubt him, but as I researched the family history I realized that he had to be wrong. The photograph had been taken about 1898, and Maggie’s half-sister Isabella was by then only four years old. Her other sister, Elizabeth, would have been six. So who was the woman in the photo with grown-up Margaret, taken before she left Haslingden for her new life?
Next I wondered if John’s name for the person was perhaps correct but the relationship wrong. Could it be a photo of Aunt Isabella, Grace’s sister? But then I learned that she had died in 1892.
I decided to look very closely at that photograph when next I had the chance.
As it turned out, I didn’t have to wait long. I was in Toronto for the birth of my daughter Meghan’s first baby. An actual blizzard was raging outside, but inside Meg’s c
harming cottage in Cabbagetown, the baby and I were tucked up safe and warm. Two-day-old Turner Whittaker Scott and I were blissed out, him sleeping, me casting a protective spell around us.
Turner’s exhausted mother happened by while we were sitting there for a quiet hour or three, and she dropped a little envelope on the coffee table nearby.
“Oh, I almost forgot,” she mentioned casually, “Penny gave me this to give to you.”
Isherwood family photo.
When I finally surrendered Turner for feeding, I turned my attention to Penny’s envelope. Inside were a large number of wonderful photos, beautifully and expensively reproduced. But there was one in particular that made me gasp.
There it was. A photograph of my grandmother, Margaret Isherwood, in her early twenties, an older woman, and two young girls. In Penny’s writing on the back was the note: Fanny, Margaret, ~~~~~, and Isabell 1898 Accrington, Lancs.
I was briefly confused by the name Fanny on the back of the picture, until someone more knowledgeable than I about the derivatives of nicknames told me that Fanny was a common short form for Elizabeth. John was partially right. Grandma’s stepsisters, Elizabeth (Fanny) and Isabella, were in the photograph with her — they were the two young girls.
I held my breath. The older woman in the photograph was obviously Margaret’s stepmother, Grace, then in her late thirties. The woman who had become almost more myth than reality was pictured there, surrounded by the other Isherwood females.
I have looked closely at this photo many times now. The young Isabella, with her abundant dark hair, is a pretty girl who seems to share her mother’s features, while Fanny seems more Isherwood. If the youthful Grace had the glossy-haired prettiness of the little Isabella clinging to her arm, one can understand her appeal. Or maybe the little girl favoured her namesake, Aunt Isabella.
The Slaidburn Angel Page 21