Welcome to the Dunkerley-Tuson Family Website!

(Notes and references are at the end of the article)

Early days
William Tuson was my great grandfather and is the father of the Tuson families of Failsworth and Hollinwood. He was the youngest of a family of nine surviving children, the fourth son of Richard Tuson and Betty, nee Wilding. By the time he was born his oldest brother, James, was already twenty-four years old, but William had a playmate, a brother called Henry (or Harry), just two years his senior.

William was almost certainly born at New House Farm on Lindal Lane in Hutton but would have moved with his family to Holt Farm at Brindle, probably before he was four years old, and it must have been at Brindle that he remembered his boyhood days. The family at Holt Farm comprised at least eight people, and may have included up to five more because there are indications that his oldest brother, James also lived there with his family (see Family Tree).

William’s early days would have been spent playing at the farm but from the age of 5 or 6 he would have attended the local school. Brindle school was run under the auspices of the local church, St. James’, where the Revd. Thomas Lund was the incumbent. When William was about nine years old he was in the rather unfortunate position of having his own sister, Ann, then about 27 years old, as stand-in teacher for at least several months. Ann was unpopular with the Revd. Lund and with the pupils but by the summer of 1871 the vicar had managed to find a full-time replacement, Samuel Marshall of Great Yarmouth and his wife Elizabeth; the couple stayed for 25 years. An article on the website of the Brindle Historical Society records the drama^[1]:

Samuel Marshall was the new master of the village school and two days later, on the 10th August, he commenced his duties; no doubt with the same blend of apprehension and curiosity with which his 58 pupils entered the same large schoolroom on that first morning. Any misgivings he might have had would not have been shared by Rev. Lund whose feelings could have been only of huge relief that a man would travel so far to take up a responsibility which, in the last year, had become burdensome to the family at the Rectory. During this time the untrained schoolmistress, Annie Tuson from Holt Farm, had provided a heavy diet of scriptural teaching flavoured with a belief in the waywardness of children and their need for frequent chastisement.

The school log book regularly records the saga of unhappiness - May 21st was a typical example... “Punished a boy severely for deceit and spoke to the whole school of deceitful actions. Gave a scripture lesson on Set and his descendents”. The conflict came to its inevitable end one day in June when the vicar’s daughters, Margaret and Grace (who were frequent and kindly helpers in the classroom), found the children “Extremely noisy and excited”. That afternoon, Miss Tuson wrote “I resign my situation as mistress of Brindle School”.

Samuel and Elizabeth had enlightened views on education and set about winning support for better books and improved premises. That first November Samuel recorded “There is a great deal of sickness among the children. The causes are cold weather and the state of the windows of the school. There is scarcely one part of the room free from draughts”. By the following winter, the windows had been replaced, a door blocked up and a new classroom created for his wife to teach the younger children. The authorities ‘demanded that only a narrow reading, writing and arithmetic curriculum be pummelled into pupils’ but Marshall recorded that by April 1872 “We have received a set of reading books... one dozen ‘Milton’s Paradise Lost’... One large map of Lancashire... New sets of pens... Lawson’s Geography books”.

‘Poetry was introduced - ‘Pet Lamb’, ‘We are Seven’, ‘The Wreck of Hesperus’, ‘The Village Blacksmith’ and ‘The Deserted Village’. Some of the poems were not a cheerful selection; ‘We are Seven’ is a particularly sombre poem as this extract shows...

The first that died was little Jane,
In bed she moaning lay,
Till God released her of her pain,
And then she went away.
So in the churchyard she was laid,
And all the summer dry,
Together round her grave we played,
My brother John and I.

September 8th, 1873 - “Scarlet Fever creeping towards Brindle. Doctor Rigby visited school”.
24th September, 1874 - “Half the school absent with Scarlet Fever. Very bad at Top o’th’ Lane. Carbolic acid given to school” (Children from the closed community at the Workhouse still attended the school and this no doubt aggravated the problem).
November, 1874 - "Epidemic of fever. School closed for a whole month. Severe snow, roads impassable”.

‘In bed he moaning lay,
Till God released him of his pain,
And then he went away.’

William had already experienced the death of his Aunt Margaret, wife of his brother James, in October 1870 followed by the death of his young nephew, Richard, aged six, in March 1871. He was to see death close up several more times in his life.

A Fair Trade
Following the death of his father, disruption of William’s young life may have soon followed as his mother struggled to cope with the situation. By 1881 Betty had moved her family to a much smaller farm at Bank House, Clayton-le-Woods, a couple of miles to the west of Holt Farm and William, aged 19, was an apprentice clogger. He might have worked with either James Beaver or George Hilton, both of whom had clogging businesses at nearby Whittle-le-Woods (see photo).

The word ‘clog’ seems to have existed already by the fifteenth century – possibly much earlier – but clogs as used in northern England, particularly in Lancashire, may have appeared only in the second half of the eighteenth century. They were at their most popular from about 1870 to 1920, a time that coincides very nicely with William Tuson’s lifetime.

The clog was the preferred footwear of the Lancashire cotton workers, both male and female, and special clogs were made for coal mining, agricultural work and other heavy industrial usage. During the whole of the nineteenth century clogging was almost all done by hand. The soles of the clogs were made from alder wood, or owler as it was often called, and the uppers were of thick cowhide. The soles were then shod with clog-irons, or caulkers, to take the wear. The photo below shows a typical pair of men’s clogs, sans laces.

The local clogger usually bought alder cut to size and seasoned by ‘bodgers’, itinerant woodsmen. He then manufactured the clogs from start to finish, cutting the soles to shape with specialized knives (see photo). The first, the stock knife, was used to shape the sole, the second, the hollower, allowed the clogger to shape the upper part of the sole to the customer’s foot, the third, the gripper, was used to cut away a strip round the edge, onto which the upper could be attached.

The clogger would cut the leather for the upper using patterns kept specially for the purpose and after stitching it with waxed threat called ‘tachin end’ would stretch the leather over a last to adapt it to the shape of the foot. The upper was nailed to the sole with brass or iron nails and the joint covered with leather welting to make it waterproof. Finally the caulkers were nailed into place on the sole and heel – so the Lancashire worker sallied forth rather like some small breed of horse!

When clogs needed repairing they were usually done while the owner waited, and for this purpose there was a wooden bench in the clogger’s shop (see photo) where customers could sit in their socks, chatting amongst themselves until their clogs were once again ready for use. This procedure often meant that the shop was very busy at the end of the day once the cotton mills and other factories had loosed.

The roads of the Lancashire towns were paved with rectangular blocks of hard sandstone called ‘sets’, and the footpaths were made of larger oblongs of sandstone called ‘flags’. Iron-shod clogs made a huge amount of noise on such hard surfaces and at rush-hour, as the mill sirens sounded to summon the workers to their posts, or at the end of a long day, the cacophony of a thousand clogs on hard paving was tremendous and was likened to artillery fire. The children, in the meantime, used to enjoy making their clog-irons spark against the paving stones. If they were unlucky enough to damage the clogs they would pray that the clogger would be able to mend them so they would not get into too much trouble at home! At this point you might like to enjoy a nice Lancashire dialect poem about Clogs.

Upon completing his apprenticeship William may have joined a local trade association and perhaps he belonged at a later date to The Amalgamated Society of Master Cloggers. This was designed to help protect proprietors from their journeymen workers and to control prices across the trade^[2].

Mary Ann Rigby (1864-1886)
Later photos of William suggest he was a good-looking man (see first photo) and as some proof of that he married three times. By 1884 it seems that he was living at Botany Brow in Chorley, possibly lodging with his sister Margaret and her husband James Ramsbotham, plying the trade of shoemaker. Probably William liked to take a drink at the imposing adjacent Talbot Arms pub, run by Robert and Jane Rigby who had six children. The pub was still there in 2004, but, sadly, looked ready for demolition (see photo).

William’s eye fell upon the oldest Rigby daughter, Mary Anne, a power loom weaver at one of the nearby cotton mills, and in August 1885 they were married at St. Peter’s church in Chorley; he was twenty-four, she twenty-one. The young couple went to live at number 288 Station Road in Walton-le-Dale, about five miles north of Chorley and William now earned his living as a clogger. No doubt things seemed set fair and William and Mary Anne looked forward to starting a family and living a happy life together. Tragically it was not to be because Mary Anne died only six months later in February 1886, probably of tuberculosis, with William in attendance. We do not know if she was pregnant.

The wrench for William must have been awful. His hopes were dashed and the relationships he had formed with Mary Anne’s family were suddenly pointless. But perhaps he did maintain contact because my mother, Irene, mentioned that she recalled an Uncle Willie, who just might have been the older brother of William’s first wife, Mary Ann Rigby…

Annie Edmundson (1865-1891)
William must have decided to make the best of his situation, however, because only twenty months after Mary Ann died he ‘clogged again’ – to use the Lancashire vernacular – in 1887. His second wife was Annie Edmundson^[3], who was then 21 years old. She was the daughter of Anthony and Elizabeth Edmondson^[4] of Manchester and at the time was working as a domestic servant in Whittle-le-Woods. Anthony was a marble mason, or marble polisher, and research has shown that he came from Dentdale in Yorkshire and learned his profession working with Dent Marble. When Annie was born Anthony had been living in what is now central Manchester, but was then Chorlton upon Medlock. Curiously, both Anthony and Elizabeth’s families were called Edmondson, both fathers were marble masons, and both were shown as living at the same address when the marriage took place, after banns, in Manchester cathedral.

I have long wondered why Annie was living in Whittle-le-Woods and where she might have been working. In an attempt to find an answer I worked through the whole of the 1881 census for the village and discovered that there was a family named Edmondson living there. And they were a family of some standing that might well have been able to afford to employ a niece as a domestic servant in 1887. The head of the family was John Edmondson, no less a person than the Registrar of Births and Deaths for the area, and also a Land Agent. His signature appears on the census returns for both 1871 and 1881. John was widowed but had two daughters, respectively about seven and five years older than Annie, and one son. John was born in Burnley and had lived in Whittle-le-Woods since the 1850s. Although there is no proof that Annie was working for John Edmondson when she met William Tuson, it is at least an interesting possibility.

At the time of his second marriage William was living in Bamber Bridge, just south of Preston, working in his profession as a clogger. The marriage actually took place on October 27th 1887 at St. John’s church, Whittle-le-Woods (see photo). William was a man in a hurry because only 271 days later, on 24th July 1888, Annie presented him with a first son, named Richard after his grandfather, but later to be known as Dick. The event took place at School Lane in Walton le Dale and was registered about a month later by William, then a Master Clogger, which means he was an employer^[5].

Until this time William had spent the whole of his life in a fairly circumscribed area between Preston and Chorley. True he had moved about, but always within the same small district. The area was in many ways still rural, but must have come under the thrall of the cotton industry that had transformed Preston and Chorley, and had substantially affected all the smaller towns and villages between them. In addition to spinning and weaving, with their attendant machine shops, coal interests and building activities, there were also a number of textile printing and dyeing works based along the rivers of the district.

At this point, however, something happened to propel William and Annie away from this area. We do not know what it was, but conceivably it might have had something to do with Annie’s parents, who had been living at Chorlton on Medlock in Manchester in 1866, although I have not found them after this date. No matter why William and Annie chose to move to Failsworth, it was a fundamental change and henceforth William’s family never returned to live in the old traditional Tuson ground south of Preston although they long retained contact with the rest of the family in the area.

If we guess that William and Annie left the area near Preston to move nearer to Annie’s parents, we still do not know why they chose to move to Failsworth, which is about four miles north of Chorlton upon Medlock. Even if they were still alive, Annie’s parents do not appear to have been living in Failsworth or the adjacent area of Newton Heath at the time of the 1891 census.

Failsworth was not a particularly notable settlement at that time. It was an industrialising area whose principle merit was its good location about half way between Manchester and Oldham – respectively the most important production and commercial centre of the cotton industry and the greatest cotton-spinning town in the world. Failsworth certainly enjoyed excellent communications – by road, rail and canal – and had seen the development of a number of cotton mills and other industrial facilities, such as a tannery, small engineering works and a brewery. Most of these activities were located along the line of the Rochdale canal and they provided enough jobs to support a vigourous community. Otherwise the settlement had little else to recommend it. The largest employer of labour was probably the Firs mill, with 700 workers; Ben Brierley lambasted the owners for their stinginess in paying the workers partly in tokens that could be redeemed only at their own 'tuck shop'. The population in 1861 was 5,113^[6a] but had risen to 14,152 by 1901 mainly due to the growth in the number and size of the cotton mills^[6b].

William set up his business as a Master Clogger in 1889 at well-located premises at 278 Oldham Road where the family also lived behind and above the shop (see photo)^[6]. It was there that his second son, Harry, was born in October 1889. Only 15 months later William and Annie’s third and final son, Jim, was born, but tragedy followed for Annie never recovered from the birth and died at home only a week later on January 18th 1891. For the second time in his life, aged only 29, William was a widower, this time with three small boys at home and far from the support of his family.

Mary Schofield (1865-ca 1923)
In his hour of need William called for help on his family. His sister, Ann, the former unappreciated Brindle school mistress, now a nurse, was living with William at the time of the 1891 census in April and caring for the two older boys. Baby Jim, aged three months at the time of the census, was sent to be cared for by his Aunt Margery Mason (nee Tuson) at Clayton Le Woods. Thereafter William’s future seems to have depended on three important facts. First, he had his own business, so had a source of income. Second, he was smart and had ambition, as subsequent events showed. Third, he still had his good looks. William quickly employed a local lady called Mary Schofield to act as nurse and housekeeper^[7].

Mary was born in 1865, the daughter of George Schofield and Elizabeth nee Travis. She had one brother, Ernest, born in 1870, and it appears that Elizabeth died at, or soon after, Ernest's birth.  Thereafter Mary lived with her father and her grandmother, Betty, always in Failsworth. Her father was a grocer in 1871, but later seems to have become a coal merchant. He had probably died before 1881 because at that time Mary was living with an uncle, James, a retired draper. Her brother was then living with another uncle, John, who was a drysalter but later became a coal merchant, a business that Ernest himself eventually took up.

So, Mary had quite a difficult up-bringing, loosing both parents before she was sixteen, at which  time she was working as a cotton weaver. The 1891 census, taken on 5th April, reveals that Mary was a ‘boarder’ ‘living on their (sic) own means’, yet this must be almost exactly when Mary had struck up contact with William. She was 25 years old.

William’s choice of Mary to solve his domestic difficulties proved excellent, and he speedily decided that he could get along very well with her. They married at Newton Heath church in August of the same year that Annie died – 1891; one of the witnesses was Ann Tuson. Mary brought up the three boys as her sons and was the only mother they ever knew. She also subsequently became grandmother to the boys’ children and evidently acquitted herself well in both roles. My mother, Irene, remembered that Grandma Mary’s potato cakes were something special!

William and his family continued living at 278 Oldham Road, and indeed that area of Failsworth must have been the Mecca for all those whose clogs needed attention, because at number 260 was another clogger’s shop, belonging to Robert Stott, a business that had existed on the site since at least the 1860s. William may have initially faced stiff competition and perhaps even some hostility as he sought to build up his business and provide an adequate income for himself and his family. By 1896 he had gained the right to vote, by virtue of the rent he paid as an Occupier of the property at number 278.

Life probably continued reasonably well for William and Mary, and they must have felt anticipation of further family happiness when Mary became pregnant. In August 1899 a boy, named George after Mary’s father, was born, but lived precisely one month. William, long acquainted with the shadow of the Grim Reaper, must have wondered at his luck in life, and Mary had to accept that she would only ever be a stepmother.

At least William’s business prospered. At the time of the 1901 census he was a Boot and Shoe Maker and a Shopkeeper, and had men under his employment, still at 278 Oldham Road. In the same year the address ‘108 Ashton Road East’ in Failsworth makes its first appearance under William’s name in the Register of Electors, so it seems that he was now running two sets of business premises. This situation continued until 1909, after which William’s electoral qualification changes to ‘Ownership Elector’ based on leased property at 108 Ashton Road East and the adjacent house at number 1, Burnley Street, Failsworth (see photo).

The first decade of the new century thus passed with William’s three boys leaving school and then all moving in to what became boot and shoe repair shops and learning the trade, ready to equip them to earn their own livings. From 1911 new events began to crowd in on the family. Dick, the oldest boy was preparing to marry towards the end of the year, but was suddenly ‘overtaken’ by his younger brother Harry, who wed Dora Heald in some haste in the spring, and a pre-ordered baby, to be called William like his grandfather, arrived in July. Thus William became a grandparent, and it would be churlish to think that Mary did not also feel the delight of finding herself with a small step-grandson to fuss over. My grandfather Dick’s wedding followed in September, to Esther Ann (‘Hetty’) Sykes. Meanwhile, Jim, the youngest boy, was experiencing the wanderlust and decided to take himself off to New Zealand. He sailed on the ship Corinthia towards the end of 1912 and was to spend several years in North Island, doing various jobs and maintaining a correspondence with the family in England. Before Jim left on his odyssey William decided that the family should pose for the fine photo that is included below.

Though ‘losing’ a son to the Antipodes, William and Mary must have been thrilled when Dick and Hetty produced their first grand daughter, Nellie, in February 1913. Tragically their joy was short-lived for Nellie died before reaching her first birthday. Perhaps it was some consolation to William and Mary that Harry and Dora had a second son, named Jim after the wanderer in New Zealand, in November of the same year (see photo at left).

Perspective
At this point, just a few months before the outbreak of the First World War, we can digress a little to try to put William’s new life in the Manchester area into a wider context.

Initially Oldham was a bit like Preston – it appeared to have few natural advantages as a site for industry, but as the steam engine replaced the water wheel, so Oldham began to make headway. Unlike Preston, Oldham was built on productive coal measures able to provide coal and ironstone, and clay for brick making. Its position on a hill gave it a moist climate, important to maintaining the condition of the cotton fibres during processing. And it was able to attract a flexible and capable work force. By 1866 Oldham had more spindles than any other town in the world^[10] but periods of good trade and expansion of capacity were followed by downturns and hardship. The year 1885 was one of the bad years, with a 13-week lockout of the workers by the manufacturers. Wages were depressed, with short-time and abatements of pay. There was a better period in 1888-89 when several new mills were built in Oldham, and though this is the time when William moved his family to Failsworth, it was not really in Failsworth that the expansion was taking place.

It was during the following decade that William established his business presence and he did sufficiently well that by 1898 he had managed to open his second shop, in Ashton Road East. This period was not favourable to the cotton industry and 1891 to 1896 was a tough time. Thereafter trade began to revive and with profits restored new cotton mill construction quickly began to take place. This phase of expansion of the Edwardian era – which was to be the last for the Lancashire cotton industry – was particularly concentrated on the Manchester side of Oldham, stretching down through Hollinwood into Failsworth. Mill workers in their thousands followed the capital^[11] and this in turn created the need for additional service industries. Now William was in the right place at the right time and there was money was to be made out of clogs, boots and shoes – at least for a couple of generations. In the first years of the twentieth century five huge state-of-the-art mills were built in Failsworth – the Argyll, Marlborough No. 1 and No. 2, the Regent (see photo) and the Mersey. Several others were built nearby in Hollinwood, such as the Devon, Fox and Heron.

Because clogs and boots were the worker’s usual footwear and required periodic repair and maintenance, William was in the business of supplying an essential service. If times were hard business may have been slack, but clogs and boots were not an optional extra and always needed attention, especially in winter. Later, the business evolved more towards boot and shoe repairs and the clogger’s skills were called for less frequently. In William’s day boots and shoes were made with leather uppers and leather soles; rubber and plastic did not exist and fashion footwear was relatively unimportant. Clogs, boots and shoes would be expected to last several years and during their lifetimes would provide the repairer with a constant income stream as caulkers or soles and heels needed replacing.

As mentioned, by 1910 William had purchased the shop at Ashton Road East and the adjoining house at 1, Burnley Street. Becoming a property owner changed his electoral status from that of ‘Occupation Elector’ to the comparatively unusual ‘Ownership Elector’ and must have given him increased standing in the community.

Since ending his apprenticeship William had always been an employer of labour but with his boys now grown up and working in the business more of the money must have stayed in the family. It seems that Harry took over the shop at Ashton Road East, living, with his family, in the house at Burnley Street. In its heyday this shop employed eight men, and was so well known that the adjacent bus stop came to be called ‘Tusons’.

William and Dick continued in the shop on Oldham Road but after his marriage in 1912 Dick moved out, opening his own business about half a mile nearer to Manchester just within the limits of Failsworth. It was there, at 14 Oldham Road, that Nellie was born, and probably died.

William, meanwhile, continued to operate out of 278 Oldham Road in Failsworth, until at least 1913, possibly until much later^[12]. This was thus the situation on the eve of the First World War – William in his early fifties running his original shop, his two older sons married and running their own businesses, and his youngest son abroad in New Zealand.

War and Post-War
It appears that Dick was unable to join the army when War broke out in August 1914, either because he suffered from psoriasis, a skin condition, or because his was an exempt occupation. But William saw his other two sons enlist. Harry joined up in England and Jim volunteered for the Wellington Regiment of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force and was sent to France (see photo right). He appears to have made a visit to his family in Lancashire during the war, but on March 30th of 1918 he was killed during a German attack, along with many of his companions, about seven miles north of Albert in northern Picardy. He was twenty seven years old. William had known grief many times during his life, but it is hard to imagine how he and Mary – whom Jim called mother – must have coped with this latest shock.

Perhaps the fact that Dick and Hetty presented them with two grand daughters during the war – Mary in 1914, probably named after her step-grandmother, and Irene in 1916 – helped them understand that life goes on. Irene was probably named in hopes of better times – the name means ‘peace’. And when peace arrived in 1918 Harry came home safely. In the years following the war their last three grand children were born – in 1920 a son for Dick, called Richard, in 1923 a third boy for Harry, also called after his father, and in 1928 a last daughter for Dick, called Margaret. Irene remembered her grandfather as a kind, gentle man who, when she was confined to a wheel chair as a result of poliomyelitis, perhaps about 1923, would buy her dolly mixtures – a popular children's sweet – and take her for walks to the tranquility of the park at Hollinwood cemetery.

About this time it appears that William and Mary lived at 9, Schofield Street, Failsworth and Mary may have died there in 1923^[13]. A photo below shows William and Mary enjoying a moment in a garden in later life. After Mary's death it is uncertain just where William lived. On 3rd January 1924 he wrote his will from 16 Grenville Road, Pendleton (Manchester), the home of his daugher Isabella and her husband James Margrove. He is also understood to have lived with his son Dick, possibly at 846 Hollins Road in Hollinwood and at Northfield Road in New Moston, although his final address was given as 13 Wright Street, Failsworth, probably then the home of his son Harry. A photo of about this time shows him with Harry. After 1922 William suffered two small strokes and in December 1925 had a loss of memory. This led to what was considered to be an ‘attack of insanity’ and his admission to Crumpsall Institution in Manchester and thence to the Lancaster Moor Hospital, as a private patient, on 9th June 1926.

The records from Lancaster Moor provide quite a lot of valuable information about William, including a photo, shown below. He was 5 feet 4 inches tall, weighed 10 stones 4 lbs, had thin brown receding hair, blue eyes and an excellent grey walrus moustache. He had been bronchitic for 25 years, was found to have a weak heart and to suffer from arteriosclerosis. He was assessed as lost, confused and amnesic and thought he had been interned ‘to get him out of the road as I was going to marry someone they didn’t want me to’. The clogger, who had already clogged three times, clearly thought he might ‘clog again’!

Over the following year his physical and mental condition gradually deteriorated. He never understood that he was in Lancaster, would often get out of bed during the night ‘to go to work’ and thought he heard messages from his children saying that they had brought his slippers. He was diagnosed as suffering from senile dementia which I rather think might have been vascular dementia brought on by the small strokes. Eventually he seems to have had another stroke, became unconscious and died on 1st July 1927 at 4.30 am, aged only 66.

A Reckoning
William appears to have been quite a remarkable man, apart from his ability to attract a succession of wives! An early life that might have promised much was derailed by the death of his father and from the relatively unpromising position in which that left him he then had to rely on his own efforts. He earned for himself and his family a lifestyle that can be seen as anything other than working class and developed family habits that lasted through the next generation. For example, he was prepared to have studio photographs taken of his family. Also he was responsible for establishing a family habit of travel, both to visit relations in the area south of Preston and to take holidays in, for example, North Wales. Then again he may have had a car very early on. There are surviving postcards of holidays in Llandudno and Colwyn Bay in 1912 and in Aberystwyth in 1913. Such family holidays continued right through the 1930’s, as evidenced by Irene’s photo albums of that period.

By way of contrast, at that time the type of holidays that working class people were taking, if any, were trips to resorts such as Blackpool or Southport by train or charabanc^[14]; these included day trips and possibly a week’s annual holiday for the lucky ones. Car ownership and trips to superior resorts such as Llandudno and Colwyn Bay were for the few.

William was a hard-working man who persevered through the adversity of considerable personal tragedy and became a successful businessman able to take pride in the achievements of his sons, and pleasure in his six grandchildren. He became a property owner and was eventually quite comfortably off. When he died the net value of his estate was £1,056-19s-6d. He left a number of bequests to relatives (not all of whom can I clearly identify) and added: "I should have liked to have given legacies to all my ... nephews and nieces but the number of the same does not permit me to do so". He left the residue of his estate to his two surviving sons, Dick and Harry, and this may have included cottages at Ashton Road East in Failsworth^[15].

Notes and References

[1] http://brindlehistoricalsociety.org.uk/features/samuelmarshallfeature.htm   
[2] Much of the information concerning clogs comes from Bob Dobson’s little book ‘Concerning Clogs’, published in 1979 by Dalesman Books.
[3] The Family Tree shows the spelling as ‘Edmondson’, but the marriage certificate indicates ‘Edmundson’.
[4] This is the orthography shown on their marriage certificate, and that used for their signatures.
[5] Per Dick Tuson’s birth certificate.
[6] It faces the Bethel chapel and, in 2004, still stands.

[6a] http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/LAN/Failsworth/

[6b]  http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.asp?compid=41418

[7] Mary Schofield had a relative, presumably a brother, Ernest, who was quite a prosperous coal merchant with a business at the corner of Ashton Road East and Roman Road, Failsworth. He lived in a sizeable house near the corner of Ashton Road East with Lord Lane. Ernest used to keep his large carthorse in the tiny yard at the back of the house. There were three girls, Lizzie and Phyllis, neither of whom married, and Florence who married someone called Dootson and had a daughter called Irene. The Dootsons lived at Corporation Street in Failsworth. Ernest lived until about age 90, a small gruff man with a very bald head.
[8] This neglects the important value-added finishing end of the business, including, dyeing and printing.
[9] German journalist Oscar T. Schweiner, reported in The Cotton Mills of Oldham by Duncan Gurr and Julian Hunt, Third edition, 1998, Arts & Heritage Publications, Oldham.
[10] Gurr, D. and J. Hunt, 1998, The Cotton Mills of Oldham, 3rd. ed., Arts & Heritage Publications, Oldham Education & Leisure Services, ISBN 0 902809 46 6.
[11] For example, William (Billy) Dunkerley, my paternal grandfather, was brought up and spent his whole life in Oldham until attracted to the new Regent cotton mill in Failsworth. He stayed to become Chairman of Failsworth Council on four occasions and his family lived in Failsworth for many years.

[12] This can be deduced from the Failsworth Registers of Electors held at the Local Studies Section in Union, Street, Oldham. Unfortunately the records from 1913 to 1934 are missing.
[13] Irene had vague recollections of Mary being laid out in a coffin at Schofield Street.
[14] A most uncomfortable form of primitive bus, usually called a ‘sharrah’.

[15] I wonder if William did not pass most of his property on to his two sons well before his death - in particular the business assets, but perhaps also some property.

Written by Philip Dunkerley

This page was last modified on 02 October 2008