William Dunkerley (1827 - 1869) and Sophia Barratt (abt. 1826 - 1889)
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William Dunkerley and Sophia Barratt represent the people of Oldham who saw the landscape around them transformed from that of an industrialising town surrounded by green fields to one covered by cotton mills, forges, coal mines and unremitting rows of red-brick workers' houses. They were children of the industrial revolution - for it was in full swing when they were born - and were subjected to much of its callousness, but they also saw the start of better times as political reform and lowered trade barriers began to deliver some improvements in the lives of what came to be known as the working classes. They must have had some sense of hope for their children's futures.
Perhaps a augury of this promise was the name of the chapel - 'Hope' - where baby William Dunkerley was baptised on 13th September 1827 at Greenacres, Oldham, when six weeks old. Hope Independent Chapel had been founded in 1824 by Samuel Lees of the Soho Iron Works to provide his workpeople with a place of his owh faith to worship in, and he endowed it with several streets of workmens's cottages. According to the baptismal register, William's family was then living at ‘G. A. Moor’, taken to be ‘Greenacres Moor’, situated on the eastern side of Oldham, but we have no evidence that William’s father worked at the Soho Works, and the chapel was presumably available to serve the needs of other non-conformists in the area.
Although William was the ninth of ten siblings, he was in fact the only boy in the family. He would have had an older brother, Daniel, but the child had died in Oldham Workhouse, and three older sisters had also died young. William, however, had four surviving older sisters and he was to have a younger brother, Joseph, who was born when he was 2½ years old. His father, Joseph, appears to have been working at the time as a shoemaker, but there is a fair chance that he was also a cotton hand-loom weaver, a trade he is known to have followed some years earlier. (Link to the story of William's parents). With such a substantial family, and the ever-present threat of the workhouse that his family had already experienced, Joseph would have needed to raise income every way possible. No doubt the family home was overcrowded and William would have fought for his fair share of the porridge with his siblings around the family table.
It could not have helped that William was born at a difficult time too. In 1826 trade in Oldham deteriorated abruptly and many cotton masters went bust in what was considered to be the worst recession the town had experienced up to that time. The mule spinners went on strike and there were thousands of unemployed and starving people. Nettles and other greens were being picked precisely on Greenacres Moor, evidently near to where the family then resided, to boil and mix with the oatmeal, the staple of the poor diet of the day. William is therefore likely to have known both hunger and poverty. The Oldham mob vented its desperation on the power looms, then being introduced and which were considered to be taking work away from the hand-loom weavers. These they smashed when possible, and the winter of 1826/27 ‘resounded with the quarrels of masters and men’. Yet in 1827 demand from Europe picked up and three new cotton mills were built in Oldham.
Unfortunately we have no information about William’s boyhood, but it appears that he must have obtained at least a rudimentary education, perhaps at the Sunday school that would have been run at Hope Chapel, because he was later able to sign his name with some style on official documents – and he was right-handed. He probably started work as a child in one of the local cotton mills, so as to help with the family budget. Certainly he was working in a cotton mill when he was fourteen year old at the time of the 1841 Census, for his occupation there is given as ‘Roller Carrier’. The family were then living at Green Field Gate, a small settlement located just off Glodwick Lane, south of the old workhouse where his family had been interned, and south of Greenacres Moor. It is conceivable that William worked at the Greenbank No. 1 Mill built by John Lees of Mount Pleasant on the corner of Greengate Street and Glodwick Lane, just a few yards from Green Field Gate. I have explained earlier that William’s father, Joseph, might at this time have been working at Greenbank Mill as a Watchman, and if this is correct it is quite likely that his young son would have been employed in the same establishment.
In 1848, when William was 20 years old, he married Sophia Barratt who had been born nearby in Shaw. The marriage took place on 23rd January, after banns, at Saddleworth Church, the couple then both living nearby, in Uppermill. Administratively, Saddleworth was in Yorkshire, but Ammon Wrigley, the Saddleworth poet, was later to say that Saddleworth always looked towards Lancashire. When William married he was a joiner, a profession with which he was to be associated, one way or another, for much of his life. There is considerable confusion as to when Sophia was born with evidence ranging from 1st September 1820 to 24th April 1831 and it is my belief that Sophia never knew her own date of birth. The best interpretation is late 1826, deduced from a combination of the age shown on her marriage certificate - ‘of full age’ (i.e. 21) and the age of 24 given for the 1851 Census. In passing it may be noted that Sophia was illiterate, as demonstrated by the fact that in 1869 and again in 1875 she was obliged to make her mark as she was unable to sign her name. Her parents were John and Sarah Barratt, both born about 1794, he in Oldham, she in Shaw. At the time John’s occupation was that of ‘Labourer’ and on the proceeds of his pay he and Sarah had to support a family of at least four children. There were no silver spoons in those mouths!
By the time of the 1851 Census, William and Sophia’s first child, Joseph, had been born and the family had moved back to Oldham. They were living in ‘Glodwick’ as lodgers with Sophia’s parents, two sisters and a brother. John Barratt was then an agricultural labourer, William was a cotton weaver and Sophia a cardroom hand.
Although Oldham became more famous for spinning than weaving, there were plenty of mills that did both until well into the nineteenth century and Greenbank Mill was one of them. By 1851 cotton weaving on the handloom was in terminal decline so it is much more likely that William wove in a mill rather than on the handloom. It seems likely, therefore, that both William and Sophia worked for wages in a nearby cotton mill, most likely the nearby Greenbank Mill which employed 550 hands in 1856 , the largest cotton concern in the area.
By 1854 when their second son, James, was born, the family was living at Sugar Meadow on the east side of Glodwick Road ([d] on map). So far as I can tell, the housing would have been pre-industrial cottages, possibly thatched, probably of poor quality and without running water; the toilet would have been a privy in the back yard or garden. Thus Sugar Meadow was probably an old and unimportant settlement of the type generally called a ‘fold’, or ‘fowt’ in the local dialect. The oldest reference to the settlement I have found is in the Oldham Poor Ley of 1793 and buildings believed to be Sugar Meadow are on Dunn's 1829 Map of Oldham and the Ordnance Survey maps of 1848. A field (no. 857) on the Tithe Map of 1848, located immediately north of the properties suspected to be Sugar Meadow, carries the same name ([c] on map). Until the late 1870s this area of Glodwick was comparatively rural with ‘fowts’ mostly close to the main road running south from Bottom o’ th’ Moor down to Glodwick village, appropriately called either Glodwick Lane or Glodwick Road. The 1848 Ordnance Survey map shows several small coal pits in the area, plus a 'brick field' and a nearby 'sandstone quarry'. Beside the Greenbank mill complex there were other scattered cotton mills, but most of the activity was further north at Bottom o’ th’ Moor, Mumps or in Oldham town itself. According to James’ birth certificate, in 1854 William was then working as a ‘French Polisher’, an occupation related to that of carpenter that he had practiced at Uppermill.
The family still lived in the same general area – Glodwick Lane – perhaps still in Sugar Meadow – in 1857 when their third son, John William was born. William had once again changed his occupation and was now a ‘Labourer at a Machine Works’, of which there would have been several within walking distance. William, however, leaves the impression that throughout his life he was unable to maintain regular employment and this perhaps meant that the family was always financially insecure.
This impression is only reinforced by the 1861 Census. By this date the family were listed as living at Greenfield Gate ([b] on map), where his parents had lived from at least 1841 to 1847, when his mother died, and where William probably stayed for the rest of his life [1]. At the time he was 33 and his occupation was shown as ‘House Painter’. This was probably one of the subsidiary trades related to the house-building booms that accompanied the rapid periodic expansions of Oldham’s cotton spinning capacity. William was the only wage-earner for the family, then consisting of his wife and three young children, which almost certainly indicates that they would have had difficulty in making ends meet. This is probably reinforced by an interpretation that Greenfield Gate is likely to have been similarly poor housing to that at Sugar Meadow. Although it still existed at the time of the 1871 Census, it was probably demolished soon after as Glodwick was mostly covered by rows of red-brick terraced housing built to meet the irresistible needs of the Oldham's expanding cotton industry. Greenfield Gate was situated on the west side of Glodwick Road, where the present Nugget Street joins, immediately south of four streets of back-to-back houses built for employees of the Greenbank Mill ([a] on map). It was only a couple of minutes walk from Sugar Meadow.
About the time of the 1861 Census, hostilities began between the North and South in the American Civil War, and this quickly led to disruption in the supply of raw cotton to Lancashire. This and speculation by merchants soon led to soaring prices which it initially proved impossible to pass on, such that many mills closed or were forced to work part-time. There was huge hardship, including actual starvation, across the cotton districts, especially among the remaining handloom weavers in the area around Blackburn, but Oldham could not escape. During the second half of 1862 thousands of the town’s workers lost their incomes and many were forced to turn to the Poor Law Guardians, who were overwhelmed, for help. At the end of 1862 over 27,000 workers, at least a quarter of the population of the district, were getting relief – money to buy food or coal, or to pay the rent . It is difficult to imagine that William was not one of them, given his frequent switches of occupation. Oldham was able to find some new sources of cotton for spinning – including short-staple cotton from Surat in India and some from Brazil, and developed skills in using waste cotton, but many small concerns were forced to close. Although the town survived – some sections even prospered – the Cotton Famine marked the lives of a generation and produced some outstanding Lancashire dialect poetry of great dignity and feeling, such as Samuel Laycock’s ‘Welcome, Bonny Brid’ . This described the mixed feelings of the poet on the arrival of a new baby during this time of extreme hardship. On the one hand, there was the joy of a new baby; on the other it was another mouth to feed at a time of great shortage.
Curiously, although Laycock’s poem is about a baby boy, his newborn child was actually a girl. William and Sophia must have understood the poem only too well, for their first daughter, Harriet, was born in April 1864. The family address, as shown on the birth certificate, was Glodwick Lane (which probably meant Greenhill Gate), and William was at least working, as a ‘machine painter’. On 2nd March 1869 when their second daughter, Sarah Hannah, arrived the family’s address was once again Greenhill Gate and William’s occupation was ‘wood polisher’. Tragically for the family he lived only a few weeks after the birth of Sarah Hannah, for he died on 29th April of ‘phthisis dropsy’, probably tuberculosis which was then sadly prevalent in poor areas. The death was registered by a neighbour the following day and William was laid to rest on May 4th in a plot at Greenacres cemetery (see photo); perhaps he had subscribed to a burial plan, then in vogue, and so the family had been able to afford a ‘decent burial’. More than that, they could also afford to have commemorative cards printed for the occasion, one of which ended up with relatives in America and was recently copied bac
k to me over the internet. Its melancholy message reads:
In Memory of the late WILLIAM DUNKERLEY
Of Greenfield Gate, Glodwick Road,
Who Died April 29th, in his 42nd year;
AND WAS INTERRED AT GREENACRES CEMETERY, MAY 4TH, 1869.
____________________
Oh! cease to mourn; in life we are in death,
And life is but a shadow and a breath.
Oh! cease to mourn; learn meekly to obey;
The Lord that gave may surely take away.
So, William died when only 41 years old, a man who almost certainly had a tough life. Things were not about to get any easier for Sophia, who was now left with five children at home, including a five-year old and a new-born baby. What was she to do? Somehow she managed. The 1871 Census shows that she had moved from Greenhill Gate a short distance to Burton Street, which appears to have been similarly poor housing that also disappeared in the rebuilding of Glodwick soon afterwards [2]. Sophia’s occupation was shown as ‘housekeeper’ and all the children still lived with her; Joseph and John were cotton piecers, James a warehouseman, Harriet a scholar; Sarah was just two years old. Also living with them was Melina Barratt, Sophia’s older sister, who was working as a cardroom operative. Once again it may be that the family worked at the nearby Greenbank Mill.
The following years brought a number of changes. We do not, at present, know if Joseph married [3], but in June 1874 his younger brother, James, married Emma Coop. His address at the time was given as Glodwick Road, which may indicate that his mother, Sophia, had moved house once again. In July of the following year Sophia remarried, to James Butler, a widowed machine grinder [4]. His place of residence at the time of the wedding appears to have been Union Street in central Oldham, and Sophia was registered as at St. Peter Street, which is in the same area. The marriage took place at St. Peter’s church .
We do not know when James Butler was widowed, although it must have been after about 1872, because he had five children including one born about that time. The marriage between him and Sophia may have been one of convenience, for the couple put together the two families such that at the time of the 1881 Census they had seven children living with them, five of James’ plus Harriet and Sarah Hannah Dunkerley. At that time they we
re living at 90, Bolton Street in Glodwick (see picture) [5]. This was probably the nicest house that Sophia knew in the whole of her life. It was, at the time, newly built, a brick terraced house probably with three bedrooms and three rooms downstairs. It was still standing in 2004. The front door opened directly on to the street, which was paved with stone ‘sets’ and there were stone-flagged ‘footpaths’ down each side. At the back was a small yard with access via a narrow entry paved with stone sets.
By the time of the 1881 Census Sophia had become a grandmother, because my grandfather, William (Billy) Dunkerley, had been born on 12th December 1874, shortly before her second marriage. She was probably a good grandmother too, because on the night of the Census, little William was staying with her at 90 Bolton Street, although his parents at the time lived a couple of miles away, at Busk in Chadderton. The last information we have of Sophia dates to 14th February 1889 when she died at 94 Retford Street in Glodwick after suffering for a week from pneumonia; the informant was her husband. She was buried on 20th February in the grave of her first husband, William, in Greenacres cemetery and her name appears on the gravestone (see picture above).
William and Sophia were born and brought up during the difficult first half of the nineteenth century, but the second part of their lives, while they were raising their family, saw conditions begin to change for the better. That period of Queen Victoria’s reign from 1845 to 1873 was called the ‘Golden Age’. The Factories Acts of 1833, 1844 and 1847 had already begun to reduce working hours and introduced inspectors to ensure that the provisions of the acts were respected. The Corn Laws were repealed in 1846 with the result that the price of bread began to fall, and the price of other goods also began to fall as the Free Trade movement made gains. During the 1850s real wages started to improve and slowly there began to be more options and opportunities for leisure. After 1851 William and Sophia may have become members of one or other of the Oldham Co-operative societies and looked forward to collecting their quarterly dividends. In the evening they may have sat round the fireside reviewing the difficulties of their childhoods and telling their children how lucky they were to have such an easy life! They had probably been awed by the arrival of the railway in Oldham and perhaps they marvelled at the start of construction of mains water in the town. Would wonders never cease?
The cotton industry was certainly experiencing better times, so much so that 1858 to 1863 saw the appearance of the Oldham Limiteds, a capital structure that became extraordinarily well developed in Oldham and which was to propel the town to the position of pre-eminent cotton spinner; twenty-eight new mills were completed. However they also experienced the hard times of the Cotton Famine, and no doubt there were plenty of other times when life was difficult. When William died Sarah, the youngest child, was only a month old and if Sophia had not remarried it seems likely that she would have faced considerable hardship as a widow with at least two young children. Although illiterate, Sophia must have been a tough and resourceful woman to keep her family together after William died. It was an immense achievement.
Notes
1. On the 1861 Census the locality is named 'Greenfield Gate'. However, immediately to the SSW was a place called 'Green Hill' that appears to have belonged to the Collinge family and was developed into mansions with formal gardens before 1848. The main drive to the houses led from Glodwick Road, precisely at 'Greenfield Gate' so that it seems by 1869, when Sarah Hannah was born, 'Greenfield Gate' was then referred to as 'Greenhill Gate'.
2. In the 1871 Census the streets preceeding Burton Street are Back Green Gate, Waterloo Street and Green Gate Street, close to but west of Glodwick Road. Following Sophia's entry Kearsley Street is mentioned, also near Glodwick Road. I have, however, been unable to locate Burton Street.
3. He may have married Mary Garforth in 1875 at St. Peter's in Oldham, but I cannot be certain.
4. Machine grinders worked in the carding section of the spinning mills. It was their job to maintain the carding engines. Sarah Hannah' grandson, Peter Brocklehurst, told me that after Sophia died James Butler 'interfered' with Sarah Hannah and was a drunkard. She therefore moved out of the house.
5. Sorry about all the parked cars!