A Family Story

The Family Story was written by the late Dorothy Tillotson and appears here with the kind permission of her brother in the hope that it will encourage others to record their 'Family Story'

Until I read the book on Yorkshire surnames which sister Ethel discovered in Blackburn library, I had always assumed that the Tillotson family had settled in Bolton (Tillotson newspapers) from much further east in Yorkshire and that one branch had gone from Blackburn further into the Calder Valley as our father had cousins in Nelson and Burnley. These cousins always came to tea when Burnley were playing Blackburn Rovers (both in the First Division at that time). On a cold day Mother always had a hot meal ready when they all trooped in hungry as hunters. Evidently this was not the case as the Tillotsons were in Colne long before the Bolton move.

        I know Grandmother Tillotson was born in 1851 as I have her birth certificate and her husband was supposed to be very much older than she was but he would never tell anyone how old he was, though I have hear 10 - 15 years older than Grandma.

        He died when our father was just 16 and Dad was actually at Bank Top Sunday School Anniversary Tea Party when he was sent for, as his Father had died suddenly.

        Grandfather Tillotson had been a labourer in a cotton mill and fell down an unguarded lift shaft whilst moving weft from the floor to another. His back was badly damaged but there was no workman's compensation in those days and he had to earn his living 'knocking up' people to go to work from about 6 a.m. (no alarm clocks). This accident triggered off asthma and it must have been very difficult for him to turn out so early in bad weather. I've heard Dad say he had to walk with his back to the wind to get about in stormy weather.

        I've wondered if he was the one from whom we all seem to have got our good memories. He had a fabulous memory for dates and in a day and age when reading and writing was uncommon amongst working people, he won bets from other people (he was not a betting man) on all kinds of topics.

        His favourite trick to get his three sons out of bed on cold winter mornings was to pull the blankets off then when he was just back from his knocking up rounds and put his cold hands on any handy part of their anatomy - a real joker. Sister Ethel reminded me, on reading my rough notes that this first attempt to arouse his three sleeping sons was to rattle the bottom step of the staircase with his clogs and shout in mock wrath 'Dammit you won't go to bed at eight and dammit you won't get up in the morning'.

        He evidently had to retire very early himself to get up early for his round and on one famous occasion they had a visitor who would not take the hint to go home at a reasonable hour so Grandfather gave him the key of the door, asked him to lock up on his way out and drop the key through the letter box. Hasty departure of tardy guest I should imagine.

        Mother used to entertain us with stories of arriving in Liverpool from Florida the year she was six, and it was snowing on the 6th June. I always took this story as a bit of poetic licence until one day I actually saw it hailstone till the street were white over in June, so after that I was a bit more careful in my judgements.

           She had been born in St. Augusta, Florida, U.S.A. the only child of Alfred and Rachael Bury, but her mother died when she was only six months old as a result of an earthquake shock. This destroyed the building where records of births, deaths and marriages were kept and her father had to swear an affidavit that mother was his daughter and to the date that she was born. I actually saw this document but it has since been lost.

        I was talking to an American couple in Plymouth one year when on holiday. He was a Professor at a University on the Pacific coast and he said that St. Augusta was the eldest settlement of Europeans in the U.S.A. settled by the Spaniards long before the French and British got there. He was surprised about the earthquake story as it is not in an earthquake zone, but I could only tell him about the destruction of the registry office and the sworn statement I had seen.

        I seem to have learned very little of Mother's people as to dates and marriage partners, possibly because her mother died young and her father died soon after our eldest brother was born.

        Grandfather Bury was a salesman for a Yorkshire woollen firm (his hometown was Nelson) and he was living in Florida with his wife and daughter as his firm's representative. He was a first class swimmer and swam for England during his stay in America. Whether or not these were the equivalent of the modern Olympics I have no way of knowing but he had medals for swimming in all kinds of events which we played with regularly as children, and of course, they got lost. I think it surprising now that we placed so little value on these hard earned trophies.

        Mother often talked about being to sea to learn to swim at three year's old and is sounds terrible, but I expect her father knew all about the buoyancy of seawater and he was on hand to see her safe.

        His brother, Vincent Bury, started work as a labourer in a cotton mill but worked his way to become manager. He did not marry until he was 60 and this upset his sister Emma, who had been his housekeeper and companion until that time. She died very soon after from the upset.

        I think we have always assumed that, apart from Walter who is dark haired and dark eyed like our mother, that the rest of the family too after the Tillotson side for looks and colouring, but sister Ethel told me recently that she was once at Uncle Vins at Cleveleys and saw a photograph of him as a young man, and it could have been our second brother Alfred. She commented on this and his niece who was acting as housekeeper after his wife died, said there was a photo of Aunt Emma upstairs and it was incredible like sister Ethel herself.

        James Halliwell Becket was our Grandmother Bury's brother. He was an auctioneer and valuer and seemed to me as a child to be very well off. He lived in Irving Place, off Saunders Road, with his wife Elizabeth who we called Auntie Lizzie and she was a very gentle kindly woman. They had no children of their own and seemed to think a great deal about our mother. I remember her being at our house in November, 1926 when our little sister, Edith died, and she was as heart broken as the rest of us.

        Uncle Jim was of a more unbending nature and we seemed to have little to do with him after he retired and went to live (like Uncle Vin) in Cleveleys, a great place for the retired in the early 30s.

        It was said that most of Mother's people were of professional types, teachers, managers etc., and I remember going to a wedding of one of her cousins in Nelson when I was about nine. Mother and I had new clothes, she a suit with a long skirt and I a white dress, white socks and shiny black shoes with a strap that buttoned over. I can remember being on the train going to Nelson, and the church was St. Margaret's, Scotland Road, Nelson. (Some-one told me later that was the church for well-to-do weddings in Nelson). My impression was of beautifully dressed people who went out of their way to make us welcome and of dancing with a girl about 12 years old, who insisted that I could waltz when I had never been on a dance floor before. I had a lovely time.

        One last memory of the Bury side. Mother said she went to live with her Grandma Bury when she first came home from America and she was small with long black hair with no trace of grey though she lived to be 80. The one I remember best, of course is Grandma Tillotson, who was the only grandparent still alive when most of us were born. She had been living with Uncle Sam, Auntie Janey and their children until our parents moved into the shop in Peel Street just before I was born in 1915, and she lived with us until she died in 1927. This move into the shop had been brought about because of an injury Dad had suffered to his thigh when he was a boy of 9. He was kicked in the groin playing at football, which left him with one leg shorter than the other. He often said wryly that whilst it had crippled him, it had probably saved his life in the First World War as many of his friends and neighbours had been killed. But his leg was proving troublesome just before the War started and his doctor warned him that it could turn tubercular if he did not get into a drier, warmer environment. They had been living in Princess Street, Waterfall at that time and the local cotton mill was damp and he was often laid on dank floors repairing floats and cleaning under the looms, so they took the doctor's advice and moved into the shop in Peel Street early in 1915 and we stayed there until 1947.

        When you realise that Mother and Father had to leave school at 12 years to start work, they made a really good job of their business. They were up early for the milk round and for people starting work at 6 a.m. calling in the shop for halfpenny mugs of coffee, and late at night when their last customers were at 10 p.m. Mother had a wonderful gift for book-keeping (long before the days of adding machines) and our customers used to swear by her accounting and she never made mistakes with their weekly accounts. Perhaps it was an inherited gift from her family background of teachers, managers and valuers coming out.

        Grandmother must have been a tower of strength to young parents with so many children to look after and a shop and milk round to cope with. I remember her ironing, washing up, baking (who could forget her speciality - Grandma's fruit loaf with extra treacle), getting us ready for school and being readily available in all kinds of domestic crises. I feel that she must have come from sound yeoman stock herself, as she often said that as children their staple diet was porridge with skimmed milk (buttermilk we called it). In spite of this was 5ft 6in tall and took a size 6 shoe in a day and age when 5ft was average height for women and size 3 shoes were more normal.

        She was married at 19 at St. Mark's Church then on Church brow before Buncer Lane was built and she had either 13 or 15 children only 3 of which lived. She talked about going back to work only 10 days after giving birth and having to walk by the wall to balance herself upright, not surprising that so many of the children died.

        She herself talked about her father carrying her to work at 6 years old to start work at 6 a.m.; there were no clocks for working people at that time and bell ringers came round to tell people the time. It was a serious offence to be late for work and her father had her in the watch-house and laid on the bench ready to start work when the time came. She was so small they had to find her a stool to stand on to reach the roving machines she had to work.

        She must have been in her early teens when the Lancashire Cotton Famine occurred. She talked of soup kitchens organised to help the needy families and after 4-5 years with no work and no doles then, all were very nearly destitute. Their family was refused aid because they had a pig in the back yard of their home in Witten Parade. I read 'King Cotton' by Thomas Armstrong some 25 years ago and ended up having a tremendous respect for the people I had sprung from but doubting if I had their stamina and determination. For a woman to have experiences like these and to be left a widow at 51 or 52 and live a happy useful life until she was 75 speaks for itself of courage of no mean order.

        Having her birth certificate given to me (I think it was found amongst Cousin Harold's papers after he died in 1974) gave me food for thought. Grandma had always said that Dorothy was an old family name and the eldest daughter must always be so named. It proves that it was so in her case, as she was the eldest daughter of her father's second marriage and this second wife was Dorothy Chambers before her marriage. I remember several Dorothys being talked about, Chambers, Farron, Richmond, Smith and of course Tillotson.

        Aunt Jane, mother of Martha, Clara, Ada and James Woods, was the eldest daughter of the first marriage and Grandma was very fond of her. She is said to have died of grief within a week of receiving news of the death of her only son in the First World War. He was in the Medical Corps in India and died of cholera.

        Cousin Fred and had always been interested in Grandma's side of the family and had some theory that she was related to the Chamberlains who owned half of Birkenhead and because of some witless yokel, we had been done our of this fortune. This birth certificate tends to disprove this, as Great-Grandma's maiden name was Chambers. One other point about this birth certificate was interesting. Dad always insisted his second name was spelled FARRON and he was given this name to honour his mother's favourite brother Thomas Farron, but the spelling the certificate says FARREN and on a copy of my own birth certificate it is also given as Farren.

        I had not thought so many memories could come flooding back when I started this family history.

        Uncle Sam (father of the aforementioned Fred and Harold and our father's eldest brother) was very small in height but with vivid merry blue eyes and a gift for reciting Lancashire dialect poems to everyone's delight and a gift for playing musical instruments by ear (piano, organ, concertina). Dad talked about his playing on outings for the lads and lasses to dance to. When I read about our family having its origins in Cowling in the West Riding, I remembered Philip Snowden, a stalwart of the Labour Party in the early 1900s who converted all the young radicals like Dad to Labour supporters, was himself born in Cowling and he was greatly like Uncle Sam in build and looks. Who knows, could there be some blood connection there?

        Then Uncle Arthur, Dad's second brother who went to America in 1912 and made a small fortune by our standards with his skill on the stock market, and whose widow, Alice formerly Taylor, remembered us all in her will when she died in 1965.

        We must all remember the ice cream all of us at some time helped to produce in the old fashioned methods of turning an inner container placed in outer case, the space between the two containers being packed with ice and freezing salt, and then we had to turn a handle like mad to make the ice cream mixture solidify. Dad's favourite ploy when the ice cream was set was to send one of us out in the district sucking a cornet, and the cry would go up from the local children 'Tilly's icecream is ready, and the stampede was on.

        The recipe for this really first class ice cream was from Auntie Alice's family, the Taylors of Blackburn who sold ice-cream locally for decades and I now find it incredible that none of us were bright enough or interested enough to write it down for future reference. It strikes me forcibly now when it is too late that we are very careless with out family treasures, trivial though they may have seemed to anyone else. Lost papers, which cannot be replaced, hard won sporting trophies and even ice cream recipes - all gone.

         One last thought on family likenesses. Tom and wife Ethel once took me to Woburn Abbey and we went into the Abbey itself to see the portraits. There was one of John Tillotson (Archbishop of Canterbury) and it was so like our own father that we were amazed; even to the trick of sitting listening with his chin propped in his hand. Very uncanny.

        Incidentally, whilst Ethel and I were out with the ramblers from Queens Hall one Saturday afternoon we went into the church at Lowchurch-in-Pendle. In one of the booklets on sale in the church at that time, it mentioned that the mother of Archbishop Tillotson was buried in the churchyard there and she was the sister of the notorious Alice Nutter of Roughlee Hall who had been hanged at Lancaster Castle as a witch. The first I ever heard of John Tillotson was when I was in hospital with appendicitis at 12 years old when an Anglican vicar came to talk to me and was very intrigued with my surname. He said what a famous man he had been and that his book of sermons was still used to this day.

        Writing all these memories and names makes me think; with two Archbishops names in our family tree (Tillotson and Becket) we ought to have achieved at least a parson. Perhaps the next generation will oblige.