Billinge History (the book)

From Longshaw Common to Chadwick Green.

INTRODUCTION.

Being back in Billinge after quarter of a century was like hearing a favourite tune played on an unfamiliar instrument - Silent Night on electric guitar perhaps or Down By The Riverside on bagpipes.  It took a while for the familiar to become acceptable as commonplace again, to stop staring at the sights that constitute my earliest memories, trying to understand why they looked so different.  Distance was something that had altered completely.  From Claremont Road to Billinge Hospital had seemed too far to venture as a child - for heaven’s sake it was at the other side of Longshaw!  Houses that had seemed to be mansions and trees that were once enormous now appeared almost minuscule.  Travel hadn’t changed Billinge; it had given it a different perspective.  Where I’d expected things to be twenty-five years worse than when I left this wasn’t always quite the case.  The old stone houses, that gave the place its character, had been renovated and not demolished.  The housing estates were in better condition than I’d expected, as former tenants were owners now.  Pride in new ownership was understandable and it showed.  Even better, those family and friends that ill health or gross misfortune had not struck down had mostly done well for themselves.  Someone had even written a book about the place.

There had been changes.  Where once everybody knew who lived in just about every house within walking distance, now it was difficult to spot a familiar face.  Liverpool and Manchester had touched borders at Billinge Church.  Who could ever have imagined it?  Who could have imagined traffic chaos in Carr Mill Road, busses running down Shaley Brow and Billinge Hill Quarry a rubbish dump for St Helens?  What hadn’t changed, thank goodness, was the view from Gores Lane Bridge, looking up at the Hill, and the way the old folks tell the tale.  Nobody tells the tale quite like a Billinger and there were still a few old Billingers left around the place to tell them.  My dad was one of those.  If I asked a question on any topic of village life, the answer would include a thumb nail sketch of the subject’s history and family relationships - the way they fitted into to the social fabric, who they married and where their parents came from.  Then I’d go away and write short stories such as this.

The old man has his routine well in place by now; at eighty-six he should have.  He gets up late, makes his own breakfast then reads the paper.  Late afternoon he walks up the road to the pub.  Like a well oiled machine he arrives back as dinner hits the table then goes to bed for a while before getting up if there's football on the television.  The old girl has a different routine.  After sixty-four years of marriage there’s not a lot to talk about so she’s mostly out when he’s in and when he’s out she cooks dinner.  I drop round to chat with my dad, late afternoons, before his daily excursion for a pint.  We watch boxing videos and talk about the old days and the folks that filled them but now are gone.

"His mother drowned herself in the marl pits and his brother Tommy did as well.  But that was ages after.  I never knew the mother but Jacky and me were about he same age.  Tommy was a few years older.  He never was quite with it, Tommy.  One of those the kids were frightened of.  You know that house near where your aunt lives?  That’s where those Swifts came from."

We were trying to establish lineage where surnames are few and generations many.  My dad is clued up on local genealogy.  All the old folk are.

"When you go down Long Fold Brow and those old stone cottages on the left then there’s a gap then that big house that faces the other direction.  Well the Mellings lived in this end, nearest the road, and the Swifts lived in the rest of the place.  Where the Mellings lived was only one up one down and they were a big family, at least ten of them.  They were all girls except Tommy.  The Swift’s place was better, more rooms, three bedrooms I think but I never went upstairs.  There were six brothers and two sisters but they were better off because the old man sank the shaft at Brown Heath Colliery and the other in Tanner’s Wood that linked up with it.  So he always had an under manager’s job at the pit.  They were better off than most of us.  Old Harry Melling worked when he could, sometimes at the pit or the farm or sometimes on the coal wagon, sometimes on the dole.  You had to take work where you found it."

Then he paused a while, thinking back to his childhood.

"The women didn’t work them days did they?" I ventured eventually, knowing they did but wanting to keep him talking.

"Not down the pit, well not round here anyway.  They worked on the pit brow, picking the shale out of the coal, some of the Melling girls as well.  Then they all used to ride home on top of the coal wagon."

He laughed then, at some memory he did not want to share with me.  In that moment I pictured the horse-drawn wagon with its cargo of grimy girls, sitting on the coal, taunting the blustering adolescent boy who became my father.  He smiled softly and continued.

"There was a wash house behind the house that both families shared.  They’ve turned it into a garage now.  Then a family moved in there as well, in just one room.  There were about six of them.  You’d wonder how they managed.  There was no baths or nothing them days.  And the Parrs, you know the Parrs, they lived in that first cottage going back up Long Fold.  I think that was just one up one down and there were at least eight kids there as well.  Old Jem Parr used to finish his shift down the pit then go fishing all night at Carr Mill Dam with a carbide lamp to feed the family"

He paused again, frowning slightly, so quick this time with the prompting question

"Where did they all sleep?"

"I don’t know; on the floor - anywhere.  Only one of them was musical, you know, could play an instrument.  That was Dave Parr, one of the brothers.  He could play a ukulele.  You never saw him without it, used to take it everywhere with him.  We all called him Ukulele Dave."

Then he smiled again, his memories out in the street, away from the abject, one up one down poverty of rural working class England.

"All the girls could sing, you know, harmonise.  They were Methodists.  Old Hugh Parr from the Methodists Church, he was their uncle but those Parrs lived up by the old smithy.  “It’s gone now," he added, needlessly, because even I knew that.  The smithy was still there when I was a child.

"Women had it tough those days.  They were just slaves.  I don’t think my mother ever went out, not that I can remember.  We kids did all the shopping."

Then he started making moves to leave so I left him to it.  He would lock the two up, two down, pre war, semi detached council house on his way out.  He’s very security conscious.  Somewhere out there in the rain my mother would be walking home with the shopping.  She is pretty fit for eighty-four.

It did not take long to realise how much folklore is contained in the mind of a person of my father’s age, or the way stories had passed on, from generation to generation, to become, in fact, the village’s history.  In closed societies, such as those that cling to the gentle slopes of Billinge Hill, stories kept the clan together, gave it identity and separated it from those outsiders who could be enemies.  If you don’t know about Wild Jacky, fishing in a puddle, outside the Labour in Vain, or ‘owd T Berry’ putting an expensive lock on a pigeon place with leather door-hinges, then you have to be a foreigner – and so it has always been, back into the depths of time.  Those who told the tale retained incidents of particular significance as each passing generation added to the total of village folklore.  When the original narrators were no more, these incidents remained, like the tips of icebergs, floating in a sea of the completely unknowable, melting in the sun of passing time.  Time is running out for Billinge.  There are few now left whose memories reach back to that gentle age of innocence before the First World War.  When they are gone, and their stories heard no more, a part of country life is gone forever – perhaps all that will be left of Billinge will be the name.

Longshaw.

A modicum of information concerning Billinge History is available in public records but almost none about Longshaw.  The name probably derives from ‘Long’ and the Old English ‘Shaw,’ meaning a copse or wood.  When people first settled there is not easy to assess.  Flint cores have been discovered on the south side of Billinge Hill that date back to 4,000 BC; Neolithic Man once roamed its gentle slopes.  Billinge gets its name from the ruling clan of the Varini, one of the Angle tribes who eventually displaced the native Celts in what was eventually to become Lancashire.  By 1000 to 500 BC the Aryan-speaking Celts or Gaels had arrived in Britain but where those peoples from the cold north originated is unknown.  By the time the Romans began to colonise, those people we know as Saxons were established in North Germany and the Baltic Islands.  The Angles, to whom the Varini were allied, were centred in the mid-Jutland peninsula.  These Varini were settled in the group of islands, east of the Jutland Peninsula, of which Fyn or Funen is the largest.  The Danes, who would later occupy most of the Jutland Peninsular, were still domiciled in Sweden.  A British leader, Vortigern Vitalis, allied himself with Hengist the Jute in the late 5th century, paving the way for the Anglo-Saxon exodus to Britain.  Eventually the Varini moved south then settled near the mouth of the Rhine in preparation for the sea crossing.

The Billingas in mythology are the followers or people of Billa, a leader-king of the 4th century BC.  They are mentioned in the 1st century AD by Tacitus and again in 'Beowulf', 600 years later, as being the rulers or leaders of the Varini.  These Billingas have been instrumental in establishing numerous place names throughout Europe whereas the Varini have not.  Procopius the Byzantine tells that the King of the Angles in Britain, 534-547, had a niece betrothed to Radiger, King of the Varini.  Radiger broke his promise and married his stepmother, a sister to Theudebert, King of the Franks.  The Angle King wasn't pleased by Radiger’s defection.  His forces, including the jilted girl, crossed the sea in 400 ships, seeking redress.  After suffering defeat in battle, Radiger had to marry the scorned princess and go with her back to Britain.  The rest of his tribe followed him across the sea soon afterwards.  From there their route can be followed; Lincolnshire and Norfolk are splattered with Billinga place names.  Presumably the tribe split into two groups, one of which went west along the River Nene towards Northampton.  Billing is a common Northampton surname.  The main party travelled northwest through Lincolnshire, across the River Humber, into established Daria then over the Pennines, via the Aire and Warfe valleys, to occupy vacant ground in the Ribble Valley.  That area was then part of the Celtic kingdom of Southern Reged, ruled by Urien 570-590.

The Billingas settlements, west of the Pennines, originated in the early peaceable years from c550.  It would be around that time that their main settlement, Billinge, was founded.  The land was so sparsely populated that the newcomers exerted no pressure on the locals, if indeed there were any established settlements at that time.  At first no attempt was made to overthrow the British King but gradually relations with the natives deteriorated, as more outsiders came into the area, culminating with the battle of Chester in 613, when the Britons were driven out or enslaved.

Norsemen from Norway and Sweden invaded northern England from the east and west c798 and at this time the Battle of Billingahoth (ridge of the Billingas) was fought near Whalley.  Eventually these newcomers amalgamated with the resident population.  The Angles liked to be on ground between 500 and 1000 feet above the sea and Billinge Hill, at 630 feet above sea level, was ideal for them.  From the summit they enjoyed its extensive views to forewarn them of possible unfriendly intrusion.  The Norsemen settled the lower Lancashire Plain.  After 800 nothing is know about the Bellinga tribe or its whereabouts.  It is assumed that they remained in the vicinity of Billinge Hill, consolidated their settlement and acquired their heredity lands.  Billinge Hall is almost certainly the site of the original settlement.  It was there that the Billinge family retained their principal holdings for countless generations, until John Billinge and his wife, Margaret nee Bradshaw, sold the heritage lands and the family seat to Francis Bispham in 1691.  The history of the Billinge family is contained in a remarkable publication; ‘Billinge of Billinge’ by Harry and Marjorie Billings, copies of which can be seen at Wigan, St Helens and Billinge libraries.  From that document all this information concerning early Billinge originates¹.  There is a reference to 967 as being the date when 'the first historical Billinge' died, in a book published in 1833².  In a book published in 1864³ it states that 'Billinge seems to be the first settlement of a family of Anglo-Saxon Nobles whose earliest records are said to be mythological rather than historical.'  Real evidence is recorded in the Charters of Cockersmith Abbey, to which Adam de Billinge and other members of his family donated land c1190-1201.  The Inquest of 1212 states that the manor of Billinge had long been divided into three portions, almost equal.  Men with the surname Billinge held two of these portions.  The third landowner was Simon, son of Outi de Winstanley, probably of Norman decent.  The Billinge family would have been lords of the manor, in their own rights, under the English Kings.  They descended, in an unbroken line, from those original settlers who emerged from the mists of mythology to cross the Pennines c 550, making them our royal family, Radiger our King Arthur and Billinge Hall our Camelot.  Billinge Hall still stands, shrouded in memories, but the Billinge family who created it has long since gone.  Jack and Marion Boardman moved to Billinge in 1960.  Marion, who had been a teacher before marriage, started teaching at Billinge School in 1967, when child-rearing duties permitted it.  She was still teaching when old Billinge School closed in 1980 then taught another year at the new premises.  That fact would not be remarkable except that Marion Boardman nee Howard was the daughter of Mary Alice Howard nee Billinge.  Mary Ann was one of the thirteen children born to Alan and Mary Billinge, originally from Haydock⁴.  Within the person of Marion Boardman a Billinge had returned home.

Written history began in the eighth century, due to the introduction of Latin literacy by missionaries of the Christian Church of Rome.  After he Battle of Chester in 613 the original Celtic occupants, of what would one day become Lancashire, where pushed into Wales.  Before the Norman Conquest Billinge was one of the fifteen berewicks, or dependent manors, of Newton.  A manor those days would have been a wooden building, housing a small group of families, surrounded by smaller outbuildings and a stockade.  These Anglo-Saxon farming communities probably averaged no more than forty people.  There wouldn’t have been ten thousand people living in all the lands between the Mersey and the Ribble at the time of the Norman Conquest.  The population grew slowly, most of it concentrated in East Anglia and the southern Midlands.  The taxation yield of Norfolk was more than ten times that of Lancashire, Cumberland and Northumberland combined in the early twelve hundreds, when the entire population of England and Wales combined was between three and four million⁵.  The first recorded visitation of the Black Death⁶ in 1238 probably halved it.

With the advent of literacy came record keeping.  We know from early records that Adam de Billinge rented land in Billinge from the Baron of Newton in 1212 and that after his death, around 1290, his daughter Mary married Henry, a member of the Huyton family at Knowsley.  They had two sons, William and Robert.  William died childless and Robert left four daughters.  When these four daughters married, the Manor of Billinge divided into four.  The eldest daughter married John de Heton and their share of the Manor became the Manor of Birchley.  The second daughter had a child who married Roger de Bispham.  Agnes, the third daughter married Adam de Billinge, a member of a younger branch of the old family.  The last daughter married Hugh de Winstanley.⁷

After the Conquest, a hierarchy of social obligation structured society from top to bottom.  At the apex stood the King.  At the bottom were surfs, providing service in the Lord’s fields in return for land to cultivate for their own well-being.  In the Lancashire Record Office remains an account of John Nowell swearing allegiance to Thomas of Hesketh, in May 1492, on Billinge Hill.  This record states that Thomas of Hesketh was seated on a great stone and that Nowell swore: ‘Sir, I will be your man from this day forward, and faith will I bear to you for the lands which I hold of you in Harwood.’⁸

The land was farmed from the offset or the inhabitants could not have survived.  When and where the first tillers of the soil made their dwellings is largely a matter of speculation.  Billinge Hall is almost certainly the site of the first Anglo-Saxon settlement.  From there the population would have increased and slowly spread out into the surrounding countryside.  What is certain is that the hamlets of Longshaw and Billinge developed separate identities.  The original Bispham Hall was probably built about 1346, after the marriage of Roger de Bispham to Margaret de Heyton that same year.  It seems logical to suppose that the stone houses that remain in Longshaw were constructed on the sites of previous dwellings, built to house earlier generations of agricultural labourers.  These were almost certainly wooden huts.  The landed gentry would have been the first to construct homes from stone.  It’s likely that tenant farmers followed their liege lords in the building of more permanent stone dwellings and that eventually the manual labourers were also housed in stone cottages.

For at least a thousand years farming was the only means of survival.  Clearing the woodlands and removing sufficient stones to make the land fit for cultivation would have been a slow, laborious process.  Gradually it was achieved and gradually the population, dependent on agriculture for sustenance, increased.  Though history tends to be regarded as a process dominated by the application of ideas springing from the fertile minds of men, the ability to wage war in defence or in aggression, the achievements of our heroes, the fluctuations of our country’s status in the league of worldly nations - non of this is strictly true.  The fundamental fact of history is the acquisition of food, backed by the practicalities of everyday survival, accrued and handed down over millennia.  From the day our ancestors first looked down from Billinge Hill, until the Industrial Revolution, they farmed the land to feed themselves or they did not feed at all.  The coal rush came to St Helens, Orrell and Wigan around the 1750s.  The industrialisation that followed in its wake brought new employment opportunities, yet there were still some fifty working farms, on the slopes of Billinge Hill, in the early 1930s⁹.  It took the descendants of those early Angles, who gave their name to Billinge, a thousand years to amass the resources, knowledge and population to quarry the earth beneath them and build their homes from stone.

Of the many stone buildings still standing in Longshaw it is almost certain that the earliest were The Hootons, in Cob Moor and Cosy Cottage, in Park Road.  Both of these buildings probably date from around 1650 - unfortunately neither posses a date-stone, as is the case with most stone buildings in the district.  The Manor, in Cob Moor, was built in 1830, the row of stone houses adjacent to Moss Cottage in 1876, Moss Cottage in 1877, the detached two story house in Longshaw Old Road in 1877 and the row of cottages on UpHolland Road, in front of Longshaw Common, in 1843-1847.  The title deeds to number 90 show that Daniel Taylor wrote a will in 1765 relating to this property, which eventually passed down to the Wilsons, but it is unclear if the current building replaced an earlier one.  James Melling, a local quarry owner who never married, was apparently responsible for building rows of stone houses in Longshaw from around 1845 onwards.

The various farmhouses that dot the landscape would have been built long before the cottages.  The two great ages for building farmhouses in Lancashire were 1680-1740 and 1840-1870¹⁰.  There is a record of a petition, presented to Squire Bankes, opposing the construction of a cottage by “Jonathan Tunstall in ‘Lankshaw’ dated the tenth day of October in the first yeare of the Raigne of our most Gracious Soveraigne Lord James the second. 1689.”  It’s apparent that the transition to stone dwellings did not come about quickly and whom the first inhabitants of Longshaw were is hard to tell.  What now constitutes Billinge Higher End would long have been more prominent than Chapel End because the main road, from Prescot to Wigan, ran over Shaley Brow.  It was at Brownlow that Billinge’s first school was erected.  Henry Fishwick, in his History of Lancashire, published 1894, reveals that ‘the four townships, on the corners of which now stands the St. Helens, in 1799 did not contain more than 7,000 souls.  Not until industrial St Helens developed, after the opening of the Sankey Canal in 1757, did the route between St Helens and Wigan gradually become the Main Street of Billinge.  The route that road takes was created at the end of the Ice Age when waters, retained by the ridge that Billinge Hill is part of, burst through and formed the valley in which both the Main Street of Billinge and Carr Mill Dam now lie.

ROBYS.

As far as records go back there have been Robys both in Longshaw and in Billinge.  There are still quite a few around now but in which spot they originated, or if they all stem from a common ancestor, I have not yet been able to establish.  The opinion expressed in the web page of an American Roby¹¹ is that Castle Donington, south-east of Derby, was built in the eleventh or twelfth century to command the crossing points of the river Trent.  Although the castle is now merely a mound on the northern edge of the village, there still remains a thirteenth century church in the village today.  Many Robey, Roby, Robie lines can be traced to this village.  As the history of Billinge goes back much further that the eleventh century, there is no need to suppose that our local Roby clan have their origins in Castle Donington.  It may be so; it may be just the opposite.  Early documentation is hard to find.

It was Henry VIII’s able administrator, Thomas Cromwell, who ordered the keeping of church registries from 1538.  A ‘Chapel of Ease’ was constructed at Billinge on the site of the present church, around 1534.  There is a record of James Roby, a churchwarden at St Aidan’s Billinge, wrongfully detaining £7 from money collected from the worshipers in 1539.  Early registries were kept on sheets of parchment.  Many were lost or destroyed as the years progressed.  It would be some considerable time before marriages, baptisms, and maybe burials, were performed at the Billinge Chapel of Ease.  There is a recording of Lawrence Roby of Billinge marrying Ann Wilson of Winstanley 3^rd February 1698 in the registry of St. Thomas at UpHolland.  Few early Billingers could have married in the village.  The church was rebuilt in 1717 and was eventually consecrated in 1882.  The earliest reference to a Roby in the surviving registry of Billinge Church is of Catran Roby, who died 2^nd November 1702.  No other information is given.  The name is strange and I’ve never seen it elsewhere.  It’s probably another form of Catharine.

Whoever Catran Roby was, that person died at the end of a tumultuous century.  Wigan had changed hands three times in the course of the Civil War.  When the town was ransacked by Colonel Rosworm’s Parliament troops in March 1643, the church was looted and the town records thrown into the streets.  Wigan was plundered by Scottish troops in 1648 and was the scene of more fighting 1651.  There had been profound changes in England’s constitutional structure and its standing with Continental Europe due to the Glorious Revolution of 1688.  Through the previous rules of Oliver Cromwell, Charles II and James II, England had been largely pro-French and anti-Dutch.  When William of Orange was given the throne, firmly establishing a Protestant succession, it made France a more or less permanent enemy, with whom we were at war with, more years than we were at peace with, until Waterloo in 1815.  Almost overnight legitimate trade with France ceased.  The gentry began to toast themselves with gin instead of good French wine, with foreseeable results.  England was about to embark on the gin period, the only time in its history, apart from the visitations of the Black Death, when the death rate exceeded the birth rate.  Despite the drunken stupor that prevailed for fifty years, the spavined inhabitants of this tiny island sallied forth and conquered the world.  The Nine Years War (1688-97) and the War of Spanish Succession (1702-13) involved Britain in warfare on a scale not experienced since Elizabeth’s struggle with Spain.  The sheer magnitude of Marlborough’s victories in the War of Spanish Succession not only secured the Protestant succession; it established England as a major force in Continental politics for the first time in History.  England’s star was in the ascendance.  The Industrial Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars and the glory days of Empire were looming.

The next mention of a Roby in the St Aidan’s registry is of James, son of John, born 29^th November 1705, the year after the Duke of Marlborough’s stunning success at the Battle of Blenheim.  That year a total of fourteen children are recorded as baptised at St Aidan’s.  I can find no other record pertaining to this John Roby other than a Margaret, buried 13^th April 1733, whose parent is recorded as John Roby, and the death of a John Roby buried 5^th September 1749, which is probably him.  Margaret may have been James’ sister.  John, the father, would have had brothers and sisters - single child families were most uncommon in those days.  There’s a record of another John Roby, the son of Michael, born 1^st January 1721.  I think this Michael is my great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather and he is most probably John’s brother.  There are records of a Francis Roby, whose wife, Mary, had at least four children between 1720 and 1728.  These dates suggest that Francis, John & Michael were brothers.  Francis is recorded as buried 10^th 1728 and his profession is given as nailer.  The making of nails, a trade long practised in Billinge, would for years be a source of Roby income.  It would hardly be adequate to keep body and soul together but unemployment was tantamount to a death sentence and employment offered little better.  An historian¹² of those times noted that ‘poor relief in the eighteenth century continued to be operated on the basis of the Elizabethan Poor Law and the 1662 Act of Settlement.  At their worst, these would have put a poor labourer and his family on par with or perhaps below that of an American slave or a Russian serf.’  The lot of the inhabitant of the industrial towns of Lancashire, in the 1840’s, became far worse than that of an American slave for the latter was a valued commodity whereas the former was something hired, responsibility for which ceased at the factory gate¹³.

Henry, the son of Jane Roby was born 18^th February 1738.  Maybe Jane was another sister of James.  Two years later, 5^th July 1740, Richard Roby, described as a husband, was buried.  Who his wife may have been is beyond me but he could also have been a bother to James or indeed to James’s father, John.  The early records are far from complete and it is all but impossible to verify the early family line with absolute certainty.  What is almost for certain is that Roby children, born in Longshaw, would all be descendants of the same family.  The place was too small for it to be otherwise.  The population of Billinge around 1720 was about 900.  Longshaw contained only a fraction of that number.

Two years after the Battle of Culloden and the end of Bonnie Price Charlie’s aspirations to the throne, Rachel, the daughter of John and Ellen Roby, was baptised 14^th October 1748 at St Aidan’s.  This John Roby must be the John Roby born 1^st January 1721, the son of Michael.  He probably married Ellen around 1748 because Rachel is the first child recorded to these parents.  There were others.  Jane was baptised 13^th May 1750.  Michael is recorded 19^th April 1752, John 30^th October 1757, James 17^th November 1754 and Betty 12^th February 1764.  The third recorded child, Michael, is my great, great, great, great grandfather.  His children came into a world that coincided chronologically with the death throes of English Jacobinism and beginning of immense economic growth and social change that would ever after be described as the Industrial Revolution.

There were other Roby children baptised at St Aidan’s shortly afterwards but these are the children of Henry and Elizabeth¹⁴, Betty¹⁵ and Peter and Peggy¹⁶.

In 1783 the Peace of Versailles was signed, recognising the independence of the American colonies.  Britain’s colonial aspirations had suffered a setback in the New World.  On the thirteenth day of July 1783 Ann Roby gave birth to a son, shortly to be christened Henry.  Her husband was Michael Roby.  They were my great, great, great, great grandparents.  As is the custom of their village, their names would be carried on down the generations.  They had at least two other children, Betty born 6^th March 1786 and Anne born 21^st December 1788.  About this Michael and Ann I know nothing more than that Michael seems to have had some connection with St Aidan’s.  He is recorded as being witness of at least eight weddings between 1793 and 1799.  There is a record of a Michael Roby buried at St. Aidan’s 20^th December 1875 aged 86, which may have been another of their children.  Henry, however, married Ann, a weaver born 21^st September 1783.  Their family included sons Darius, born 3^rd September 1820, and Michael, born 10th November 1822 and at least one other child, a girl, Mary Ann, born 9^th September 1826.  I don’t know what happened to Mary Ann or if this couple had other children but I do know that from these two sons an explosion of Robys occurred in Longshaw.

Henry carried on the connection to St. Aidan’s as he starts to appear in the registry as a regular witness at weddings from 1800.  He died blind on 17^th October 1866 aged 83.  In the 1841 census he is living with his wife, Ann, both aged 55¹⁷, Darius, 20, Michael, 15 and Ann 14.  In 1851 he was still living with his wife, Ann, in Longshaw.  They were both aged 67 at that time.  There were only two girls named Ann recorded as born the same year as Henry; Ann, daughter of Edmund and Ann Wilson, and Ann, daughter of John and Hester Waterworth.  As the name Hester does not appear in successive generations it is more probable that Ann Wilson was Henry’s wife.  In 1851 the children recorded as living with their parents are Darius and his wife Sarah aged 30 and 29 respectively, Michael and his wife Elizabeth aged 25 and 25, Ann, a granddaughter aged 2, Thomas a grandson aged 10 months and Thomas, a lodger, aged 69.  This lodger, Thomas, may have been Henry’s elder brother.  Ann did not survive the next ten years.  Her son Darius remarried between 1851 and 1861.

When I consider the life of my great, great, great grandparents, Henry and his wife Ann, I can only imagine it to have been one of unrelenting poverty.  He is recorded as being 77, a former farm labourer, in the 1861 census and the life of such was not idyllic.  An article about child farm workers¹⁸ tells of children aged six working 14 hours a day and having to pay for meals and tools out of the 3 pence a day they were receiving.  That was in 1862.  This article ends with these words, ‘As a result of the Gangs Act 1868 and the introduction of other legislation, we no longer have the unsatisfactory and unhealthy conditions on farms that were endured by our forebears of three generations ago.’  Henry was five generations ago.  His wife Ann is described in the census as a weaver.  This would have been one of the so-called cottage industries shared by the entire family, from toddlers upwards, which kept alive so many of our ancestors.  When new intensive farming methods and machinery started to appear around 1760, the demand for rural labour began to decline.  The Napoleonic Wars worsened these problems when, in addition to falling wages, the price of food increased greatly.  Matters got from bad to worse when 300,000 British solders and sailors were demobilised at the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815.

Most of those demobbed had no civilian skills and they swelled the ranks of farm labourers.  In 1830, after rural riots in many parts of England, 3000 labourers were tried and 300 sentenced to death.  In 1834 the six Tolpuddle Martyrs were transported.  That was the year workhouses were introduced to discourage idleness and poverty was made a matter of personal shame.  Not until 1872 was the National Agricultural Labourers Union formed.  Basic education began in the 1870’s, free from the 1880’s, allowing some bright children to begin to move on from this appalling treadmill of poverty.  It was all far too late for Henry Roby.

The 1861 census shows as follows - Longshaw Village

Darius Roby aged 40 (can't read occupation) born Winstanley.

Maria Roby, wife aged 32 born Billinge (died 28^th April 1873, aged 44).

Ann Roby aged 12, daughter, nail maker born Windle.

Michael Roby aged 9, son, flag quarry, born Billinge.

Rachel Roby daughter, aged 4, born Billinge.

Henry Roby aged 1, son, born Billinge.

Henry Roby, father, widowed, aged 77, formerly farm labourer, born Billinge, Blind.  (When Henry died 17^th October 1866 at the age of 83 he’d outlived his son Darius, who died 8^th August 1865 aged 44, by just over one year).

Unfortunately the 1861 census does not give addresses.  I think that Darius and family were living at 6 Park Road because when his son Henry married Sarah Rigby 11^th June 1894¹⁹, that address is given.  This was Henry’s second marriage, the first being to Jane Ann Anderton 23^rd April 1888.

The same 1861 census for Longshaw village shows

Michael Roby aged 38, a stone mason, born Billinge.

Elizabeth Roby aged 35, wife, born Billinge.

Thomas Roby aged 10, stone quarry, born Billinge.

James Roby aged 7, scholar born Billinge.

Ann Roby aged 5, scholar born Billinge.

John Roby aged 1 born Billinge (25/9/1859).

This Michael and Elizabeth Roby are my great, great grandparents.  Michael married Elizabeth around 1850-51 but the records are missing for that period.  Wilson's Gazetteer shows the population in 1850 to be - Chapel End, 1129 acres, 389 houses, population 2015, Higher End, 1549 acres, 204 houses, population 1051.  Their son John, then aged one, would become the grandfather my mother never knew.  His photograph is the oldest we posses of that family line.  There is a sensitivity to his features that gives no indication of the brutal life he must have known as a child nail maker and a miner.  Though the 1786 map shows no collieries located in Billinge, coal mining became the major industry through the 1800’s.  By 1855 87 men and women, 46 adolescents and 37 children were working at Blackleyhurst Colliery.  This may have been Billinge’s first major coal mining enterprise but others soon followed.  In time, Billingers would come to be known either as poachers, pitmen or comedians; many were all three.

Billinge lies in the West Lancashire Coalfield.  Longshaw is adjacent to the Orrell Coalfield, which is part of the great Wigan Coalfield.  When coal was first mined in Billinge is not recorded but it’s likely to have been near Longshaw Bottom, where the Orrell Four Foot seam outcroped near Chair Wood.  When Thomas Winstanley died, in 1561, part of his will included the words, ‘chargeth his coal mines with the payment of £20 per annum in the name of his wife jointure for the upbringing of her children.’  When James Bankes purchased Winstanley Hall in 1594 he notes that there were coal pits on his estate.  Coal was mined from day eyes and shafts, around Dean Wood and Red Wood, in the early 1500’s whilst records show that coal was worked in Haigh at the beginning of the 14^th century.  These workings would be for local consumption and are unlikely to have employed more that a few personnel.  It was the opening of the Douglas Navigation in 1742 and the subsequent joining of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal at Dean Locks that caused the coal rush, bringing Liverpool and Bradford speculators into the area.  One of those Liverpool speculators was Jonathan Blundell who bought Jackson’s Orrell Colliery in 1776.  He retired to Blackleyhurst Hall in 1796.  His father, one of the most successful of the Liverpool merchants and ships captains, had been mayor of Liverpool.  Part of the family fortune came from the slave trade.  Blundells were major operators in the local coal industry until nationalisation in 1942.  So extensively was the Orrell Coalfield worked that by the coming of the railways, in the mid-eighteen hundreds, some 20 million tons of coal had been extracted and the rich Four Foot and Five Foot seams virtually worked out.

As my great grandfathers and grandfathers worked down local collieries, I have taken the trouble to investigate their conditions of employment.  ‘The Orrell Coalfield-1740 to 1850,’ by D Anderson, makes for illuminating, if not particularly cheerful, reading.  For example, ‘very young boys were used for opening and closing air-doors when the drawers came through with their tubs and baskets.  The occupation was described as one of the most pitiable in the coal pit by its extreme monotony.  Were it not for the passing and re-passing of the wagons it would equal to solitary confinement of the worst order.’  No doubt great fortunes were made from the coal deposited beneath the green fields of our village.  Those who slaved underground led lives of abject poverty and misery, from which drink was a temporary respite and death was the only release.  These workers could not have been contented.  There were serious riots during the famine winter of 1800 in the Wigan district and again in 1812 and 1819, when a meeting of the Lieutenancy, under Lord Derby, was called in Wigan.  Sir William Gerard and Myrick Bankes, both of them local coal producers, were among the landowners present at that meeting.  A collier’s union was formed in Wigan in 1830.  Its members went on strike in 1831.  The most serious disturbance occurred in the Chartist Riots, 12^th August 1842, when 10,000 marchers descended on Wigan and stopped 3,000 locals from working in the mills and collieries.

As the deposits nearest to Wigan and the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, on one side of Billinge Hill, and those nearest to St Helens and the Sankey Canal, on the other, were worked out, the coal under Billinge became economically viable to extract.  Brownlow Colliery was opened near Billinge Hill in 1842 and others would have followed soon after.  Windy Arbour Collery’s shaft was sunk in 1843 and produced coal until 1976.  An article in the Bolton Chronicle, 31^st January 1846, records an interchange between union spokesman William Holgate and an overlooker from a Billinge colliery.  The results of a geological survey published in 1861 show several seams of coal at various depths with mine shafts, old and new, dotting the landscape.  Over time, literally hundreds of shafts and day eyes must have been sunk in Billinge.  The 1929 rate book shows that six collieries were still working within the municipal boundaries²⁰.

There were at least four collieries in operation when I was a young man.  Along Red Barn Road were the Hillside and Clay Pits.  Gaffney’s Pit, near to Blackleyhurst Hall and Lavin’s Pit, across Turpin Fields, were still ongoing concerns.  Extensive open cast mining operations occurred all over Billinge in the fifties.  There is still open cast mining going on near Simms Lane Ends.  In the late nineteen fifties most of the local miners worked in the larger NCB collieries around St Helens.  I can remember the sound of their hob-nailed boots and rasping coughs as they made their way to the bus stop in the pre-dawn winter darkness of my early adolescence.  I would pull the blankets over my head and go back to sleep.  The pit got some of my ancestors but, thankfully, it didn’t get me.

The 1871²¹ Census Longshaw village shows.

Michael Roby aged 48, a stone mason, born Billinge

Elizabeth Roby aged 45, born Billinge

Thomas aged 20, a miner, born Billinge.

James aged 17, a miner, born Billinge.

Ann aged 15, a factory cleaner, born Billinge,

John aged 11 a nail-maker, born Billinge (25/9/1859)

Mary aged 9 born Billinge (15/9/1864).

Richard aged 7, born Billinge (17/1/1866)

Edward aged 7, born Billinge (17/1/1866)

Thomas is the first Roby mentioned as being a miner.  In the 1861 census he is listed as a ten-year-old, working at the stone quarry.  Ten years later he is working down the pit.  The record shows that he died 2^nd February 1877 aged 26.  It’s almost certain he was killed at work; mining was a dangerous occupation.  Thomas didn’t die without issue however.  He married Elizabeth Barker 21^st October 1873.  His two sons were William, 6^th January 1874, and Alfred, 12^th January 1876.  William died at the age of four, 2^nd October 1878.  Alfred married Eva Emily Collard, 6^th October 1900 and they raised five children; Elizabeth, Thomas, Amelia, Ellen and Alfred.  The second child, Thomas, named for his grandfather, was the father of Keith Roby, who still lives in Park Road.  Keith used to play darts for the Stork Hotel with his cousin George Sumner, Amelia’s son, when I played for the same team in the late sixties.

In the course of uncovering information about the family, by speaking to existing descendants, an incident often mentioned was the Bolton football disaster, March 9^th 1946.  That day, Bolton played Stoke City in the quarter final of the FA cup.  Stanley Matthews, the most famous name in football, appeared for Stoke, bringing thousands of extra fans to an already guaranteed capacity crowd.  Young Nat Lofthouse was just establishing himself on Bolton’s first team.  He would go on to become the most celebrated player ever to pull on the Wanderers jersey.  So many fans crammed themselves into the ground that a barrier collapsed, causing thirty-three deaths and over five hundred injuries.  Among the dead were Tom Roby and his son Richard.

Tom was the son of James, the second of Michael and Elizabeth’s sons.  James married a girl called Jane, sometime around 1876.  I have not traced the marriage record yet.  James was a collier – it was becoming the predominant local occupation.  His wife gave birth to at least three boys and two girls²².  The third child, Thomas, married Ellen Chorlton²³ 29^th August 1908 and served on active duty in the First World War.  Though he survived the experience he was so affected that he never worked again, spending his time growing tomatoes and chrysanthemums.  His wife Ellen ran a small grocery shop, making and selling pies from the front room of their house in UpHolland Road.  They had two sons, John and Richard, and raised John Ashall Chorlton, whose mother died in childbirth.  He was the son of Ellen’s brother John, who was one of the best bowlers Billinge ever produced.  The other Chorlton brothers could hold their own on the bowling green.  Billy Chorlton won the News of the Word Handicap in 1952.

Richard’s Roby’s only child, June (8/6/1937), married James Moyers and they live in Orrell.  Their two children are Susan and Paul.  Thomas and Ellen’s other child, John, married Hilda Derbyshire from Pemberton and their three children were Frank, Kathleen and Barbara.  Frank Roby used to have a television and radio shop in Church Street, Orrell.  My mother went to school with him but never knew quite how they were related.  Is it any wonder?

John Roby, my great grandfather, was to follow his elder brothers, Thomas and James, down the pit.  The days of making nails were over.  There is reference to nail making²⁴ that describes the trade as ‘having increased greatly in the 17^th century from an origin east of Wigan.  It had spread south and west along the coalfield as far as St. Helens by the middle of the 18^th century.  The easiness of entry to the nail trade, the ready employment of women and youths and the low degree of skill made it a highly competitive trade with low wages and irregular employment.  The working conditions, in the little forges, built at the back of the workers’ houses, were appalling.’  John died 5^th May 1908 at the age of 48.  His death, from a lung condition, was almost certainly work related.  He never saw his youngest child.

There is some space dedicated to nail making in Richard Donald Lewis’s book, The Billingers,²⁵ concluding with these words.  ‘Most of them could neither read nor write and signed for the iron with a cross.  As many of the children were put to work in the smithies at eight or nine years of age, they too became illiterate.  We have some evidence that Billinge nail-makers were as dissolute as their Wigan counterparts, who were reported to be pretty bad, and if they were half as crafty as the Billinge poachers, then they were surely quite a bunch.  The trade became over-exploited in the early eighteenth century and a long period of degeneration for the village nailer set in, as the industry became hopelessly over-competitive.  John Rigby was well known as a Billinge nail-maker around 1777, but the trade seems to have been dying in the village by 1825.’

So my great grandfather started work as a child in an industry whose conditions were described as appalling by a chronicler of that time.  He started work when the industry was already dying some thirty years before he was born.  It could not have been very rewarding but he would have known no different and had no choice.  Toil was the norm for the children of working-class families.  His cousin Michael, Darius’s son, was working in the stone quarry as a nine-year-old.  So was his elder brother, Tom.  When my mother was 12, about 1927, she used to run errands for Elizabeth Roby, then aged about 75, the widow of Michael Roby and mother of yet another Henry Roby, who never married.  Also living at the same address was a daughter, Mary, married to John Hewitt, with their children, Paul, Harold and Ethel.  Harold Hewitt still lives in The Avenue, just round the corner from my parents.  Henry Roby is therefore our common ancestor; Harold’s great, great and my great, great, great grandfather.  Henry Roby is the common ancestor to more than enough descendants to fill the Hare and Hounds on a Saturday night.  That Longshaw watering hole, as it now stands, was built in 1907.  Prior to that date, the Hare and Hounds was situated on the corner of Longshaw Old Road and Park Road, next door to the shop which is still operating.  It would have taken most of the Robys less than ten seconds to walk there.  I can imagine that the old Hare and Hounds was not a spot for faint-hearted strangers, filled, as it must have been, with quarry men, farm labourers, colliers and nailers - not the place to accidentally tread on someone’s ferret.

In Harry Parkes’ booklet ‘The Life of George Lyon,’ the author claims that UpHolland Priory was built with stone from quarries on Billinge Hill in either the eleventh or the thirteenth century.  Exactly when local houses were first constructed from stone I have not been able to establish with certainty but quarrying probably developed into a local industry before 1700.  What is for certain is that John Eddleston²⁶ bequeathed his land and house to charity when he died in 1672.  This land included the Vicarage, Billinge Hill and a quarry called ‘Grindstone Delph.’  The coffin shaped tombstone of George Smith in Billinge Churchyard dates back to 1720.  He supposedly died after being bitten by an adder whilst working at Billinge Hill Quarry.  That tomb is St Aidan’s most striking feature.  Michael, my great, great grandfather, is always recorded as a stonemason.  Many stone houses were erected in the course of his working lifetime.  If he was not fully employed in their construction, he may have found further employment at Billinge Hill Quarry, dressing stone.

The 1881 census shows Elizabeth Roby as a widow 56, living in Longshaw, with John 21, Richard & Edward 17.  All three boys are miners, as Thomas, the eldest brother, had been before his death.  Elizabeth’s husband, Michael, died 13^th March 1875, at the age of fifty-two.  James was working down the pit, married with two children by that time.  Ann must have married or was living at another address.  Darius’ eldest son, Michael, also married a girl called Elizabeth.  Their first child, Joseph, 8^th August 1871, must have died young because they named their second son Joseph also.  He was born 27^th April 1878.

My mother’s grandfather, John, died seven years before she was born.  Her grandmother was Mary Elizabeth Ratcliff but I cannot find the marriage.  There’s a gap in the records.  John’s younger twin bothers both marred girls called Naylor.  The twins are recorded as being miners, living at 4 Park Road.  The records show that Edward married Sarah Naylor 31^st December1889 and Richard²⁷ married Ann Naylor 15^th February 1890.  Richard’s children were Thomas 5^th May 1891, Wilfred 24^th August 1893 and Ann 27^th September 1895 – three months after Jack Dempsey was born.  Ann ended up in America.  I wonder if she ever saw Jack Dempsey?  When Louis and I were in Monassa this year she suddenly sprung to mind.  Richard died in 1902, another victim of the pit – his wife, Ann, died in 1907.  Mary, Richard’s elder sister, now married to a man called Barton and living at Lamberhead Green, took in the orphaned children, then aged 16, 14 and 12.  Another Lamberhead Green family, the Tabeners, emigrated to Canada in1910.  Thomas Roby, then aged 21, went to the New World with them.  Soon after Thomas arrived in Canada he sent for his brother Wilfred and sister Ann.  Just before Tom married Molly Tabener, Wilfred returned to England on the Empress of Ireland.  If he’d stayed for the wedding he may have been drowned because the ship went down on its next Atlantic crossing.  Thomas and Ann stayed on in Toronto.  Tom married Molly and they all moved to the San Francisco area about seven years later.

At first Tom Roby worked in the insurance business, but somewhere along the line he opened a pie shop in Alameda, California, which is on the Eastern Shore of San Francisco Bay, near Oakland.  The Roby Pie Shop provided pies to most of the East Bay's restaurants.  The business thrived, for a time.  In '28 and '29 Thomas was expanding production capacity.  He borrowed money to purchase a modern oil burning industrial oven but, as the payments on the debt began to come due, the depression hit.  Demand for pies decreased; sales suffered; cash flow dried up; and within a couple of years the Roby Pie Shop was forced to close its doors²⁸.

Tom and Molly had three sons, Eric 19^th October 1915, William 25^th September 1917and Thomas 27^th December 1919.  William and Eric still survive though both are now widows.  Eric is reputedly playing tennis at 84²⁹.  Thomas died from a heart attack some fifteen years ago.  Ann married more than once.  Her son by her second marriage, Bill Raust, now deceased, came over to England a couple of times to visit relatives with his uncle Eric and Eric’s wife Gloria.  Thomas Roby, the orphaned child of my great grandfather John’s twin brother Richard, started a Roby line in America that has survived and mostly prospered.  His three sons fathered seven grandchildren and they in turn produced a further nineteen great grandchildren.  I stumbled across one of these grandchildren, Don Roby, due to an unlikely chain of circumstances similar to winning the lottery.  When he returned my email, nineteen days before the turn of the millennium, it felt as if the past had reached out to touch me.

When Wilfred Roby returned to England he married Elizabeth Worthington, a girl from Pemberton, 5^th February 1916.  They had one daughter, Ann, who shares her father’s birthday and was born 27^th August 1917.  Ann married George Houghton, another miner, at St John’s Pemberton 19^th July 1941.  Their only child, Joan, was born in 1950 and died in 1994.  Ann Houghton lives alone in River Street at Orrell Post.  She remembers visiting Longshaw as a child with her mother.  My mother remembers her as being a very attractive young girl when she came to visit their mutual cousins, twin Edward’s children.

Twin Edward’s first born were twin boys, 2^nd December 1902, but they both died.  His surviving children were Helen, Elizabeth, Jane, Ann & Richard.  These girls, known as the four sisters, never married and managed the family sweet shop in Longshaw Old Road.  Richard married Beatrice Hartley, daughter of James Lee Hartley, registrar at Wigan.  Their children were Eric, William, Jean and James.  Jean and James still live in Longshaw.  William married Mini Bellis and their youngest child, Steven, has also fathered twins.

In 1891³⁰ census shows John 31, Mary Elizabeth 19 and Ann 7 months.  This age difference is most unusual.  Mary Elizabeth Ratcliff was born 11^th June 1871.  Ann was the first of at least five children.  She was born 18^th August 1890.  The second child was my grandfather, James, born 16^th July1891, a year with a winter so severe that it became common practice to feed birds from bird tables for the first time in some parts of England, though probably not in Longshaw.  The other children were Emily, born 1^st April 1893, Michael born 25^th October1894 and John born 4^th October 1908.  All these children were born at 4 Park Rd.  John, like his brother Richard, died from a lung disease, five months before the birth of John, the child named after him.  His could not have been an easy life.  The working classes were almost slaves in those days.

My mother remembers an old smithy in the back garden at 4 Park Road, large enough to have employed about 20 people.  As her grandmother paid rent to the Smiths, farmers up Crank Road, this smithy was probably an enterprise of the Bankes family, of whom the Smiths would be tenant farmers.  This stone building was used for housing chickens, as nail making was, in my mother’s childhood, a matter of history.  She remembers a Rhode Island Red cock that used to attack anybody that went near the hens until her father wrung its neck and put it in the pot.  Her father used to keep pigs and grow potatoes and other vegetables, as there was a large plot of land attached to his mother’s house.  Ann, the eldest child, lived there with her mother, Elizabeth, together with her husband, George Dillon³¹, and the three boys, Frank, Harold and Jack.  Emily and her family lived just round the corner.  My grandfather and his family lived further down Park Road at number 28.  His Uncle Michael and family lived at number one.  Longshaw was getting too small to house all these Roby descendants.  In the first quarter of the twentieth century at least twenty-six Roby children were born in at least twelve different Longshaw households.  That does not include the children born to Roby girls who married into other local families, such as the Dillons.³²

Emily Roby married Harry Wilkinson, another Longshaw local, 25^th September 1920.  Their children were Irene and Alan.  Irene married Frank Smith but had no children.  Frank was a well-know tenor.  He often sang at the short-lived Billinge British Legion.  Frank would sing at the drop of a hat.  He would stand at their front door in Claremont Road on Christmas Night, singing carols at the top of his voice.  It was part of the festive season.  Alan married a girl called Sylvia and they raised a boy named Mark.

Michael Roby, the fourth child, was born in 1894, the year that a French bacteriologist, Alexander Yersin of the Pasteur Institute, finally identified the microbe living in and on black rats that caused bubonic plague.  He married Elizabeth Gaskell from Pemberton and went to live with her in that township.  Their two children were girls, Elsie and Marian.  Elsie married Aden Glover who owned or managed a fishing tackle shop in Pemberton.

Michael was the comedian of the family.  He owned a tiny Yorkshire terrier that bit anyone who came in range and liked to eat raw potatoes.  On his visits to Park Road he would turn the dolly tub upside down then preach from it like a Methodist minister, keeping his mother and sisters in stitches.  Old Elizabeth would say, “Don’t be so daft an’ tek thi ooks wom Michael.”  “Am not gooin till thaa buys mi a packit o’ cigs.”

“Tha mon buy thi own, thar workin’.”  Then Michael would grab as many of his mother’s chickens as he could and run off down Park Road with them under his arm.

He was a poacher when his elder brother, my grandfather, worked as a gamekeeper on Winstanley Park, owned by the Bankes family.  Jem Nanny, as he was know, was a big, raw-boned, cantankerous man who started work down the pit like most of his generation.  The change to working in the open air must have been worth the probable drop in wages.  His position as a gamekeeper caused friction with his younger brother.  They did not get on socially for years because of it.  My father still has the wooden baton that Jem carried on his patrols of the Bank’s Estate and which he used to wave under his brother’s nose and say, “Iv a catch thi poaching I’ll gi’ thi that.”  Jem finished his working days for the steel manufacturer GKN.  So did my father.  My father remembers a worker there telling him that his father-in-law was the strongest man he ever knew.  My mother remembers Jem physically throwing a much younger bloke out of the Higher End Labour Club when he was well into his seventies.  She can also remember her mother having to retrieve his coat, hanging on the fence outside Billinge Hospital, after he’d been fighting outside the Labour Club on a Saturday night.  The local policeman, Bobby Hambly, often had to bring him home to Park Road when he was a younger man.

Occasionally my grandmother, formally May Waterworth, would go out for a drink with Jem.  That allowed the girls to run riot.  They used to tie a rope to the large beam over the kitchen table and swing like monkeys, with the paraffin lamp swinging in unison.  It’s wonder they never set the house on fire, though Doris almost did on one occasion.  As my mother recalled she and her sisters running wild around the house, with her grandmother banging on the door, trying to restore order and the neighbours being put through purgatory, she could hardly get the words out.  “We were poor but we had a lot of fun,” she managed to say through her laughter.

John Roby was born five months after John, his father, died.  He was one of the better footballers the village ever produced and may have gone on to professional status had his mother allowed him to try it.  He played for Billinge Juniors when they were in the Lancashire Alliance, alongside the Lowe brothers, Jack, Hugh and Billy, two of the Green brothers, Billy and Harry, Oswald Littler, Stanley Liptrott and Peter Middlehurst.  His nephew, Frank Dillon³³ was another outstanding football player at local level who went on to play professionally for Charlton Athletic.  My great uncle John gave me my first job as a paperboy when he owned the news agency and grocery shop opposite Billinge Church.  He married Helen Fairhurst and their son, Maurice, was for many years involved with Orrell Rugby Union Club.  He is a talented artist, specialising in drawings of local buildings and landscapes.  Helen is the granddaughter of Our Nell’s Jack and at the age of 89 she still lives in Newton Road.  She will be 90 in April 2000.  I’m looking forward to that party.

My grandfather, James Roby, married Beatrice May Waterworth, the eldest child of Wilfred Waterworth from UpHolland and Annie nee Larkin, an Irish girl whose two sisters taught at Blackbrook.  May’s parents were married at Adlington, June 20 1890. Because Wilfred married a Catholic, it caused a great deal of consternation in what was a well-established farming family.  May was fourteen when her mother died.  She took over the raising of her younger brothers and sisters until she married James Roby.  Their first child, Agnes, was born 18^th June 1912 when Jem and May lived at 10 Longshaw Old Road.  That was the year the Titanic went down.  A postcard commemorating that event sent four months after the disaster to Henry Tyrer, a bookkeeper then living at 22 Main Street Billinge, still survives.  Agnes was taken for a walk to Winstanley Park as a two year old and died from sunstroke.  The next child, Doris 11^th May 1914, was born at 28 Park Road, as were all the remaining children; my mother, Beatrice Ann 4^th July 1915, Emily 28^th September 1916, Edna May 25^th July 1917, Ivy 5^th November 1921, Betty 30^th May 1926 and finally twin boys, John and James 19^th June 1929.  These twins died - John after eleven days and James after thirteen days.  Obviously there is a gene for twins in the Roby make up.  One generation before, Richard and Edward were the twin brothers of my great grandfather John.  Edward himself was the father of twin boys, Frank and James, born 2^nd December1902.  Edward’s granddaughter, Jean, carried on the tradition by giving birth to twin daughters.  His great grandson, Steven, has twin sons.  My cousin Elaine, Ivy’s daughter, has identical twin daughters.  How many of the other twins are or were identical I cannot say.

James and Beatrice May Roby’s girls all grew up and married.  One of my earliest recollections is of my Aunt Ivy speaking to my mother.  Being about two at the time, my own speaking ability was limited to a few short sentences.  As they spoke, I was amazed how much they could say and wondered if I would ever be able to say so much.  Anyone who ever knew any of my aunts will know the answer to that one.

Doris, the eldest, was her grandmother’s favourite.  Consequentially she was better dressed and got to church on Sundays when her younger sisters hadn’t the clothes to go in.  She once almost burned the house down by throwing paraffin on the fire.  Her father saw the smoke and ran home from feeding the pigs in his mother’s allotment, just in time to prevent disaster.  Doris didn’t come home for a few days after that episode.  She attended the Council School, in St James Road and then Hollgate School, near Orrell Post, before starting work at Orrell Mill as a fourteen-year-old.  She married Stanley Williams, the son of an adventurous Welsh sailor, Jim Williams, a survivor from the glorious days of sail.

When Jim Williams left the sea, he came to Billinge to install electricity and lodged at district nurse Sarah Berry’s home in Beacon Road.  He got friendly with Alice, one of the daughters, had to move out because of the relationship but eventually married her.  Their son Stanley also became a sailor.  By a strange coincidence, Stanley and Doris Williams lived next door to John Chorlton, whose second wife was Mary Williams – no relation to Stanley.  John Chorlton’s children however, also claimed Sarah Berry as their grandmother.  That was because Sarah Berry’s parents were Henry Green and Nancy nee Gee.  Henry died young and Nancy married again to Charles Martleton.  Among her children was a daughter Mary.  This Mary Martleton married a Welshman, Henry Williams (no relation to Jim Williams).  When Mary Martleton became Mary Williams by marriage, she had one son and three daughters, Mary being the youngest.  She died giving birth to Mary.  Henry Williams moved on to Yorkshire, re-married and had more children.  Sarah Berry, being Mary Martleton's half-sister (same mother, different fathers), took in the baby Mary Williams and brought her up.  Mary grew up and married John Chorlton, living next door to Sarah Berry’s real grandchild, Stanley Williams.

Doris Williams outlived her husband Stanley but failed, by a few months, to see out the millennium.  She was an inquisitive, warm-hearted woman and an eager conversationalist.  In the fifty yeas that I knew her, from being the kid she made nettle pop for to the much-travelled nephew who pushed her around in a wheel chair, her company was always a pleasure.  For my money they don’t come any better than my Aunt Doris.  A few words, such as these, can never portray the effect that any person who lives for close on ninety years has in a close-knit society such as Billinge used to be.

From a past we can hardly comprehend, half a millennium before the Norman Conquest, successive generations each added to the pool of common knowledge that sustained us.  In ways, big and small, the lives of those who passed before us touch us all.  Beyond our grandparents we have the oral history that each generation creates from its tragedies and its triumphs, its superstitions and its iron strong beliefs.  Beyond that are the scanty records in dusty archives that link us back five hundred years, if we are lucky.  Beyond those archives there is nothing but the silent sentinel of Billinge Hill, looking down across the Lancashire Plain.  No road reaches closer to the summit than Beacon Road, where Doris raised her children, Olwyn, Douglas and Stanley.  Her immediate neighbours, in 1947, in the redbrick row where she lived, were William Barnes, George Baker, John Chorlton, Clifford Taylor, John Edwards, Fred Atherton, Francis Taylor, Richard Ashton and Robert Houlton.  She died in September 1999.

Beatrice Ann, my mother, and all her younger sisters went to the Council School until they started work as fourteen-year-olds.  My mother went into service for a Baptist minister in Wigan then moved to Haydock Park Farm with Albert and Mary Hampson.  Albert looked after the pigs while his wife, Mary, was the housekeeper.  Mary was a sister to the Hitchens from Greenfield Farm in Carr Mill Road.  The Hitchens came from Quaker Cottages, opposite Gladden-Hey Farm.  John Bradburn, the farmer at Gladden-Hey, married then to Mary Ann Robinson from Tanyard House Farm, contributed a calf to the Hitchens to help them get established.  The father, Henry Hitchen, carried on working down the pit whilst his son Herman, always a bachelor, ran the farm.  Herman’s brother, Thomas, became an engineer at the Viaduct Works in Earlestown, but helped on the farm when he was able.  He married one of the Gee girls from Beacon Road and Enid Hitchen is their only child.  Martha Hitchen, the eldest, married Jack Holland.  Their two boys were Henry and John and the surviving girl is Mary.  Eventually a dispute about the inbreeding of the pigs led to Albert and Mary Hampson leaving Haydock Park Farm.  My mother left with them.

She went to work at Orrell Mill with Doris and her younger sister, Emily.  It was closer to home and she had more company.  Doris stayed on at Orrell Mill until she married.  Emily and my mother moved to Eckersley’s Mill in Wigan.  They used to walk to work then run home to save the train fare to go dancing at the weekend.  If they didn’t beat the train back to Orrell Station, or if they arrived home flushed from running, their mother would know that they’d skipped the train and take the fare back off them.  Such was the poverty of working class England between the wars.  The day before my mother married Thomas Taylor, in 1935, she was sacked from the mill.  They did not employ married woman.

Enid, my sister, was born in Doulton Street, St Helens, where my parents lodged with the Bacon family until they got their first home in Moss Road.  My father’s Aunt Eleanor lived close by with her husband Ellis Morley.  The Morleys were taking care of Leo Taylor, my father’s Uncle Thomas’ son, in addition to raising their own children.  My mother’s parents lived nearby in Tracks Lane.  From Moss Road my parents moved to Green Slate Road for a couple of years then got a cottage adjacent to Tommy Daniels’ house near the reservoir.  That house is gone now, as the way of life and the people who lived it are also gone.  Billinge has never been an epicentre of historically significant events.  For fifteen hundred years its inhabitants tilled the soil.  For a much shorter period they mined coal beneath the surface.  The strong survived and the weak ones perished.  Life was never easy but having no choice they got on with living it as best they could, passing on their unique history by telling stories and affirming their position in the sequence of generations by memorising the genealogy of the surrounding neighbourhood.  The old folks retain that skill.  There are still a few who can recall the entire social infrastructure back to the early days of the twentieth century and beyond.  The next generation won’t be able to do that.  We’ve been swamped with a tide of outsiders whose families are foreign to us.  We have no way of knowing where they came from and few of us care.

Tommy Daniels farmed the Promised Land Farm, a part of old Billinge that hasn’t yet disappeared under the creeping fungus of housing estates.  John Cross and his wife Annie had arrived a few years earlier, around 1930, from Ollerton in Cheshire, to take over the nearby Billinge Hall Farm.  All three of this couple’s children married into the local farming community.  Sidney Cross, their son, married Margaret Elizabeth Johnston from Longley House Farm, near the bottom of Winstanley.  Annie Cross married Edward Abbot from Lime Vale Farm and Doris Cross married John Alker from New House Farm.  My mother went to work for Tommy Daniels at Promised Land Farm before Enid started school, leaving the growing child with her parents.  Then the war came.  As my father’s parents in Carr Mill Road would dominate my early childhood, our Roby grandparents in Tracks Lane would influence my sister’s.  I asked Enid to jot down her thoughts concerning this period of her life.  This is what she gave me.

During the years of World War Two I lived with my grandparents, May and Jemmy Roby, at that end of Billinge know as the Moss.  My early schooling was at St James’ Primary School thought some of my friends went to the Council School.  The rivalry between schools was forgotten the moment we were back on home territory.  Much of my spare time was spent around Greenslate Farm and the fields and woods nearby.  Sam Glover, the farmer, was very patient with the local kids.  He rarely scolded us or chased us from his property.

Both Granny and Granddad helped at the farm when extra labour was needed.  They were hard working people and if I had a mind to be idle I had to keep out of their way.  Grandma worked wonders to keep the family well fed.  She cooked on an open range, boiling pans of potatoes and vegetables on the coal fire and baking cakes and pies in the side oven.  She baked bread every week, made jam and pickles and was famous for her homemade wines and beer.  I still have one of her large beer crocks at my home in Yorkshire.

Jemmy was said to have been strict with his six daughters but he was always an indulgent Granddad where I was concerned.  One of my earliest memories is of standing on the toes of his clogs whist being danced round the room.  I have done the same thing with many a toddler since then.  He was a great tease.  For years I believed that the tub of liquid fertiliser, kept by the greenhouse door, contained dragon’s blood.  He dissuaded me from begging for ice creams by saying the ice cream man let his nose drip into the ice cream.  Every inch of his garden was cultivated.  Vegetables for all seasons were his pride and joy, included interesting products such as tomatoes, cucumbers and mushrooms.  He kept a small border of herbaceous flowers for our Walking Day baskets and for other special days.

I spent many an hour watering and weeding plants, which must have initiated my life long interest in botany and gardening.  Granddad also bred rabbits for the pot.  I can still recall the feel of icy fingers as I collected clover from snow covered fields as a treat for them.  Those rabbits were my pets.  I never did eat them when I was a child and have been reluctant to eat rabbit ever since.

Now and again Granddad would take me with him to visit his friends.  I loved the trip to Winstanley Hall, riding on the crossbar of his big, black pushbike, an uncomfortable but exciting journey.  Compared to the modest gardens of the village, the gardens at the Hall were amazing.  There were long glasshouses with peaches and camellias growing against the walls and gape-vines hanging overhead.  I never returned empty handed but always came home with a small gift of fruit or flowers.  I still wonder how they survived the bike ride home.

Despite their hard working lives, Grandma and Granddad live well into their seventies, always making the best of whatever came along.  I remember them with great affection.

My mother served three years in 158 Regiment of the Royal Artillery.  After the war my parents lived for a while with my father’s parents in Carr Mill Road.  I was born there in October 1945.  They soon got a council house in Holt Crescent³⁴.  Until I started school, my mother took me with her to work at Tanyard House Farm, then owned by Tom Robinson.  Tom Robinson’s grandfather, William, was born at Wiswall Farm, Longshaw, the scene of an unsuccessful raid by the notorious highwayman, George Lyon, around 1813.  William was the eldest child.  He had two brothers, Thomas and James and a sister Elizabeth.  His brother, Thomas, was killed as a nineteen-year-old at the then Lancashire and Yorkshire Station at Wigan in 1872.  He worked there as a porter.  The inquest found that he struck his head against a pillar then fell beneath the wheels of a moving guard’s van.  The Valentine Card he sent to his sweetheart, Lydia Melling, just before his death, is still in the possession of June Edwards, his brother’s great, great granddaughter, as Lydia subsequently married her lover’s elder brother, William.  James, the youngest brother, worked for Squire Bankes later in life and lived in the middle of three stone cottages, next door to the Blacksmith’s Arms, at the top of Main Street, opposite Mount Pleasant Farm.  The father of these Robinson brothers was James Robinson.  After his death, between 1861 and 1871, his widow, Elizabeth, remarried Thomas Melling from Longshaw but this man mismanaged and lost the farm.  John James Simm took over Wiswall Farm, which he inherited from his uncle, James Melling – the quarry owner who built the rows of stone cottages in Longshaw.  The relationship between Thomas, James and Lydia Melling is unclear as of this writing³⁵.  John James Simm died without issue whereupon his sister, Mary Ann, then married to Charles Mather, inherited.  Charles Mather’s brother, Richard Oswald, became Billinge’s first Doctor Mather.  His son, Richard, and Charles’ three sons, Hugh, David and James, also became local doctors.  James’ widowed wife, Edith, still lives at Wiswall Farm and his son, Charles, also a retired local doctor, lives and farms at Sandy Forth Farm.  When Charles retired from the family practice, in 1995, he brought to a close a tradition of his family practising medicine in Billinge for over one hundred years.

After his stepfather lost Wiswall Farm, William Robinson married Lydia Melling, from the Hare & Hounds, on January 13^th 1876.  He worked at Tanyard House Farm for twenty-five years.  Then his employer, Mr Roscoe, died or left and he became the tenant farmer.  Eventually his widowed daughter-in-law, Hannah, together with his grandchildren, Tom and Lillian, managed to buy Tanyard House Farm, after Squire George Bankes died in 1949 and a massive auction of his property was held to meet death duties.  In that sell off, no less that thirty-one farms, though not all in Billinge, were auctioned, with far reaching consequences.  Most of the new farm owners eventually sold their newly acquired acres for subdivision and the urbanisation of Billinge began³⁶.

William Robinson had two sons, James and William, and two daughters, Margaret and Mary Ann.  Margaret Robinson married John Bradburn from Gladden Hey Farm.  Mary Ann married James Ashton Tinsley from Otterswift Farm.  William married Clarice Cunliffe, a local girl who worked in service for his mother.  James married Hannah Hayes, related to the Hayes family at Lime Grove Orchards – always know locally as Bob Senney’s.  Hannah’s father, James, and Bob (Senney) Hayes were brothers.  Her family came from the Ramparts, a block of stone cottages behind the Unicorn Inn.  Old William Robinson became an influential man.  He served as a councillor for twenty years and as a sidesman for Billinge Church for forty years.  It was his grandson, Tom, who farmed the land with his son, James, when my mother took me with her to work at Tanyard House Farm.  There was no way I could have know, at that age, that four generations of my family had lived in the tiny cottage by the farmyard pond while four generations of Robinsons had farmed the land.

After I stared at Birchley School, my mother worked for a while as a cook at a Nurses’ Home in Wigan.  From there she moved to Woolworth’s as a cook then started work for her bother-in-law, Bob Dunlop, her sister Emily’s husband, who owned a Woodworkers Supply business in Chapel Lane.  She stayed with Bob Dunlop until she officially retired then worked part-time as a cleaner until she was eighty.  At eighty-four she is remarkably robust and active.  Fifteen hundred years of natural selection, on the slopes of a rocky hillside overlooking the Lancashire Plain, have produced a hardy stock of people.  I only hope I inherit my mother’s fortitude.  If hard work is her secret then I probably won’t.

Emily followed her elder sisters into the Mill.  It’s the way it was in those days.  When Orrell Mill closed she had to go to Hope School once a week until she turned eighteen but she doesn’t know why.  It was something to do with the social security.  She started at Eckersley’s Mill at eighteen, where she had to work six months as a trainee without wages.  It was while she worked at Eckersley’s that she met and married Bob Dunlop from Darlington Street, Wigan, 25^th September 1937.  Bob was self-employed, in some capacity, as woodworker until he died in 1977.  He probably got his enterprise from his mother who sold nettle pop to the workers at Darlington Street Brass Foundry, saving enough to buy several cottages in the area.  Bob was an ever-cheerful character who never seemed fazed by any calamity.  He and Emily operated a clog-sole enterprise at Jolly Mill, Boar’s Head, before the War.  After the War they moved first to Ince then into Wigan proper, always in the woodwork business.  Emily had a shop on the corner of Chapel Lane and Bob operated a woodwork supply business in Princes Street.  They lived in Ann Street, off Chapel Lane, until Emily became sick and was confined to hospital.  My mother quit work at Woolworth’s to help until Emily got better.  She stayed working for Bob Dunlop until he died.  The business expanded and moved to the bottom of Scholes, next to the River Douglas, then to The Boat Yard, alongside the Leeds and Liverpool Canal in Poolstock Lane.

My father built a bungalow for Bob and Emily, next door to Billinge Council Offices, in 1957.  The bungalow is still there but the Council Offices are gone.  The Dunlops lived there until Bob had a stroke in 1971.  They sold to bungalow then moved to Aspul where Bob died and is buried at St Elizabeth’s.  Aspul is a long way for Emily’s sisters to visit so in 1981 Emily moved to Church Street, next to Orrell Station.

“Ower Ivy sed, ‘I waint b’ comin up theer if tha teks ill agen,’ so a thowt Emily, tha better cum wom!”

She sold the house in Church Street in 1997 and lives in the Sheltered Accommodation complex behind her former home.  Like my mother she lives a very active social life.  She was never a shrinking violet and she’s not about to change at this stage of the game.

Edna May Roby went straight into service for the Barr family in Moss Road.  She stayed there until she met and married William Heinikey.  Soon after they moved to Birmingham where Edna still lives.  Billy died a few years ago.  He was the first Billinge born person to win the prestigious Waterloo Bowling Tournament.  On the day that he played in the final my father gave Tommy Duncan five pounds to bet on Billy.  When Tommy came back to Billinge that night he gave my father the five pounds back, saying he couldn’t get the bet on.  Few people ever pulled a fast one on my father but Tommy Duncan was one who managed it.  Edna and Billy Heinikey were too far away for us ever to see them except when they came to Billinge to visit.  Their two daughters are Audrey and Pauline.

Ivy Roby was a pretty good runner in her time.  She once beat Nelly Halstead, the British champion, off a handicap mark at the UGB sports ground in St Helens.  She played football for Bolton Ladies and together with Peggy Melling³⁷, a very famous Billinger, represented England at soccer.  Ivy was a seamstress.  She learned the trade at Brown & Haighs in Chapel Lane, Wigan.  It was there that she met and married Charles Wilkie, a cutter who, incidentally, could run faster than Ivy.  That might have been a good thing for Charles because Ivy had a temper and could fight like a thrashing machine.  She was one of those rare women who are more than willing to fight with a man.  I remember her best for always having a pot of tea made when I went to visit.  She never had to make a fresh one when visitors came because as soon as one pot was emptied she made another.  She had unusual eyes, one blue and the other green and grey.  That gene has not passed on to her grandchildren though the running gene has.  A granddaughter, Carrie, represented Lancashire and David, a grandson, is training with Liverpool, Pembroke and Sefton Harriers.  Ivy and her husband are gone now.  They left three children, Elaine, Ann and Charles.

Betty, the youngest daughter, was still at school when the war started.  She can remember taking the younger children to the air raid shelter, wearing their gas masks.  Of the six Roby sisters, Betty was the one who acquired an office job.  She started work as a typist at Brown and Haighs in 1940.  Enid, my sister, was also living at Tracks Lane through the war years.  It was Betty who instigated Enid’s move from St James’s Primary School to Holy Cross, St Helens, when she realised Enid was having difficulties with her schoolwork.  As Enid went on to Higher Education, she probably owes a vote of thanks to our Aunt Betty.  In 1949 Betty married Ernest Lee, a carpenter from Scott Lane, Marsh Green, who served his time with the Navy.  They lived with Betty’s parents until 1954 when they moved to Claremont Road.  They’ve lived there ever since.  My Uncle Ernie has always been a fisherman.  He used to take me spinning for pike at Carr Mill Dam in those far away winters when it used to snow.  My Aunt Betty is probably the best ever scone maker of my experience - so good in fact that I once put her up recipe on the Internet.  Malcolm, their only child, got a university education and has done well for himself as we say in Billinge - good on him.  He is the youngest of James Roby’s grandchildren, the most travelled and perhaps the brightest.

Four of James Roby’s daughters will see in the new millennium, as will his eleven grandchildren, twenty-four great grandchildren and thirteen great, great grandchildren.  The Roby clan from Longshaw proved to be prolific.  James Roby’s descendants are just a fraction of that fecundity.  I’d like to meet the rest of great, great, great grandfather Henry Roby’s many and far-flung progeny but I wouldn’t want to feed them.  There wouldn’t be much change from a tenner if you bought them all a drink.

  (December 1999)

¹ See page 171 for a fuller account of this remarkable document

² A History of England under the Anglo-Saxon Kings by J M Lappenberg

³ Words and Places by Isaac Tayor.

⁴ See Appendix M.

⁵ Hoskins & Finberg, Devonshire Studies

⁶ An as yet unconfirmed outbreak of bubonic plague may have decimated England c 500.

⁷ From article in the Evening Post, July 24 1969.

⁸ See A History of Lancashire by P J Gooderson

⁹ See Appendix B.

¹⁰ See A History of Lancashire by P J Gooderson, published 1980.

¹¹ http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Prairie/1318/robey.html

¹² Paul Langford in the Oxford Illustrated History of Britain, chapter 7.

¹³ For an account of those unspeakable horrors see ‘English Saga 1840 - 1940’ by Arthur Bryant, chapter two.

¹⁴ Henry 6/3/1768 – 19/12/1769, Henry 10/11/1771,

¹⁵ Betty illegitimate daughter of Betty, 28/11/1771.I can find no record of the mother’s birth.

¹⁶ Peter 16/3/1783.

¹⁷ The 1841 census rounds off adults’ ages to the nearest five years.

¹⁸ By David McGill in the September 1999 issue of Practical Family History.

¹⁹ The year Billing and Winstanley became an Urban District Council.

²⁰ See Appendix D

²¹ Also in the census Maria, the widow of Darius, 42; Ann, 22, a colliery servant; Michael, 19, a miner; John, 1, a grandson.  Another family is William, 30, a miner; Ann, his wife, 30; John Thomas, 10; William Edward, 7; Isiah, 5; Elizabeth, 1.

²² Richard 10/2/1887, Mary 7/6/1879, Thomas 21/7/1882, William 2/10/1885, Elizabeth 17/9/1888.

²³ In 1891, the Chorlton family lived at 108 UpHolland Road.  William John Chorlton, a coal miner, married to Ann nee Smith, was the head of the family.  Their first four children were all girls: Mary Ann (Polly) born 1883, Ellen born Oct 1884 Margaret, born July 1887 and Martha, who died aged 5 weeks in 1890.  Charles, the first son, was born in 1891.  Another daughter, Anne, followed him in 1893, but she unfortunately died in 1899.  Then followed more boys: Billie in 1896, John in 1898, Joe in 1900, and finally Albert in 1902.  All the brothers followed their father, by working down the mines.  John Chorlton’s first wife, Margaret Alice Ashall, died giving birth to John Ashall Chorlton in 1921.  He then married Mary Williams, who gave birth to Eileen in 1923 and William Roy in 1926.  After a career in the mines, the navy and the army, Roy became an ambulance driver at Billinge Ambulance Station.

²⁴ Trends in the Industrialisation of Merseyside 1750-1860 by J R Harris.

²⁵ The Billingers by R D Lewis, published 1976 by Riversdown Publications Ltd, Pall Mall.

²⁶ See Appendix H The Eddleston Trust.

²⁷ In Keith Roby’s family bible there is a memorial to Richard’s death, 18/3/1902, aged 38.

²⁸ This information supplied by Don Roby, Tom’s grandson.

²⁹ Living at 130 Washington St Novato as of December 1999.

³⁰ In 1891 census there are other Robys living in Longshaw.  At 22 Longshaw Old Road we find Edward 27, Sarah 23, Joe 1.  Henry, 32 and William, 30,both miners, are living as lodgers with the Cheetham family.  William, 15, is living with James and Hanna Ashcroft.  Michael 29 and his wife Elizabeth are living with Joe, 3.  Alfred Roby, 5, is living with the Barkers.

³¹ Married 1/1/1916.

³² See Roby notes at the end of this document.

³³ 28/4/1920.

³⁴ See Appendix A for the names of heads of households in Holt Crescent and Holt Avenue in 1947-8

³⁵ See Appendix K for notes on the Mellings.

³⁶ In all, 31 farms, 65 cottages, 4 colliery sites, brickworks, woodland and accommodation land – 132 lots comprising 2278 acres, went under the hammer 2^nd & 3^rd May 1951.

³⁷ Peggy was 68 when she died in 1990.  The fish & chip shop she and her sisters ran on the corner of Garswood Rd was for years a focal point for the village’s social life and a primary source of its nutrition.