Billinge History (the book)

Afterthoughts

On a sunny September afternoon in the year 2000, I sat with my son Louis on the steps of the Capital Building in Austin, Texas, waiting to meet the distant relative whose name was Shelly Roby.  She worked for the American television personality Oprah Winfrey and her great grandfather, Tom Roby, born in Longshaw, had emigrated, as an orphan, to Canada in 1910.  Tom’s father, Richard Roby, had a brother, John, who just happened to be my great grandfather.  I had discovered this American branch of the family by what almost amounted to a miracle.  Now it was time to meet one of them.

As we sat with our backs to the building, where the soon-to-be-elected-president George Bush then presided as Sate Governor, I noticed a girl walking through the crowds, some hundred yards below us and knew that must be her.  She walked exactly like my daughter and, at that distance, could almost have been her.  It’s amazing how our genes run true across the generations and how far they spread.  Both my son and my daughter were born in New Zealand - a long walk from Billinge with a nail in your clog.

United by our Billinge heritage, we spent an afternoon together, in a comfortable bar in a city I’d like to live in sometime, showing her family pictures on the laptop and telling stories about people she could not imagine in a place she never seen.  She seemed to be both delighted and amazed at the revelations.  When I told her about my aunt Ivy picking up the fox-terrier that had just bitten her by the scruff of the neck and biting a lump out its back to teach it better manners, she almost fell off her seat.  It was a good afternoon – a family thing.  I knew right then that I’d have to get a Billinge History web site together and put a book in Billinge library someday soon.  It took a lot of help and about a year to make these things happen.  Since then, building on that starting point has been ongoing.

Two previous editions were published before this one.  Edition One was brought out in 2001 for two reasons.  Firstly, we had promised to put a copy of our work in the local libraries as part of a successful funding application and sought to establish our credentials with the funding authority for future reference.  The second reason was that Mrs. Ethel Smith nee Tinsley of Carr Mill Road was then over ninety years old.  I badly wanted to put a copy of the book she inspired into her hands as soon as humanly possible.  When that occurred, it was, for me, the most memorable moment of the many that have occurred since deciding to delve more deeply into our local Billinge History.

Edition Two was published in May 2002 due to the pressures of demand – people wanted it so we succumbed to the pressure.  The book was nowhere near complete then and it is nowhere near complete now.  I had, for instance, intended writing the history of Brownheath Colliery because of another almost miraculous occurrence.  Whilst talking to a complete stranger about what I was doing, he said that he had something I might be interested in – the records of Billinge Collieries.  This stranger was originally from the Lake District but he’d lived in Ashton at one time.  One day, his small daughter had brought home a large book that she’d found in a rubbish skip.  It turned out to be the one of original minute books of Billinge Collieries Limited, a company formed in 1911 to take over Birchley Colliery and who subsequently opened Brownheath Colliery in 1914.  Realising the historical value of this book, my newly found friend had returned to the skip and recovered almost all this company’s record books.  I didn’t let him out of my sight until he gave them to me.

Brownheath Colliery was a major employer of local Billinge labour – my grandfather amongst them.  It operated from 1914 to 1934.  With two of the three original minute books, the correspondence books, the wages books and other company records in my possession, it was possible to see the inside story of a critical Billing industry.  Better than that, Ethel Smith was born at Brownheath two years before the first shaft was driven there.  She had lived at the mine’s doorstep until it closed twenty years later and, possessing almost total recall, knew just about every name in the wages books and how they fitted into the local community.  I have recorded Mrs. Smith’s recollections of the colliery and its characters on mini-disk.  These recordings and the record books are now in possession of St Helens reference library.

Another kind benefactor rescued the Local Board Minutes from 1888 to 1910 from a trip to the rubbish tip.  They contain a wealth of information that I would otherwise have condensed and recorded, in this current hardback edition, if circumstances had allowed it.  There are many other contributions, large and small, that we don’t have time to include in this edition.  Whatever additional information and photographs the Billinge History Society accumulates in the future will be always available from the society’s web sites.

This may well be the final edition of our collective researches to be published in hardback format.  Somewhat reluctantly, we have decided to shelve the publishing project for the time being and get on with other things.  There are simply not enough hours in the day to do everything that needs doing.  Publishing books is, unfortunately, extremely time-consuming and a very expensive enterprise for amateurs.

We have so far only scratched the surface of fifteen hundred years of Billinge History but we trust our efforts to date will be a useful reference source to anyone interested in that history.  We will be particularly grateful if anyone researching family history would contact us through the web sites, as our good friends Sheila and Anne have done at the eleventh hour, just in time for me to include their research (below) before this work goes to the book binder.

Joe Taylor

Secretary Billinge History Society 2003

THE BERRY'S by Anne Darbyshire (Berry) and Sheila Bowden (Mousdell)

Mary Frodsham (1776)

Mary Frodsham was our great, great, great, great grand mother.  The register at St. Aiden's church shows that she was christened in 1776.  She had a child, Betty Frodsham, who was christened on 11th December, 1796.  Mary was 20 years old at the time.

Betty Frodsham (1796) and Henry Foster (1798)

Betty Frodsham was our great, great, great grandmother.  She was a weaver by trade.  Betty married Henry Foster in 1820 and they had 5 children:

Jane Frodsham (20/6/1819); William Foster (17/2/1822); Elizabeth Foster (21/12/1823); Richard Foster (16/1/1827); James Foster (11/1/1828).

Henry was a nailer and had 5 sisters and 1 brother:

He was born on 21/01/1798; Margaret (17/4/1803); Ann (18/8/1805); Betty (23/10/1808); William (16/12/1809); Ellen (21/1/1813) and Ellen (21/7/1814)

Jane Frodsham (1819) and John Berry (1815)

Jane Frodsham was my great great grandmother and like her mother, she too was a weaver.  Jane was the first born of 5 children.  She was baptized at St. Aidan's on the 20th June, 1819.  At the age of 19, Jane got married to John Berry on August 12th 1838 at All Saints Parish Church, Wigan.  John was 23, and on the marriage certificate it states that John's father, like Jane's, was a nailer.  John worked in the colliery as a labourer.  John was the sixth child of Edward and Betty Berry.  His family were:

Margaret (20/6/1802); Ellen (5/2/1804); Thomas (22/6/1806); Mary (5/2/1809); William (16/12/1811); John (1815); Jane (10/10/1816) and Edward (17/10/1819).

John and Jane lived in Billinge all their lives, firstly at Slack, Lane Ends and then at number 5 Carr Mill Road.  John became a brakesman in the colliery in later years.  In the 1861 census, it shows that John and Jane had 8 children:

Mary, 19; William, 15; Elizabeth, 14; Ellen, 12; Henry, 9; Ann, 6; John, 4 and Margaret, 1.

They lived at Slack then.

In 1871, the census shows that they had moved to 5 Carr Mill Road and had another 2 children, Levi, 9, and James, 6.  By 1881, John and Jane had moved to Fir Cottages, St Helens Road, Billinge.  John was a widower by 1891.

The Descendants of Anne Darbyshire

William Berry (1845-1879) and Mary Turton (1849)

William and Mary were my great great grandparents.  William was the third child of John and Jane.  He was baptized when fully grown at St. Aidan's, and became a coal miner's drawer.  William married Mary at St. Aidan's on the 28th February 1876.  They had 3 children, John, Jane, and Levi.  Williams had a short life, dying on the 24th January, 1879 aged 35.  He died at the Rant of bronchitis lasting 13 days.  His brother John was present at his death.  He was buried at St Aidan's.  Mary later remarried a man named John Naylor.

Jane Berry (1880-1909) and Joseph Chisnall (1870-1928)

My great grandparents.  Jane was the middle child of 3.  Going to school at St. Aidan's, she lived at 8 Weavers Court and worked as a pit brown lass, when she met Joseph.  She had my grandfather Thomas, before being married.  On the two census returns, she was living with her brother John and her son Thomas at 5 Weavers Court.  When they married, she moved to 72 Rainford Road.  She had 5 more children, Hannah, Anna, Joan, Maria and Helen, but all died before the age of 2.  Jane lived on to be 35 before dying in her home of a pulmonary embolism on 6th September, 1909.  Her husband Jospeh himself died aged 55, drowning in a pit in Maddox Farm, his body being found on 4th March, 1928.  The coroner could not say whether the death was accidental or suicide.

Thomas Berry (1894-1984) and Mary Elizabeth Roughley Gee (1894-1959)

My grandparents.  Thomas was born in Weavers Court before moving to Rainford Road.  He served in the First World War before working in the coal mines for the rest of his life.  He went to St Mary's school, Birchley, the same as his wife.  He married Mary Eliabeth there on 13th April, 1918.  Bringing up 4 children, they moved to 31 Holt Avenue.  He was a well known figure around the village, everyone calling him 'Old T'.  My grandmother died aged 65 but my grandfather lived to be 90, passing away in 1984.

Denis Berry (1926-1996) and Winifred May Mary Murphy (1924-  )

My parents.  My father was born on 21st September, 1926 at 72 Rainford Road and baptized at St. Mary's Birchley, going to school there later.  He was the youngest of four, Thomas, Joseph and Jane, who had a twin sister Anne who died after 1 week.  He married my mum Winifred at St. Vincent's, Parr on 29th July, 1950, having 4 children:

Myself, Patricia Anne; Christine; Denise; and Terence Anthony.

Working in the coal industry all of his life before having to finish because of ill health.  Then he became the caretaker of the then new school, Billinge Chapel End.  Retired from there aged 59 due to a chest complaint.  Lived to be 69 then dying of a coal-related disease, leaving us all to mourn a wonderful husband and father.

I would appreciate it if any relatives of the earlier Berrys, the family of William's brother preferably, John or James's brother Levi, would get in touch to see if they can fill in any more details.

Ann Darbyshire October 2003

The Descendants of Sheila Bowden

Hannah Middlehurst (1829-1900)

Hannah was my great great grandmother, and mother of Elizabeth.  Hannah had 3 children in total and never married.  She lived at Lane Ends for most of her life and lived with her son Peter and his family in the Cockshot in the late 1890s.  Peter and his son Peter, Hannah's grandson, worked at Birchley colliery.  The younger Peter died at the age of 13 when an iron bar fell and crushed his neck on the 13th August, 1900.  Hannah died 4 months later.

Henry Berry (1852-1917) and Elizabeth Middlehurst (1855-1925)

Henry Berry was the third child of John and Jane, and my great grandfather.  Henry was baptized at St. Aidans in 1852.  He was a coal laborer and married Elizabeth on the 1st January, 1883 at St. Aidans.  Henry was 30 years old and Elizabeth was 27.  They lived at Lane Ends.

Elizabeth was born in the workhouse at Frog Lane, Wigan, the same as her brother Peter, who was 3 years older.  Peter was born on the 30th September, 1852 and  Elizabeth on the 3rd April, 1855.  They also had a sister who was born in Billinge on November 4th, 1862.

Elizabeth and Henry had 5 children:

Jack (1872); Anna (1876); Ellen (1882); Hannah (1886), and Joanna (1888).

All of their children were baptized at St. Mary's, Birchley.

Henry died in 1917 at the age of 65 years and was buried at St. Aidan's.  Elizabeth died in 1925 and was buried at St. Mary's.

William Gee and Hannah Gee nee Berry (1886-1977)

Hannah Berry was my grandmother.  She worked as a pithead girl at the age of 14 years along with her sister Ellen, at Birchley colliery.  Hannah married William Gee, a fireman, on the 14th March, 1908.  Hannah was 22 and William 23.  They lived in Main St. at the time.

William Gee was born in 1885 and lived at 202 Main St., Billinge.  He was the 7th child of Thomas and Catherine Gee.  He had 7 brothers and 5 sisters.  William attended St. Mary's school, Birchley.  He went to work in the pit at the age of 12 years and he later became a fireman.  He was there when they first sank Brown Heath colliery.  William worked in the pit until he was 70 years old.  He was in the swimming team and also Billinge Albion football team.  He died in September 1972 aged 87.

William's nephew, Joseph Gee, was killed in the First World War.  He was a driver for the Royal Field Artillery.  His parents received his 3 medals.

William and Hannah Gee had 8 children, 3 of whom died in infancy.  My Mum Pleasance was second born in 1908.  She was a pupil at St. Mary's school.  When she was a teenager, she went into service at Conroys in Wigan.  They were fruit and veg wholesalers.  Mum was employed by them to look after their son, Michael Conroy.  She later got a job as a pitbrow lass at Brown Heath colliery.  My Mum married my Dad, Leonard Mousdell, on 2nd January 1937 when she was 28 years old.  He was the son of John and Mary Mousdell of Main Street, Billinge.  My Dad was born in 1908, the 7th of 9 children, and was a pupil of St. Aidan's, Billinge.  He became a miner at the age of 13 when he left school and worked as a hewer in a number of pits in Billinge and St. Helens.  His main hobby was pigeon fancying and he won the Pigeon Derby with his bird, Blue Mick.  My parents had two children, Monica, and myself, Sheila.

Sheila Bowden October 2003

Len Mousdell with Blue Mick