Billinge families

ROBINSON

(extracted from the main text)

After his step-father lost Wiswall Farm, William Robinson married Lydia Melling, from the Hare & Hounds, on January 13th 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 concequencies. Most of the new farm owners sold their newly acquired acres for subdivision and the urbanisation of Billinge began .

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.