Dave Pattern
@daveyp
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Hi David
Many thanks for getting in touch! There are a couple of options:
- You can register for an account that will allow you to edit pages on Huddersfield Exposed. If you’re familiar with editing content on Wikipedia, then the site uses the same software.
- You could create a new topic in the Roll of Honour Forum and include details of the errors and how you’d like them to be corrected. You can also upload photos and other files. I’ll use that information to update Arnold’s page on your behalf.
regards
DaveHi Steve
The stone laying ceremony on 5 June 1909 has a 2-column write up in the Huddersfield Examiner 12 June 1909 which names the architects as Messrs. Garside & Pennington of Pontefract. The contractors were:
- masons: Thomas Bottomley & Sons (Lindley)
- joiners: J. & J. Wilkinson (Marsden)
- plumbers: Milnes & Garside (Huddersfield)
- plasterers: John Theobould & Sons
- slater: Mr. T. B. Tunnacliffe
- painters: Moxon & Sons (Huddersfield)
I’ve not been able to locate exact dates of birth for several of the victims, so copies of birth certificates will need to be ordered (all registered at Huddersfield):
- John Charlesworth — Q1 1848 v22 p296
- Emor Charlesworth — Q4 1845 v22 p205
- Ruth Charlesworth — Q1 1851 v22 p366
- Joseph Mettrick — Q3 1850 v22 p344 (needed to confirm parents as mother was “Brown”)
- Jane Mettrick — Q3 1849 v22 p318 (needed to confirm parents as mother was “Brown”)
- Abel Earnshaw — Q3 1844 v22 p306
- Alfred Ashall — Q2 1850 v22 p357 (mother was “Haworth”)
- George Hartley — Q1 1852 v09A p249
- Elizabeth Healey — Q4 1843 v22 p312
Updates:
- Turns out the above Joseph & Jane Mettrick were separate/unrelated to the Joseph & Jane who died in the flood. Instead, they were the children of Thomas & Mary Ann Mettrick and it’s just an odd/curious coincidence that the Joseph & Jane who died in the flood were born around the same time and were given the same names.
- Alfred Ashall’s birth certificate confirms mother’s maiden name was Haworth… but can we trust the details given on the birth certificate if the story that Alfred’s father and mother were unmarried and had eloped are true?
I’d need to check how long after the flood it occurred, but there was an auction at Holmfirth Town Hall of unclaimed items that had been recovered but not claimed by their rightful owners. The money raised went to the relief fund. So, possibly a table that came from the house of one of the victims?
[edit] The auction took place on 10-12 March. I’ve attached the notice published in the Huddersfield Chronicle (06/Mar/1852).
SALES BY AUCTION.
HOLMFIRTH FLOOD.
SALE OF UNCLAIMED SALVAGE.
MR. TINKER is instructed to SELL by AUCTION, on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday NEXT, the 10th, 11th, and 12th days of March inst., at the places where the articles are described to be in the Posting Bills which have been distributed throughout the district, unless the said articles be previously claimed and properly identified.
Sale to commence each day at ten o’clock a.m.: on Wednesday, at the Town Hall, Holmfirth ; on Thursday, at the Red Lion Inn, Lockwood ; and on Friday, at the place next to where the sale of Thursday is concluded.
The Salvage at other places, not described in the Posting Bills, will be advertised for sale in a subsequent Bill.
Instructions are given to prosecute any person or persons removing or appropriating any of the Salvage without my written authority.
GEO. TINKER.
Holmfirth, March 2, 1852.Hi Patrick. Your best bet would be to contact the Revd. Abbie Palmer and she should be able to put you in touch with one of the churchwardens who’ll have access to the burial registers:
https://communitydirectory.kirklees.gov.uk/communitydirectory/organisationDetails.aspx?orgId=1525
It looks like there was a clay pit nearby which was only marked on the 1959 O.S. map.
Attachments:
Thanks, Harry! I don’t think I had access to the detailed 1959 OS map when Amberley House was added to the site.
Work will begin shortly on migrating the site to a new web server and upgrading to MediaWiki 1.39. A lot of work will be required, so there’s a separate topic:
That’s a great photo! I’d agree it looks 1920s.
Thomas Dent was at Burlington House from around 1918 until his death in 1945 and was definitely still active as a photographer in the late 1930s.
The site’s map feature (which displays icons of geoindexed locations) has just had a major update which should improve performance…
The icons are delivered via an API which takes the boundaries of the displayed map and, combined with the current zoom level, decides which markers should be displayed. Previously, the API response included details such as geocoordinates, location name, location ID, icon details, etc. and, if a large number of markers needed to be displayed, the response size could be large — perhaps up to around 15kB for a particularly busy map. Each time the user adjusts the map (scrolling, zooming, etc), another API request was needed, generating network traffic and CPU load on the server.
The new update moves to using the web browser’s localStorage (if available) to cache a full copy of all geoindexed locations using a JSON file on the server. The browser will periodically check to see if the localStorage cache is up-to-date and, if not, pull a fresh copy of the JSON file from the server. The API response is now much smaller (around 1kB) and contains only the location IDs of the markers to display — the rest of the information (geocoordinates, name, icon, etc) is retrieved from the localStorage.
I spotted this morning that Microsoft Internet Explorer 11 was failing to properly render some of the pages in the site, so I’ve tweaked bits of the JavaScript to try and restore functionality. Versions of IE lower than 11 are not compatible with this site. IE users currently account for less than 0.1% of visitors and Microsoft will soon be ending support for IE 11. If you’re still using Internet Explorer, you should seriously consider using a more modern web browser, such as Chrome, Firefox or Opera, most of which should work just fine on older versions of Microsoft Windows. Otherwise, you should be able to use the official IE replacement — Microsoft Edge — on recent versions of Windows.
It looks like the numbering might match the 1960s O.S. map (the first to show house numbers), with 3 & 5 at the bottom right.
Attachments:
I’ve started work on this “future plan” item:
- integrate Omeka content directly into the wiki (so that the content appears in searches, etc) and just use Omeka as a back-end management tool
When Huddersfield Exposed first launched, Flickr offered a reasonable amount of free storage for multimedia so it made sense to use that as the tool for storing and managing the content. Unfortunately, all that changed in 2018. We then moved to using a local install of Omeka Classic to manage the multimedia and uncoupled the Flickr integration. The downside was that the main site (which uses MediaWiki) became separate to the multimedia archive (Omeka).
Moving forward, I’m now using the Omeka API to help embed multimedia into the main site, e.g.:
As of today, running a search within the site, e.g. for Moldgreen, will include multimedia content that is stored in the main MediaWiki page index:
…previously I’d been running the search keywords against the Omeka API which tended to bring back irrelevant results when using multiple keywords.
The main thing that’s still to do is to provide a new page on the wiki that will allow you to run searches against only the multimedia content.
Further questions…
4) Was the body of Emor Charlesworth ever recovered/identified?
- Emor’s father (John) was still recovering from the flood on the first day of the inquest (Fri 6 Feb) and he wasn’t there to identify any of the bodies. The newspaper reports are contradictory, but it looks like there were two male bodies that remained undefined in Honley inns that were then identified after the inquest jury had left (as we know that there were three “unknown”s who were buried and they didn’t include the two Honley bodies). The ages of the two match up with Charleworth children (John & Emor), but there’s no mention of Emor being buried in newspaper reports nor any burial records. Emor’s name also seems to drop off the list of the still missing. In newspaper coverage on 14 Feb, John said that Emor “is the name of one child not yet found” and a description was issued. Was Emor’s body ever found (if so, seemingly not reported in the press and where is the burial record?) or was he forgotten about?
- TO DO: Small project to collate the newspaper coverage of which inns bodies were taken to, which were definitely identified on 7 Feb, and which appear to have been identified afterwards. The coverage of 7 Feb suggests that the bodies of 5 or 6 children remained unidentified but only 3 were buried as “unknown”s.
5) The flood babies
- Again, newspaper reports are contradictory, but there are reports of a new-born baby being found dead at Hinchliffe Mill and also reports of a new-born baby being found with (or near to) Hannah Bailey at Thongsbridge. Some reports suggest the latter was Hannah’s baby, although her husband makes no mention of her being pregnant or having recently given birth. It was also suggested that the Hinchliffe Mill baby had “been purposely placed there since the accident at the reservoir, by some unnatural mother to conceal her shame”. There are no mention of either baby at the inquest, nor can I find any burial records (caveat: Hinchliffe Mill Wesleyan burial records are lost).
- The Leeds Intelligencer (14 Feb 1852): “There was also found on Tuesday [i.e. 10 Feb], at Hinchcliffe, the body of a child unknown, which, from certain appearances which it exhibited, the medical gentlemen who have examined it, and with whom we have conversed, have declared must have been born in the water.”
- Huddersfield Chronicle (14 Feb 1852): “We may mention here, as rumours have obtained currency, as to the unfortunate sufferer being drowned whilst in the pains of labour, that if this is [Hannah Bailey’s] child, it bears evidence of not only having been born, but dressed, and is to all appearance of the age stated [i.e. a few days old].” The body was at the Rose & Crown, Thongsbridge.
- One oddity is that lack of coverage of the Hinchliffe Mill baby in the Huddersfield newspapers — the majority of references are in non-Huddersfield papers, so may not be accurate.
- My working theory is that the Hinchliffe Mill baby was indeed placed there after the flood and that the reports of a baby became conflated with the finding of Hannah’s youngest daughter Martha. The testimony at the inquest [6 Feb] seems to make it clear that the infant was taken to the R&C and that Aner Bailey identified the body as being his youngest daughter.
- Huddersfield Examiner (14 Feb 1852): “John Moorhose Woodhead, joiner, of Holmfirth, said, whilst he and some other parties were going to look at a number of houses at Thongsbridge on Thursday morning, about half-fast two o’clock, they discovered the bodies of Hannah Bailey and an infant supposed to be hers. They found the body of Hannah Bailey a little above Thongsbridge, about twenty yards from the bridge on the southeast side in Wooldale; the child [I doubt they would use the world “child” for a new-born baby] was about ten yards above; she had no covering on, but the child had part of a night-dress fastened round its neck. Both the bodies were taken to the Rose and Crown Inn, Thongsbridge. Enor Bailey said he had lost his wife and two children; the youngest was about two years old, and the eldest was aged four years; he had seen their bodies at the Rose and Crown. He (Bailey) was stunned by being thrown on one side by the water. The wife and he were standing on the floor, and the children were playing on the bed, when the flood came, and swept them all away. He was the only one that was saved out of the four.”
- Can we unravel the curious story of the Horbury Flood Foundling? From the Examiner (24 Mar 1914):
“Ariel,” in his weekly chat, made an interesting allusion the other week to the octogenarian novelist, the Rev. S. Baring-Gould. It is recorded that in the fifties and sixties he was curate-in-charge of Horbury Bridge. At the Holmfirth flood there was a tremendous flow of water at Horbury Bridge, and the “flotsam and jetsam” included a baby girl in the water. The foundling was rescued and adopted by a Horbury family. The village parson published the “Penny Comequicks,” in which a foundling baby in a flood was a conspicuous character. The real flood baby settled in Horbury for life, and it is only a year or two since she died, the romance of her babyhood having been attached to her throughout her life.
…who was she? The story feels intertwined with Baring-Gould’s books.
6) What was William Exley‘s relationship to the Mettrick family?
- the 1841 Census lists William Exley and also Sarah Exley (aged 15) residing in James Mettrick’s house — was Jane William’s sister (if so, where is her baptismal record?) or possibly even his young wife (if so, was she James Mettrick’s daughter and, if so, where is their marriage record?)
- the 1851 Census lists William Exley as being James Mettrick’s son-in-law — this would tie with Sarah Exley being James’ daughter (if so, where was she in 1851?) or perhaps William was in a relationship with James’ married daughter Betty (whose husband Enos had left for American in 1846)
