William Edward Armytage Axon: St Paul's, Kersal Moor #4

The dates of William Edward Armytage Axon (1846–1913) are only just visible on his gravestone, although he is also mentioned here in relation to his wife Jane (née Woods) (1843–89) and his granddaughter Helen Josephine. Here too his third daughter Katharine is buried.

Axon was born in Chorlton-on-Medlock, Manchester, the son of the soon-to-be bankrupt clothing manufacturer Edward Armytage and his fifteen-year-old servant Lydia Whitehead. He was brought up in poverty by the Axon family. Although his education was very limited, William Axon had a great aptitude for education, he spent some years at Manchester Free Library, and in the mid-seventies started working for the Manchester Guardian, where he remained until retiring in 1905.

His many published works include Exotica [poems], 1876; Illustrating Lancashire Dialect (1876); Life of Oliver Cromwell (1877); The Good and Evil of Tobacco (1877); The Annals of Manchester (1886); The Ancoats Skylark, and other verses, original and translated (1894); Echoes of Old Lancashire (1897); and William Harrison Ainsworth: A Memoir (1902).

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Edwin Waugh: St Paul's, Kersal Moor #1

Samuel Oldham Lees: St Paul's, Kersal Moor #2
Robert Angus Smith: St Paul's, Kersal Moor #3
James Crossley and Eleanora Atherton: St Luke's, Kersal Moor #5