Kersal Moor and Chartism

 

'Kersal Moor

 

This Moor was the site of
the first Manchester Racecourse
(c 1687–1846) and the great
Chartist rallies of 1838 and 1839,
when over 30,000 workers met to
demand the right to vote and
the reform of Parliament.'

 

The wooden sculptures are attractive too.

James Crossley and Eleanora Atherton: St Luke's, Kersal Moor #5

'In Loving Memory

of

JAMES CROSSLEY,

PRESIDENT OF THE CHETHAM SOCIETY,

F.S.A.

BORN AT THE MOUNT, HALIFAX;

MARCH 31^ST 1800

DIED AT STOCKS HOUSE, CHEETHAM;

AUGUST 1^ST 1883.'

 

James Crossley (who has been called 'Manchester's Dr Johnson') was an author and bibliophile, and also a solicitor and a business partner of Thomas Ainsworth, the son of the novelist William Harrison Ainsworth who was a lifelong friend.

 

Crossley established the Chetham Society in 1843 to edit and publish works of local history, and many titles were published. He was responsible for the publication of a very successful hoax: Fragment on Mummies, which was said to be by Sir Thomas Browne.

 

I learned about the existence of this grave (and the other below that I've made posts on) from an online publication on St Paul's Churchyard, which I link here. This publication also mentions that he asked to be buried as closely as possible to Eleanora Atherton, and his wish was granted.

Eleanora Atherton (1782–1870) was a philanthropist who lived in Manchester and is thought to have given about £100,000 to charity between 1838 and 1870. She supported the work of the Chetham Society, including the donation of the library of one of her ancestors, the philosopher and poet John Byrom.

Below are links to other posts in the series:
 

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

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

Robert Angus Smith: St Paul's, Kersal Moor #3

A very impressive polished granite gravestone. Scottish-born applied chemist and environmental scientist Robert Angus Smith (1817–1884) has been dubbed 'The Father of Acid Rain'. In 1843 he became the chemist Lyon Playfair's assistant at the Manchester Royal Institution, and later stayed in Manchester as a consulting analytical chemist. His most noted publications are Disinfectants and Disinfection (1869) and Air and Rain: the Beginnings of a Chemical Climatology (1872).

Below are links to other posts in the series:

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

Samuel Oldham Lees: St Paul's, Kersal Moor #2
William Edward Armytage Axon: St Paul's, Kersal Moor #4
James Crossley and Eleanora Atherton: St Luke's, Kersal Moor #5

Samuel Oldham Lees: St Paul's, Kersal Moor #2

'IN LOVING MEMORY OF
SAMUEL OLDHAM LEES
OF CALDER BANK, DAVYHULME
DIED AT SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH, DEC^R 8^TH 1879,

AGED 47 YEARS, WAS INTERRED HERE JAN^Y 3^RD 1880.'

Although Samuel Oldham Lees's grave is here, it's his daughter who is of interest. Edith Ellis (1861–1916), or Edith Lees, hated her cruel father and distrusted men in general. She became a lesbian. However, in 1883 she joined the Fellowship of the New Life, where she met Havelock Ellis, whom she later married. The marriage was unusual though: they probably never had sex, lived separately some of the time, and Edith continued with lesbian affairs.

 

In 1898 Edith published the novel Seaweed: A Cornish Idyll, which Jo-Ann Wallace suggests may have inspired D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover,* and which (published by 'Dr. Roland de Villiers') was accidentally suppressed at the same time as Havelock Ellis's Sexual Inversion (1897). There is a link below to Seaweed, along with links to other posts in the series.

 

* 'The Very First Lady Chatterley? Mrs. Havelock Ellis’s Seaweed', by Jo-Ann Wallace, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 Volume 51, Number 2, 2008.

 

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

Robert Angus Smith: St Paul's, Kersal Moor #3
William Edward Armytage Axon: St Paul's, Kersal Moor #4
James Crossley and Eleanora Atherton: St Luke's, Kersal Moor #5
Edith Ellis's Seaweed: A Cornish Idyll (1898)

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

Saint Paul's churchyard, Moor Lane, Kersal Moor, Salford.

 

The grave of Edwin Waugh (1817–1890) – pronounced 'Woff' – the dialect poet who was born in Rochdale and was the son of a maker of shoes. His poem "Come Whoam to Thi Childer an' Me" (1856) greatly impressed Andrea Burdett-Coutts with its emphasis on temperance and marital fidelity, although the alcoholic wife-deserter Waugh was obviously no exemplar of the ideals of the poem.

 

EDWIN WAUGH

'BORN 29^TH JANUARY 1817

DIED 30^TH APRIL 1890'

 

The following paragraphs are included in the Wikipedia entry for Kersal Moor:

 

'In 1876 the Lancashire dialect poet and songwriter Edwin Waugh moved from his Manchester home to Kersal Moor for the "fresher air". Waugh's early life was spent in Rochdale and although he worked in Manchester he yearned for the moors he remembered from his youth. He wrote the following poem about Kersal Moor:

Kersal Moor

Sweet falls the blackbird's evening song,
in Kersal's poised dell;
But the skylarks trill makes the dewdrops thrill,
In the bonny heather;
Wild and free
Wild and free
Where the moorland breezes blow.

Oft have I roved you craggy steeps,
Where the tinkling moorland rills,
Sing all day long their low sweet song,
To the lonely listening hills;
And croon at night
In the pale moonlight

While mountain breezes blow.

As his health declined, Waugh moved to the seaside town of New Brighton. On his death in 1890, his body was brought back to be buried in the graveyard of St. Paul's Church, on the edge of the moorland he loved so well.

...Oh lay me down in moorland ground,

And make it my last bed,
With the heathery wilderness around,
And the bonny lark o'erhead:
Let fern and ling around me cling,
And green moss o'er me creep;
And the sweet wild mountain breezes sing,

 

Above my slumbers deep. – from The Moorland Breeze, Edwin Waugh (1889)'

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Samuel Oldham Lees: St Paul's, Kersal Moor #2
Robert Angus Smith: St Paul's, Kersal Moor #3

William Edward Armytage Axon: St Paul's, Kersal Moor #4
James Crossley and Eleanora Atherton: St Luke's, Kersal Moor #5