The Eastwoods of Eastwood: a deep dive into education, exercise books and a little bit of family history

Recently one of our borrowers came into Todmorden Library with some exercise books he had been given many years ago, wanting to know if we could help him find anything out about them. After a little bit of skim reading, and a LOT of rummaging around in the back and online research, we discovered that they belonged to three of the children of Thomas and Sarah Eastwood of Eastwood Hall – Barker, Elizabeth and Edwin. Thomas, along with his brothers, owned and ran Eastwood Dyeworks, also known as Eastwood Lower Mill or Cockden, near to where Eastwood train station used to be. The Eastwood family was a very old family from the district whose presence in the valley can be traced back to the 1300’s. He and his brothers carved out a decent living from the early 1800’s right up until the end of the cotton famine in the 1840’s, after which Thomas retired and became what is recorded on the census or electoral registers as a “landed proprietor” or “independent gentleman”. Thomas and Sarah lived in Eastwood, near to Eastwood House (now Eastwood Hall) and had ten children in total. Many of them died relatively young, between the ages of 20 and 30, but Thomas and Sarah and some of their remaining children lived to their 80’s. Three became local solicitors – quite locally famous ones at that – and some of their nephews also were articled to them while they were pursuing their law degrees and qualifications. The most well known to those of you who are interested in the history of Todmorden would be Abraham Greenwood Eastwood who held a number of positions on the town council for nearly 63 years and whose firm was involved in drawing up various legal documents, including the official boundaries of the town itself, in preparation for Incorporation. We have very little in the historical record about the three whose books we have on display here but with the help of some local history resources held at this library, and some online ones, we can put a little flesh on the bones of the three children who carefully and (likely) painfully produced these exercise books.

Barker: very little is known about the eldest child of Thomas and Sarah. He was born in 1806 and presumably went to the same sort of school as his brothers, somewhere that demanded a great deal of work to be done to receive a good mark. He and his parents and siblings were initially baptised at Myrtle Grove Congregational, near Charlestown, and rebaptised at Cross Stone in 1819 during a period where there was a great deal of argument and conflict between the congregation and the leadership at Myrtle Grove. The mass family move to another denomination – not just another church – might have been intended as a statement; according to the Todmorden and Hebden Bridge Almanack of 1868, Barker’s grandfather had actually donated the freehold on the land on which Myrtle Grove was built! After this point Barker disappears from the record until 1837 when he reappears on the electoral register. On the 1841 Census he is listed as a “farmer” and lives at Eastwood with his parents. He again appears in 1843 and 1844 on the electoral register, but it is unlikely that he voted in 1844 as he died on the 4th of January, only a few days after his birthday, at age 38. Barker had never married and no record exists of any illegitimate children, although we are only able to see records going up to 1837 so cannot be sure. Don’t be so surprised that we would think about such a thing when trying to discover more about an unmarried person; illegitimate children were not only common but were faithfully recorded as such on their parish birth records along with the name of the reputed father! The township had a very forward-thinking legal approach to illegitimate children, and fathers, if proven in court, would be liable for paying maintenance to the local Guardians who would then pass the payment along to the child’s mother.

The burial record shows him as having been interred at Cross Stone in the old yard, but his stone was separate from that of his parents and was either no longer in place or legible by the time transcriptions of the memorials were taken by the Todmorden Antiquarian Society. His death and burial record do not record any cause; however, given that most of his other siblings who died young suffered from tuberculosis or related illnesses, it seems probable that this was the cause of death for him. Tuberculosis and related diseases were very common in the 19th century. In 1815 one in four hospital patients in England had TB, and the situation had barely improved by 1870 when one in five deaths were attributable to TB. Four of these books are his, and all cover a variety of maths from geometry to calculations of volume to the calculations necessary for a variety of tradespeople.

Some calculations from one of Barker’s exercise books

Elizabeth: Elizabeth was born in 1813 and was one of the small number of long-lived Eastwoods in this family unit. In 1839 she married William Sutcliffe, another local cotton manufacturer, and the two of them lived in Todmorden for the rest of their lives. One of their sons, Charles Edwin, joined his uncles’ firm of solicitors at one point. Elizabeth herself passed away at the end of 1888. Like Barker, there is not much historical information about Elizabeth to be found apart from census entries and birth/marriage/death records for herself, her husband and her children.

Elizabeth Eastwood – photo courtesy of Diana Williamson

Her book contains much of the same sort of mathematical exercise as Edwin’s; maths related to the running of a business, such as invoicing, creating and updating financial records, expenses, the charging of interest and how to make resources last a set amount of time given particular demands on them. It’s interesting to think of Elizabeth being taught the skills needed to run a major business in what was probably, given her age, the late 1820’s/early 1830’s, and also given her family’s wealth and her social position within the independent manufacturing class. There were boarding schools in Wakefield which educated girls and it seems likely that Elizabeth must have attended one of those, although we could not find any record of her a being resident of one. Given that the notebooks are so similar, particularly hers and Edwin’s, it would make sense that her school was a part of the larger network of schools in Wakefield at that time.

1853 OS map of St. John’s Ward, Wakefield

Edwin: Edwin’s skills ran towards very different subjects than maths, as he was one of Todmorden’s first solicitors to operate a firm in the town, alongside his brothers William and Abraham who were also solicitors at law. Their practice was on Water Street where Wrigley Claydon is now. Edwin was a little more creative in his notebook than his siblings – rather than lightly pencilling his name at the top of the flyleaf (like Barker) or at the bottom of the exercises (like Elizabeth), he wrote his name in pencil on the inside cover of the book in fancy block-type script. He also scribbled some Latin verb conjugations inside the cover. His book, like Elizabeth’s, covered business-related maths.

Thanks to Edwin’s age and profession there is a little more information available about him on internet archives. Born in 1826, he can be found on the 1841 Census in Wakefield at an unnamed boarding school. Searches of historical maps of the area indicate that he was likely at the West Riding Proprietary school, where Abraham (who was a year older than him) also attended. The school is visible on the 1853 Ordnance Survey map detail shown earlier with Elizabeth’s information. He later became a qualified solicitor and married Martha Robinson of Rochdale in 1850. They lived at Harley Bank not far from Elizabeth and William Sutcliffe, who in 1851 lived just down the road at Harley House. Edwin, like many of his siblings, died relatively young at the age of 31 in 1858. A family tree gives his cause of death as phthisis, a type of tuberculosis or wasting disease.

Edwin Eastwood – photograph courtesy of Diana Williamson

Moving on from autobiographical details, we return now to the books. We can more or less be certain that the books were produced by the three children independently as the handwriting and quality of hand-lettering differ between each book which was labelled for one child or another. That’s how we know that the book without a name anywhere inside belonged to Barker, for example – the handwriting matches exactly. Similarly, the two books which cover business maths and finances are too similar in content to be for the same student, and the handwriting within each one is different. Edwin’s handwriting is larger and his spelling a little less consistent, while Elizabeth’s straight lines aren’t very straight and often her sentences slant downwards and to the right.

detail from Edwin’s exercise book

The handwriting rarely gives away whether the writer was a young man or woman as it is in near-perfect script, with only the occasional spelling error or uneven lines to give away that it might not be an adult. The content also makes the reader feel especially inadequate when it comes to their own knowledge of maths. Even accounting for the archaic language used many of the calculations are very complex, and it’s a credit to each child that they were able to produce these works. Although…let’s be honest…it isn’t as though many of us here could double check their work for accuracy! It might not be as impressive as it looks on the surface. But we’ll let the Eastwood children have their win.

If you have a mysterious handwritten book of your own at home, or an item you’ve inherited that has a name on it, this is all research that you too could do both from home and in your local library. Almost all of the resources we have in our libraries are catalogued, and your library assistants at each branch will have a good idea of what isn’t. Online reference resources like FindMyPast, Ancestry, and the British Newspaper Archive are also available to use, for free, in the library itself. This display drew on those online resources as well as items in the Todmorden Antiquarian Society’s collection which is housed at Todmorden Library and whose items are catalogued and available to view on request. If you want to do some research of your own or want any help or advice from us, don’t ever hesitate to ask!