“I’ve been waiting 19 years to see these”: The mystery of William Hardaker, Part Two

After Part One came out, I began asking around within my professional (and unprofessional – we library people run in packs) circles about what could have happened to the contents of the Hardaker room. A lot of research went into the preparation of Part Two…but in the end, it turned out that the answer to this mystery laid much closer to home than I expected. Read on to find out how we got from the last post to the photo above, which is of John Hardaker – William’s great-great-grandson – stood with what we think are the only remaining pieces of art from this curious and obscure man’s life’s work.

The first stop was the Todmorden Town Council minutes, to see in more detail what had happened after 1947 when dry rot had invaded the Centre Vale Rooms. From there I learned that the decision was made to disperse the contents as follows – natural history items and specimens were to be donated to local schools, loans to be given back to the family of those who had initially loaned them, and donations (artwork particularly) were to be offered out to neighbouring authorities and ultimately disposed of. I contacted a friend who works at Touchstones in Rochdale to see if anything had gone to them, given the Tim Bobbin connection, but her searches revealed nothing. I then contacted someone within Museums who was also unable to find any paperwork relating to Centre Vale, but offered an interesting fact: that often during that time, artwork whose frames were gilded would be unframed and the gilded frames burnt down to recover the gold. Times were hard post-war and we forget that sometimes! But it helped explain why the sketch in Local Studies’s possession no longer had a frame.

I went back to the local newspapers and found that in 1916, one of William’s children had offered to sell what became the contents of the Hardaker Room to the Town Council. It seemed that after the daughter who William had been living with died, the family found themselves with lots of things they couldn’t or didn’t want to keep, which anyone who has lost a parent or older loved one and needed to deal with their estate will sympathise with. After a few months deliberation the council paid £5 for the lot. So, as museum holdings which the council owned, they would have been disposed of rather than offered back to the family when 1952 rolled around and Centre Vale was officially scheduled for demolition.

Disheartened but undeterred, I began asking around with other local history enthusiasts in Todmorden, laypeople and councillors alike, to see if anything was lurking in the Town Hall basement or hung in a bathroom or in a cupboard in someone’s house. No one had any ideas apart from asking someone else who I was already in communication with (and some of them had been the ones to say “ask that person”, so it all became a bit circular). The undeterred began to sag under the weight of the disheartened.

I finally contacted someone via Ancestry who a researcher friend had found for me who had William in their family tree and appeared to be relatively active on the website. Within ten minutes of me sending him the link to Part One and explaining what I was doing, he had looked up the phone number for Todmorden Library and rand me there. Enter: John Hardaker, who told me that he had been looking for an example of William’s artwork for 20 years! He told me of the many ads placed in the local newspaper asking if anyone knew anything, the trawling through microfilm reels, and his own ultimate disheartened acceptance that everything must have been destroyed or was in private and/or unknowing hands. Not a single item remained in his family’s possession and he had almost completely given up hope of ever seeing anything. Which made me feel GREAT about my complete lack of success in finding anything else.

The unconscious mind is a funny thing and sometimes throws answers at us when we least expect it. I had two 3am wake-ups, which each produced a suggestion, that ended up giving John and I satisfaction.

Wake-up #1: “what about those paintings Douglas gave you?”

Abraham Greenwood Eastwood, painted 1852

Back in early 2022 I published a blog post and did a display about the Eastwoods of Eastwood, focused around some maths exercise books from the 1820s-1840s belonging to members of that family, and shortly afterward the library was given three paintings as a donation – portraits of the three Eastwood brothers who became solicitors in Todmorden, one of whom laid the corner stone for Todmorden Library on Corporation Day in 1896. They’ve been wrapped up and waiting for a chance to reframe and hang them. The next morning I was in work, I unwrapped them and looked at the signature. WH. You’re kidding me.

Edwin Eastwood, painted 1851

These were commissions that used to hang in the chambers where Douglas, who donated them, spent his working life as a solicitor, and he was given them to keep at some point many decades ago. By sheer luck they ended up with us at the library and now I was able to give John some good news. There isn’t just a sketch, there’s paintings! We know from the record that William painted portraits in oils, and proper ones too not just Bobbin-esque grotesques, so it feels as if there’s enough evidence here to credit these three to him.

William Eastwood, painted (posthumously) 1852

Wake-up #2: “what about that weird wood drawing in the Antiquarians collection?”

Todmorden Library holds a portion of the Todmorden Antiquarians Society collection so that anyone researching local history can access both our archive and theirs, and so their members have easier access to their own resources. There’s always been a little box in the cupboard that intrigued me and that no members had any clear idea of the origin of, containing medals, old coins, and a caricature of a man in a fancy hat looking askance at a battered hat on a peg drawn on a square piece of wood with ink. On the back was written “’What a shocking bad hat!’ Matthew Bell’s likeness”. Refer back to William’s obituary in Part One, where it refers to him sketching someone on a “clogger’s chip” to paint later and mentions that this story was well known to people in Todmorden at the time.

Did people then ask him to draw them on a piece of wood? Was this a gift for a friend? There was a Matthew Bell living in Todmorden at one point who was born the year after William and died a year before him, but the argument against this unsigned drawing being of him is that neither he nor anyone else of that name appears in Todmorden before 1889. There was a Matthew Bell in Burnley who was the same age as William, but would a gardener have been able to afford such a fine hat? The jury is out on this piece.

John visited Todmorden on Wednesday and was thrilled to see the almost certain and not-quite-so-sure works of his ancestor, so all that hard work and pre-dawn irritation paid off in the end. But this can’t be all that was left. So, now that we know what his signature looked like, the rest is in the hands of our readers. If you have an old painting at home with these initials, this way, on it, do let us know. It would be wonderful to begin tying the five pieces we’ve got here together in a more substantial way, and great for John too to see the full range of his great-great-grandfather’s talents.

William’s initials. Don’t just sit there, go check your old pictures!!