Joseph Winterbottom was the old bastard pursued by Oldham police across the border from Lancashire into the West Riding of Yorkshire in the summer of 1833. Arrested by the Halifax Constabulary, he was immediately identified by visiting Oldham bloodhound Heywood as a known rogue and vagabond, and proceeded to squeal like a pig, identifying the four men who were his accomplices in robbing a local Halifax man on the road that previous night.
But when the case went to trial, Winterbottom was not among those in the dock. Instead he was a witness for the prosecution against those four much younger men for whom he was probably the leader of this most DESPERATE GANG OF ROBBERS™. For this base treachery, his sometime associates were sentenced to seven years in Van Diemen’s Land. Winterbottom, walked free, at least for a time.
When they finally got him, it was for stealing “five fowls, commonly called hens” in 1837, and was sentenced to fourteen years transportation. He was forty-four years old by then, so he was nearly twice the age of the associates when his evidence had sent them out before him. He was born about 1791 in Oldham and was quite literally a bastard. When he was baptized in St Mary’s Church, Oldham on 2 June 1793, his mother Hannah was still a spinster (i.e. unmarried) and his father was identified as one John Collinson.
There had been at least two convictions before his final one, he served three years in Salford Gaol from 1815 for a crime I can’t quite interpret from the record, and another for stealing calico and thread; a very Lancashire crime! Once in Van Diemen’s Land, he was convicted for stealing potatoes, but still, he received his Conditional Pardon on 7 July 1846 and full freedom on 5 April the next year. But not for him a return to England or a new life in the other colonies; the next year he was dead, in the district of Brighton, in what was yet to be re-named Tasmania.
Did his path ever cross any of those he betrayed? Unknown.
But on the record of death was a simple two line item:
A heinous crime had been committed the previous evening, Mr Robertshaw had been viciously attacked and robbed in the street that night. That Tuesday morning the wheels of early nineteenth century justice began to turn. A suspicious character was apprehended that very morning. He was from across the border in Lancashire, Winterbottom was his name. By useful coincidence there happened to be an officer from the constabulary of that particular county; Mr Heyward from Oldham, present in Halifax that very day.
The scene of the crime: Halifax in 2015
Yorkshire Gazette 13 July 1833 p3
Heyward had been on the trail of villains from his own jurisdiction, so he eagerly secured an interview with Winterbottom, wherever the Halifax authorities were holding him. He immediately identified Winterbottom as one of those he sought, and Winterbottom instantly recognised he. This Javert, this Lestrade of Oldham swiftly secured a confession and the names of his accomplices. Heywood hastened away back across the border into Lancashire to apprehend those suspects. By Thursday evening, he had all four in custody.
They were examined before Christopher Rawson, Esq., back in Hallifax on Friday, in a process described as exhaustive. The prisoners were committed to stand trial at the assizes to be held in a few weeks time and ordered to be sent to York Castle until that date.
The ordered Place of Remand: York Castle in 2015
Enough of the debtor’s prison remains in York to get a very clear idea of what the holding conditions of the prisoners was like. However there is no record of James Dyson or any of the other accused being present at the relevant period in the Gaol facilities’ database. They may not have been transferred to York at all, and may instead have been held at Bradford, which was where their trial was eventually held on 3 July 1833.
The place of judgement: Bradford in 2015.
The four young men were charged with stealing from the person. They were:
James Dyson James Schofield James Butler Thomas Jackson
The Jurors were:
Joseph Cox of Bradford, Draper John Collier of Bingley, Farmer Robert Ellis of Bradford, Grocer Benjamin Ellis of Gunessal, Farmer Jonathan Foster of Clayton, Farmer Thomas Farnell of Bingley, Spirit Merchant John Hutchen of Clayton, Manufacturer Johm Hainsworth of Adele cum Ecculs Cow, Miller John Mawson of Rawden, Clothier Robert Nunns of Hasfull, Joiner James Peekover of Munton, Shopkeeper.
But wait, is there not a name missing from the charge sheet? Hold on, here is the list of witnesses called:
Thomas Robertshaw Henry Naylor Joseph Winterbottom George Hulley William Heywood.
Obviously a deal was done with Winterbottom to deliver up his accomplices, presumably he was forgiven not only this crime, but whatever crime Heywood had been chasing him for to begin with.
Court documents that should have been for this trial but weren’t. Kew, 2015
Somewhere in an archive in Bradford, there may be the complete trial notes for Dyson, Schofield, Butler and Jackson. The search for these records lead me on a fruitless search through the archives of Britain in late 2015. It culminated in the National Archives in Kew, London, on my last day in England, was when I discovered that these particular trial notes were back in Yorkshire— where I had started the search. Its only on TV that you can fly back and find what you have missed…
Possibly the Hulk Justitia: The original image was engraved by Cooke after Prout as ‘Convict Hulk off Deptford’ in Cooke’s Views in London and its Vicinity completed in 1834.
I could not believe my eyes when I first read about Hannah Beswick of Birchen Bower.
It was not that I could not believe in a ghost story — although that part of the legend I still find challenging — but that I could find a tale with so much in it: haunted houses, buried treasure, invading armies, a real-to-death mummy in the attic, AND find out I had an actual family connection to it all. That was the good news. More disappointing was attempting to investigate further and finding so few primary sources to draw upon.
The least suprising aspect of this tale was that there was a Dyson component to it. If any family was going to have a haunted house associated with them, it was going to be these Dysons of Lancashire, the siblings of the same James Dyson who was contemporaneously creating a new life for himself in Western Australia during the middle of the nineteenth century.
A DISMAL autumn evening. The mist hangs heavy on the silent landscape, and wreaths in ghostly folds above the stream. Along the highway rides carefully a man of sober garb and mien, who, passing the ancient Bower House, continues his way to a smaller residence by the river side of Birchen, Lancashire. “So she has left it,” he mutters as he glances back at the ancient residence, now but faintly outlined in the mist. “A goodly property ; and she fears the grave. Ha! who will inherit it, I wonder? And her money ? If rumour speaks truly, she has buried it.”
If an army of hairy Scotsmen were descending towards you in the November of 1745, you would have buried your gold too (and maybe yourself as well, to save time) — you had only to look to history of how the Jacobites treated their own countrymen that last time, to know that no mercy would be shown to a rich Sassenach couple. But spinster Hannah Beswick and her bachelor brother John did survive Bonnie Prince Charlie’s invasion of Manchester with their property unravaged. John had— apparently— almost been buried alive; but his eyelids flickered just as they were about to close the coffin lid. He still predeceased his sister though, leaving her the manor house and farm of Birchen Bower in Hollinwood.
When she died, so the legend goes, she specified she was not to be interred. So her medical attendant (who did quite well out of her will, thank you very much), embalmed her instead. Dr Charles White was not one to let a good thing go to waste, so he put the old lady on display at his house in a clock case (to be seen for a fee, no doubt). Later on she ended up an exhibit in the Manchester museum. Late Victorian squeamishness eventually saw the poor old mummy buried in an unmarked grave in 1868. She had been above ground for 110 years.
Section of an Ordnance Survey map of Hollinwood from 1890
These Beswicks died during the eighteenth century. The Hollinwood manor (but not the farm) passed out of the family’s descendant’s hands during the following century in November of 1834. The next owner (or maybe a tenant) of the manor building was Mr Samuel Wolstenholme, but he was declared bankrupt in March 1836.
A wing of the house was demolished, and the remainder was subdivided into tenements for cotton-spinning workers. When you consider all the old Lancashire cotton mill buildings now being transformed into supermarkets or luxury apartments during this twenty-first century, you will realise there is nothing new about this form of recycling.
Almost as soon as the old lady had been embalmed, reports of her ghost had began to be recorded around the old manor house and the adjacent farm. It was part and parcel of the legend of course, that her gold was never officially recovered. Unofficially, some items were recovered by various tenants over time, but none of them seemed to have got rich… or did they?
Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser 12 October 1839 p1
Enter the Dysons. James Dyson is out of this story. By the time Mrs Robinson, a descendent of Hannah Beswick on her mother’s side, sold sold the last of the property — James was on a convict ship to Van Diemen’s Land.
Then during 1839, the same year James’s father Joseph died, there were worrisome reports that Chartists were drilling in the fields outside Birchen Bower. It seemed revolution was in the air.
Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser 15 January 1859 p7
Archetypal worker’s dwellings from the early 1800’s. Any ones actually connected with the Dysons have been flattened. 2015
Fast forward a decade, and it is pretty much obvious that the world did not end in 1839 and at some point between the years 1843 and 1851 Andrew and Joseph Dyson, older and younger brothers of James Dyson respectively moved into the district and operated a cotton spinning establishment named Bower Mill. Andrew, his unmarried sister Mary and her two illegitimate children John and Edwin had taken up residence of Birchen Bower. The codicil to Andrew Dyson’s will made just before his death in 1880 gives a strong indication that he owned the whole place and the Mill as well. Although they had dissolved their partnership a decade earlier, Andrew left the property to Joseph. After that the trail has not been pursued…
The site of Bower Mill in 2015. Inspiring, isn’t it?
So did the Dysons mine gold as well as spin cotton? Probably not. But it is fun to speculate. In the late nineteenth century Birchen Bower was demolished to make way for the Ferranti factory (now also demolished.) Bower Lane and Bower Mill were likewise flattened at a later date and a major free way dug across the site.
Birchen Bower was about here.
It is frustrating that I have been unable to locate an image of Birchen Bower in any form, or of Hannah Beswick herself (stuffed or unstuffed). It was ancient and had a whitewashed exterior according to an article dating to 1953 (the house, not the mummy). It is curious that while there were ghost sightings of Hannah during the Ferranti factory days, there don’t seem to have been any on the motorway. How odd.
Birchen Bower as it is now (2015) No ghosts.
There has been at least one book published on the mummy of Birchen Bower.
Halifax is a town in the West Riding of Yorkshire, not that far from the Lancashire border to the west. With little in the way of useful agricultural land in the district until comparatively modern times, the processing of wool, and later on, cotton, evolved into an industry that dominated the town. Messrs Buck and Kershaw established themselves in business as stuff merchants in the late eighteenth century. “Stuff” has a few different definitions, but in this case referred to worsted cloth, a material which is spun from wool. By the first third of the nineteenth century the original Mr William Buck and Mr James Kershaw were long departed, but the business lived on, running a worsted spinning mill, a warehouse in the ancient street in Halifax known as the “Woolshops” and a head office at a prime location in the very heart of town on Union street.
Halifax in 1835
Mr Thomas Robershaw was one of Messrs Buck and Kershaw’s employees in Halifax. He was a warehouse manager for the business and was thirty-six years old. It’s not clear yet whether he was married or had any family. His residence was about a mile away from his place of employment, in a locale known as Kings Cross. His journey to home was west down the Kings Cross Lane, also a major thoroughfare to the junction of paths that lead out of the district to the manufacturing and trading centres in East Lancashire. Houses for the rapidly expanding workforce sprawled outwards from the old town. Civic services were non-existent for the burgeoning population, but in the finest tradition of laissez-faire economics the private sector filled the gap with inns and beer-houses. In the whole parish there were but three policemen, and two of those were volunteer constables. What could possibly go wrong?
On the evening of Monday, 17 June 1833, for Mr Robertshaw, things finally did go wrong. First of all, he left his pocket book in the inn he visited on his way home from work. Such was how his fortune would play out that this careless or intoxicated act would soon be recast as luck. The hour was late when he departed the establishment and his home was still a mile away. While the mid-summer night may have been fine, there was also a new moon. There may have been the odd lantern outside a public house, but street lighting was a thing of the future. Mr Robertshaw walked home in the dark.
Town of Halifax, Yorkshire, from The Penny Magazine, 15 March 1834
Somewhere between the Halifax town centre and King Cross is as close as can be identified that the assault took place. There were five of them, but how much he saw we can not tell. That he was not altogether in the remote wilderness is the extreme length they went to silence him in their struggle. Soil was grabbed and stuffed in his mouth, more and more dirt to smother his cries, a suffocating pressure like he was being buried alive from the inside out. It felt like he was going to die. His chest would have pounded with terror and the useless adrenaline urged him to breathe faster for the air that would not come. Roughly, his pockets were searched. Perhaps they searched again, for they did not find what they had expected to find on the sort of man such as he, that would make such a desperate action worthwhile. Coins worth nine shillings were all that they found, and they took them. Then perhaps for spite for such a miserable haul someone took his hat. After that they let him go and fled, leaving Mr Robertshaw barely alive to spit out the choking dirt. There is not much more to say on Mr Robertshaw’s life other than that he most likely never fully recovered from this ordeal.
Eighteen days later he stood in the courthouse in the nearby town of Bradford to give evidence against four young men accused of theft from his person. The fifth member of the gang was not in the dock. He was a much older man than the others and was also their alleged ringleader. He would have stood where Mr Robertshaw had stood on the witness stand when he gave evidence against his compatriots. Maybe part of the deal was that the four were only charged with the theft and not the assault. The jury found them duly guilty. Highway robbers were still routinely sentenced to death. Instead, the four young men were sentenced to transportation for seven years and the older man walked free. How Mr Robertshaw felt about this outcome is not known. If he felt that justice had been done we cannot tell.
While the four young men were imprisoned on the hulks awaiting transportation to Australia it is recorded that they confessed their parts in this crime. None of them appealed their sentence although they had the opportunity to do so. Maybe they had realised the full enormity of their actions and that a re-examination might go that much worse for them. For on Monday, 29 July 1833, exactly one month after the attack, Mr Thomas Robertshaw, of King Cross, foreman to Messrs. Buck and Kershaw, stuff merchants, Halifax, died. He was buried the next day in the churchyard of the Holy Trinity church in Halifax by curate William Wilmott, M.A. He does not have a headstone.
Future research
The crime, the pursuit and apprehension of the gang is recorded in some detail in the regional contemporary newspapers. The preliminary documents of the trial exists which lists the jurors and witnesses against the accused.
Queen Anne, just so you know. (There might be a test later)
Five minutes of searching the internet revealed no consensus on the origin of the name Dyson. Thankfully this is not what this article is about. Regardless of the original etymology or geographical location of a theoretical common ancestor, (and while it would give me no pain at all to be able to trace my ancestry all the way back to a female cattle rustler in the West Riding of Yorkshire) the earliest credible ancestor I can identify from the surviving records is that of Simeon Dyson from Crompton, near Oldham in Lancashire. His son, Ely (or Eli) was born during the reign of Queen Anne, some time before April 1701.
Hand Loom Weaver in Lancashire. James Dyson’s father sold machine parts.
For several generations thereafter, the descendants of Simeon were predominately cloth weavers in the hilly east of Lancashire, occasionally spilling over the county borders into Cheshire to the south, or east into Yorkshire. The weaving of wool into cloth using hand looms was a traditional cottage industry in the region, and Simeon’s listed trade as a joiner—a specialised skill in carpentry—hints at his future family’s success in manufacturing the implements of the weaving trade.
Joseph Dyson (1783-1839) was born into a very different world to that of Simeon, his great-great-grandfather. King George III had comprehensively lost the American colonies and the spinning material of choice was now cotton. Staggering technological advances in the production process transformed a rural landscape into both an industrial and urban one. During Joseph’s lifetime, the transition from water power to coal and steam would have turned the damp wet country (the moisture being ideal for the cotton spinning process) from green to black. Joseph married Hannah Binns in the Church of St Chad at Rochdale, on 19 January 1804. His father-in-law, Mr. Andrew Binns was described as a Cotton Spinner which does not really adequately reflect the reality that he was not a weaving machine operator (skilled though such operators needed to be), but was actually an owner of a mill in his home town of Mossley.
The town of Mossley lies on the border between three counties, Lancashire, Cheshire and Yorkshire in England.
Joseph seems to have had a varied career that involved quite a bit of travelling about the county. At the time of his marriage, his trade was listed as clothier, which suggests he was involved in the selling end of the cloth production cycle. By 1815 he was described as a cotton weaver, which again tends to down play his responsibilities as an overlooker—a factory floor supervisor. He made his residence on the outskirts of Oldham town, a district glorying in the name of Mumps. He owned at least six cottages on a small street that looped underneath the hill-side overlooking the main road out of town. It’s grand name of Regent Street seems somewhat overblown. Those six cottages (now long gone, as are everything else contemporary to him or his family on Regent street) probably was the heart of his cotton empire, as far as it went. The impossibly large number of occupants of this tiny street are mostly listed as cotton spinners in the 1841 England Census, which took place only a short time after his death. Dyson probably owned or sold the hand spinning machines worked by them in his cottages. His travelling work continued as a machine broker and a trader in cotton waste. When he died at home in Regent Street in 1839 he left his children an estate worth £2000… to some of his children at least.
Regent Street, Mumps, Oldham, Lancashire, England: visited October 2015. There is nothing remaining of anything even remotely associated with the Dyson family.
His sons continued in the Cotton milling trade as Spinners, Overlookers, Managers and Yarn Agents— except one.
Of his nine supposed children, three appear not to have been born to his wife, Hannah—and at least one of those may have been adopted from his unmarried sister.
All the children that survived into adulthood were mentioned in his will, witnessed shortly before he died at his home on 13 July 1839, his long-suffering (inferred by the circumstances) wife having pre-deceased him eighteen months before. All the children were mentioned, except one.
Thomas Dyson, born 1803 at Quickwood (Saddleworth) near Mossley.
Andrew Dyson, born 1806 at Mossley.
William (i), born 1808, died 1814 at Quickwood.
John, born 1815, at Bough, Mossley.
Mary, born 1822 at Mossley.
Sarah, born 1824, at Oldham
William (ii), born about 1826.
Joseph, born 1828, at Mumps.
The missing child was James Dyson. He was reputed to be born in Newton Heath, a suburb of Manchester on 15 October 1810, but no baptism record has been discovered for him. Birth certificates are still a generation away. At least two of his siblings, John and Mary, are described as illegitimate on their baptismal records. In John’s case, Joseph is the reputed father, while Mary was probably the daughter of Joseph’s unmarried sister Betty. The second William Dyson also has a missing baptism record but, like older brother James, he indubitably existed. James Dyson is not in the 1841 census that locates most his siblings living together in Regent’s street, or working with their late mother’s Binns relatives. He was either in, or about to arrive in Western Australia at that precise moment. Essentially, there is no formal record tying James Dyson to this family in Lancashire. And that’s the way (I am sure) they wanted it. Informally, however:—
James Dyson in Western Australia, outlived all but one of his siblings back in Lancashire, and at the time of his death, and until her own in 1896, sister Sarah lived in Newton Heath, Manchester — the only definitely recorded member of his family to do so. She lived in a house named “Birch-villa” on Droylsden road. It’s name might a reference to to the family’s cotton mill founded after the time of her father and run brothers Andrew and Joseph. It was known as Bower Mill and was located in Hollinwood, equidistant between Newton Heath and Oldham, near the site of an old house occupied by the family called “Birchen Bower.” The house was famous for many legends including a real life mummy and ghost story. Today there is a motorway on the site.
But what had James done to be so comprehensively written out of the family story in Lancashire? Before him, James was a family name among the Lancashire Dysons. It was demonstratively “retired” after him. He was not the last bastard to be fathered by his father so it could not be that. There remained some memory of the family’s antecedents in Lancashire by James Dyson’s Australian children, and there may have been some (long lost) line of communication back to someone in the home country.
The Daily News, 23 June 1888, p. 3
James arrived in Western Australia on the ship Napoleon in 1841, but the surviving passenger list for the January arrival at Fremantle from England does not mention him. But wait, does not the press clipping below say he arrived in July, 1833?
The West Australian (Perth, WA : 1879-1954) Tuesday 19 July 1910 page 1
The year the colonial barque Napoleon visited Western Australia was most definitely 1841— she made two visits to Fremantle in that year, one in January, and the second in July. She is not to be confused with an American whaler of the same name also in the vicinity at that time. A passenger list for the January visit contains no mention of Dyson, although the ship sailed direct from England. From the second July visit, no passenger manifest has been located and the port of origin this time was quite different.
The Napoleon sailed from Fremantle in February 1841 and arrived in March at Launceston, Van Diemen’s Land. There she underwent re-fitting to be a whaler and sailed back to Fremantle in May, arriving on the 12 July 1841.
The Perth Gazette and Western Australian Journal (WA : 1833 – 1847) Sat 7 Aug 1841 Page 1
There was a man called James Dyson then living in or around Launceston in what is now known as northern Tasmania in 1841. Furthermore, there are distinct records of a young man called James Dyson who departed from England in January 1834 for the prison colony of Van Diemen’s Land. This James Dyson did indeed depart from Lancashire in 1833, never to return.
The circumstances of his departure were no doubt a massive embarrassment to his family, and more than enough cause enough for his father to wipe him out of the family inheritance, however his ancient cattle rustling antecedents may well have nodded with approval.
…continued.
