Continuing our walk, Further down Nottingham Road ….
Eldest child Edmund.
After Mr. (John) Cope retired or died came Edwin (Edmund) Tatham.
Edmund and (his brother) Amos Tatham acquired the business, Edmund living in the old house against the factory with his family, Agnes, Walter and Ted.
The eldest child of Benjamin and Sarah was Edmund — whom Adeline sometimes refers to as Edwin.
He married his first wife in January 1844.
She was Elizabeth Wheatley Burgin-Richardson, eldest surviving child of South Street blacksmith Robert and Mary (nee Wheatley).
With his father, Edmund worked as a needlemaker at their Kensington site.
By 1869 he had bought a lace warehouse in Nottingham and later, in the 1870’s, moved to Addison Street in that city with his wife and most of his children.
Edmund’s wife Elizabeth died at the Addison Street home in Nottingham – number 19 Addison Villas — on November 2nd 1876, aged 50.
Gap alert!
Edmund married again and on the 1881 is listed at his Addison Street home with his ‘wife’ Mary, aged 58, a native of Hallam, Nottinghamshire.
Who was Mary?
Edmund died in Addison Street on March 4th 1887, aged 62.
And five months later the trustees* of his will put up for sale the Needlemaker’s Arms Inn in Kensington Street, then occupied by Edmund’s brother Herbert.
*The trustees were sons Edmund junior, Allen and Walter (who declined to act)
In July 1862 B(enjamin) Tatham left the partnership of B(enjamin), E(dmund) and A(mos) Tatham, needlemakers.
And in 1865 Samuel P. Hodgson left the partnership of E(dmund) and A(mos) Tatham, manufacturers of lace, Nottingham and Ilkeston. (London Gazette September 1865)
In the late 1860’s the firm was split when Benjamin’s son Amos moved into Belper Street initially as a needlemaker but then adding lace making in the 1870’s.
Elder brother Edmund remained in Nottingham Road as a needlemaker while also acquiring a lace interest in Nottingham.
In February 1872 Edmund Tatham’s oldest son Walter celebrated his 21st birthday and to commemorate the occasion a party was organised at the Kensington Works for the family and about 100 employees of ‘Edmund Tatham, lace and needle manufacturer’.
The Pioneer reported at the time that “we are glad to hear that the lace and needle business at these Works is in a most flourishing condition, and affords employment to so many inhabitants in the vicinity”.
About 1877/78 the same Walter Tatham bought the needle-making/machine-making side of the business.
And in April 1878 the Nottinghamshire Guardian announced that the firm, sited at Kensington Works, Ilkeston, and 13 Castle-gate, Nottingham, was “despatching to the machinery department of the (Paris) Exhibition a beautiful case containing a complete collection of hosiery and warp needles, guides, hooks, points, &c., manufactured by them. The case is ornamented with designs of gilding on a black ground, and above it the name of the firm, with a view of the works at Ilkeston, is beautifully illuminated. The needles and other implements, highly finished, are arranged upon a bed of black velvet, and form a very striking design”.
At the same time (1877/1878) Edmund’s other sons Edmund junior and Allen, together with Joseph Newsome Milne, had formed Tatham Brothers of Ilkeston and Nottingham, lace manufacturers. Meanwhile Edmund Tatham senior carried on business as a lace manufacturer in Nottingham.
One Saturday night in March 1881 a window pane on the ground floor of the Kensington Works was broken, allowing a hand to reach into the office, open a desk drawer which was close by, and remove from it a bag containing £5 17s 9d. This money was the sick club fund, employees paying 3d per week into it.
As the money had not been placed there before, an inside job was suspected.
In 1881 Walter formed a partnership with Mansfield-born needlemaker Phillip Ellis to become Tatham, Ellis & Co.
In 1891 this became Walter Tatham & Co.
“As manufacturers of machine needles, &c., (the Tatham) firm has gained a wide reputation. At the Antwerp Exhibition, in 1885, they were awarded the Gold Medal for superior excellence: and in the following year secured the Silver Medal – which was the highest award – at the Liverpool Exhibition”. (Trueman 1)
Shortly after the death of Edmund senior in 1887 ‘Tatham Brothers’ (that is, Edmund junior, Allen and Joseph Newsome Milne) amalgamated his business with their own and became Tatham & Co.
In May 1889 Edmund junior retired from this firm and made over his interests to his two former partners — trading as Tatham & Co., lace manufacturers of High Pavement, Nottingham, and Kensington Works, Ilkeston.
(They were declared bankrupt in November 1893 … see next page)
Copy of a Trade Card c 1891 (courtesy of the Ilkeston Reference Library).
Second child Amos.
Benjamin’s second son Amos was born in Ilkeston in 1826 and married Eliza Bell, eldest daughter of William and Phoebe (nee Riley) at St. Mary’s Church in May 1847.
After the birth of their first child Herbert in September 1848, the family went to live in Crich for a few years.
In 1854 Amos Tatham and his family came to Ilkeston.
By 1855 Amos and Eliza had returned to Ilkeston with two additional children, William and Eliza, in time for the birth of daughter Sarah.
Amos Tatham and family lived in a house at the top of Park Road.
The houses have been pulled down and a garage built on the site.
They next moved into a house on the west side of Nottingham Road.
When Edwin Tatham left the town in the (early)-mid sixties, Amos and family moved into the old house against the factory, and again, when Edwin returned to Ilkeston in the early seventies, Amos bought a piece of land in Belper Street, (on the east side), on which he built a small factory, and a house. They went into the lace trade, and ultimately increased their building.
Amos worked in the family business until the firm split in the late 1860’s.
The lace manufacturing partnership with his elder brother Edmund was dissolved in 1869 and in that year Amos established separate premises in Belper Street.
By 1871 he had a house and factory on the east side of that street and the census of that year records him as living at 6 Belper Street as a needlemaker employing 29 men, 13 boys and four girls.
In January 1871 Amos and his son Herbert, of Belper Street Works, applied for a patent for ‘improved means of taking up the threads in warp machines, and in the construction of points for such purpose’.
When they wanted to extend the factory the house was pulled down and another one built in Stanley Street.
In the later 1870’s Amos expanded on the west side of Belper Street, now a hosiery, lace and needle manufacturer, before he died in Belper Street in May 1878, aged 51.
Amos’s sons Herbert and William continued the firm’s growth until the former died in London in 1882, following surgical treatment in his throat, leaving brother William to continue the Belper Street expansion.
In 1884 warehouses and offices were built on the west side of Belper Street while a four-storey factory was erected on the site of the former house, by which time the family residence had been moved to Stanley Street.
During the building work for these new premises excavations were made for a large deep cellar, leaving the gable end of the old workshops unprotected, unsupported and only half a brick thick.
Not a clever move!
About nine o’clock one evening a large part of the wall collapsed into the cellar, damaging some machinery and valuable cardboard patterns of lace, and causing some consternation among the local populace.
The other children.
Apart from Edmund and Amos, Benjamin and Sarah Tatham had eight other children.
In Ball’s Yard we met eldest daughter Sarah Ann who married lacemaker and later pork butcher Thomas Ball in 1859.
Her sister Maria married Alexander Cordon in July 1853.
He was a framesmith and manager at Amos Tatham & Sons.
They spent the latter part of their lives at Orchard House in Nottingham Road, and Maria died there in March, 1894, aged 62.
Eliza lived as a spinster, all her life spent in Nottingham Road, and died at number 283 in November 1928, aged 95.
She was a long-time member of the Independent Chapel
Herbert married in March 1856 to Martha Bamford, daughter of Common blacksmith Thomas and Sally (nee Wheatley).
Both died at their home at 37 Graham Street in October 1899 and March 1902 respectively.
Mary was a Tatham who managed to ‘escape’ from Nottingham Road when she married engine fitter Theodore Richardson in November 1857 and moved to Derby.
Benjamin junior was born, lived and died in Nottingham Road – the latter event at number 283 when he was aged 78.
One of this Benjamin’s sons was also named Benjamin, born in March 1875….
ACCIDENT AT ILKESTON. – Yesterday morning a young man named Benjamin Tatham, son of Benjamin Tatham, was at work at the lace factory of Mr. Edmund Tatham, Kensington, Ilkeston, when by some means he was drawn up to the shafting of the machinery, and whirled round until his clothes gave way, and he fell to the floor.
Strange to say, with the exception of a broken arm and a good shaking, the lad received no further injury.
(Nottingham Evening Post – Thursday 20th. Dec. 1888).
(My thanks to ‘Billy’ for this contribution … see Comments)
Born in June 1845 the twins Joseph and Isaac survived only a few weeks.
Just over five years after the death of his first wife, Benjamin Tatham senior married his second wife in July 1850.
She was born Ann Scattergood in 1807, the daughter of lacemaker Thomas and Mary (nee Gorse) and had married needlemaker Joseph Hardy in February 1837. Less than two months after the death of ‘much respected’ Joseph, aged 42 – in June 1850 — his widow married Benjamin and the pair lived together in Kensington for the next 20 years.
Let us revisit Allen Tatham … before we move on to the Ilkeston Mechanics’ Institute
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