Colne

[poliphilo]

 It was raining hard first thing, but by the time we got to Colne it had more or less stopped. Ailz and Ruth went shopping at the Boundary Mill complex and I took a walk round town.  Colne is built on a hilltop; there's a river with mills alongside it and a railway viaduct and a town hall by Waterhouse and a 12th century church with rare 17th century grave stones in the yard. Round about lunchtime the sun came out and I got to eat my egg crunch sandwich (egg mayo with peppers and iceberg lettuce) sitting on a bench in Pendle View Park. I don't suppose tourists come to Colne unless they're on the trail of the Pendle witches- and even then I shouldn't think they linger. I like towns that don't do a sit up and beg routine for outsiders. 

Colne's two most famous sons were both Hartleys- and presumably related.  One of them- William Pickles Hartley- founded the  jam company and the other- Wallace Henry Hartley- was bandmaster on the Titanic.

Comments

[margaretarts.livejournal.com]

Interesting to think that the bandmaster of the Titanic was from this little place. How did he get from there to there, I wonder.

Beautiful creative font on the Isabell Hartley gravestone. I would have guessed that kind of design to be early 1900s. So maybe the Arts and Crafts Period was simply bringing back a kind of font from the 1600s. I didn't know that.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Here's what I've been able to find out-

Wallace Hartley came from a musical family. His father, Albion Hartley, was a Methodist choirmaster. (Colne was a prosperous cotton town in the 19th century- and much less of a backwater than it is today). As an adult he moved to Yorkshire to become the director of an orchestra in the seaside town of Bridlington. He accepted employment with the Cunard line in 1909 and played on ships like the Mauretania and the Lusitania before being poached by the White Star Line. He was 33 when he died. His body was recovered and shipped home to Colne- which gave him a hero's funeral.

I wonder if the Isabell Hartley on the tombstone is an ancestor of his?

[margaretarts.livejournal.com]

This poor man was on the Lusitania, then the Titanic? How awful! Of course the Lusitania sank after the Titanic, so there's that...comfort?... that we know he wasn't rescued from one sinking to become a victim of the other.

Yes, I was thinking that you were linking Isabell and Wallace Hartley with the good photos you'd taken...but Hartley might have been a common name in town through the centuries.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I suspect all the Colne Hartleys were related to one another- albeit distantly.