Having gone down the Derby Road … Adeline escorts us back and up the road.
“Returning up Derby Road, we come to the row of houses opposite Mill Field. In one of these lived the miller, Mr. Paul Hodgkinson.” …… This row stood opposite the Derby Road windmill, on the south side of the road.
We have met Paul Hodgkinson, cottager, grocer, miller, stamp distributor, in the Market Place area.
“Mr. and Mrs. William Hollis, farmers, lived in another.”
The head of the Hollis household was journeyman miller James Oldham Hollis, son of agricultural labourer William and Sarah (nee Oldham) and born in Orston, Nottinghamshire in 1828.
As a youth he went to work in the Newark area where he was apprenticed to miller James Oldham, (his grandfather?) and where he may have encountered his future wife Betsey — who was born at Folkingham in Lincolnshire.
And it is Betsey’s family history which gives a clue to the naming of their children.
On Christmas Eve 1821 gardener Thomas Solomon married Elizabeth Ward at Folkingham in Lincolnshire and Betsey was their last child before Thomas died about 1827.
Widow Elizabeth very soon married another gardener, William Charles, in April 1828, and the family lived at Papplewick before moving into Nottingham in the late 1830’s.
Their children were baptised with the surname of ’Charles’ and the family appear on the 1841 Hyson Green census with that surname.
However by 1851 the surname had expanded to ’Charlesworth’, but before that Betsey had married James Oldham Hollis.
The couple wed in December 1847 at Radford with the bride using (correctly?) the surname ’Solomon’ and giving Thomas Solomon as her father.
By 1861 James and Betsey Hollis, with their two sons William Charlesworth Hollis and James Charlesworth Hollis, were at Derby Road/Moors Bridge Lane — both sons helping their miller father.
The Hollis family in the 1870’s
The early 1870’s were an eventful period in the Hollis family history, with four weddings, three funerals and a birth.
On April 18th 1870, coalminer son James Charlesworth Hollis married Jane Trussell, elder daughter of Kensington lacemaker John and Jane Grace (nee Chambers). This latter family had origins in Bulwell and Quarndon, Leicestershire, and came to Ilkeston about 1850 from Derby via Belper.
In the later 1860’s James Oldham Hollis had moved from Derby Road into Bath Street – to number 42 – where he traded as a grocer.
And on January 12th 1872, ‘much respected’, he died at this address.
Shortly after, on April 19th, his daughter-in-law Jane Hollis died, aged 22.
Three further marriages followed these two deaths.
On December 1st 1872 Betsy Hollis, widow of James senior, married grocer and butcher Samuel Smith of Chapel Street, son of shoemaker Samuel and Elizabeth (nee Smith) — and thus a cousin of the late George Clay Smith of Bath Street.
The groom was 20 years younger than the bride and in this second marriage Betsey gave her father as ‘William Charlesworth’.
And on December 24th 1872 James junior married his second wife Sarah Bostock, daughter of Pimlico lacemaker William and Sarah (nee Henshaw).
In the following year elder son William Charlesworth Hollis married Sarah Ann Hayes, the illegitimate daughter of Ann Hayes and framework knitter Thomas Leivers.
The latter couple had long lived together as a married pair so that all five of their children, registered as Hayes, eventually adopted the name of Leivers — the name under which daughter Sarah Ann was married.
Shortly after William Charlesworth’s marriage, another death… that of his brother James, on August 24th 1873, aged 23.
However James’s line was not extinct as he left one son, James William, born in that year.
The Hollis line also continued through the family of William Charlesworth and Sarah Ann living in Belper Street.
Here William was a deacon at the Baptist Chapel and ‘much respected by that community’.
In 1878, while working as a coal contractor at Oakwell Colliery, his legs and back were seriously injured by a fall of ’bind’.
Thereafter he appears as a pork butcher trading in Belper Street.
However, towards the end of the century he was assistant overseer of the poor, and acted as a bailiff which, at times, could be a dangerous occupation. For example, in December 1895, William was employed by auctioneer and estate agent George Haslam to take possession of a house in Havelock Street. The tenant there, John Millington, hadn’t paid his rent and William was sent to distrain. A ver drunk John was not too pleased, threatened to chuck William out of the property and then thought he would precipitate the bailiff’s departure by thumping him in the face. Not a wise move !! But worse was to come, as John followed William to his house and attempted to continue the argument and shouting that he “would lay Hollis out !!”.
All this resulted in John being fined 10s plus 13s costs or 14 days in jail.
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Living with them in Belper Street were Sarah Ann’s parents who eventually married at St. Peter’s Church, Radford on July 11th 1891. At the wedding ceremony her bachelor father Thomas Leivers gave his age as 70 while her spinster mother Ann Hayes declared herself one year younger.
Eight years later Thomas died at their home of 31 Belper Street and his widow then went to live with her youngest child Amy Louisa, now the wife of Derby-born coalminer Thomas Knighton.
Ann Leivers died at their Grass Lane home in 1899, aged 77.
Betsy, now the wife of Samuel Smith, went to live in Chapel Street after her marriage and died there on October 5th 1880, aged 52.
Eight months later Samuel Smith married Harriet Goddard, illegitimate daughter of Fanny Goddard and the niece of James Goddard, at that time the landlord of the Anchor Inn in Market Street.
And finally Sarah, the widow of James Charlesworth Hollis, married Phillip Paul in 1877 and continued to live in Pimlico with her parents, her husband, her son James William Hollis, and eventually her nephew William Henry ‘Harry’ Rowley, whom she seems to have ‘adopted’.
Harry was the son of Thomas and Lucy Ann (nee Bostock); his father died in 1879 and four years his mother married coalminer John McDonough.
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Continuing upwards to Oakwell Fields.
