So, after The White Lion Inn, Adeline leads us to “Wheatley’s Yard, which had Mr. Thomas Wheatley’s house in it. Mr. Wheatley was a coal dealer” — who was occupying 113 Nottingham Road in 1871.
Dale Abbey-born Thomas Wheatley was usually – not exclusively — listed as ‘labourer’, either agricultural (census 41 and 51), road (census 61) or general (census 71 and 81).
Wright’s Directory of 1883 does list him as ‘a coal dealer of Nottingham Road’.
In 1834 he married Maria Bircumshaw, daughter of Nottingham Road coal dealer Samuel and Mary (nee Kelly).
“Thomas had two daughters and one son, Mary (who died of consumption), Martha and William”.
— The eldest child of the marriage was Elizabeth, perhaps not recalled by Adeline because she married on New Year’s Eve of 1854, when Adeline was only three months old. Her husband was coalminer and widower John Shooter, though after marriage she didn’t stray far, still living for a time in Nottingham Road before eventually moving to Brussels Terrace where Elizabeth died in August 1871.
— Mary was the second child, dying, unmarried, in April 1860, aged 21.
— The third child appears as Martha on the 1851 and 1861 censuses but elsewhere as Matilda….. the latter name being the one by which her birth was registered, she was baptised, married and buried. Her husband since 1871 was lacemaker Jonathan Tilson, son of Pimlico lacemaker Thomas and Mabel (nee Stanley).
By the end of the century they were living in Long Eaton.
— Daughter Emma died from typhus fever in 1856, aged eight.
— It was only son William who for a time was the coal dealer in Nottingham Road.
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Neighbour of the Wheatleys was James Gallimore.
