“Have you come across Ada ……”
OR
Serendipity and Family History

[Article by Derek Wrathall (dwrathall(at)totalise(dot)co(dot)uk); published in the Wharfedale Family History Group newsletter in Dec. 2005]

As members will know, the tracking down of ancestors can take many twists and turns with unexpected information or events leading to new and interesting lines of enquiry.

A couple of years ago I was talking at a village event in Bradley to Elsie who, like me, is a fond grandparent, and our granddaughters are school friends.

Elsie mentioned that she had Wrathall connections in her ancestry, one of whom was of great age and still alive in Skipton. I made a mental note to follow this up at some stage but had not done so when, out of the blue, I received an appeal, made to all Wrathalls in the Bradford telephone directory, by Dr. Peter LOFTS. He had recently been appointed archivist to the Steeton Male Voice Choir and was trawling for information and memorabilia relating to Hume WRATHALL, the founding conductor of the Steeton Male Glee Union, the antecedent of today’s choir.

Up to this time my principal sources of information had been parish records, the St. Catherine House (now GRO) Indexes, memorial inscriptions, censuses etc. and more locally the archived editions of the Keighley News. From the reports of Wrathall births marriages and deaths I had come across the obituary for Hume WRATHALL and passed a copy to Peter. At the time my researches had not uncovered any connection to Hume so Peter was disappointed in this respect and also already had a copy of the obituary. An interesting outcome was that I learned of a namesake living only a few miles away. We two Derek Wrathalls have since met and there is now another line of Wrathalls to pursue at some future date.

However, my dialogue with Peter continued and we fed each other nuggets of Wrathall information, and concerning Hume in particular, as more data was unearthed. In one letter Peter asked “…….have you come across Ada?” A gentleman whom Peter had interviewed, and whom from boyhood had known Hume, recalled a relative of that name who lived in Bradley, my home village.

Recalling my conversation with Elsie I rang to ask if the elderly lady in Skipton was called Ada. She was in fact called May Amelia but Elsie was prompted to ring her cousin, Frank WRATHALL, at Hest Bank. The upshot of this was that I subsequently spoke to Frank and his wife, Betty, who were married in Skipton and had just celebrated their Diamond Wedding. They suggested that I talk to their daughter-in-law, Christine, who was “into” family history.

In my first chat with Christine I asked, very much as a shot in the dark, if there was a Hume WRATHALL in the family. When she said yes I had one of those family history moments when the hair stands on end and the goose pimples appear. Subsequently, we Wrathalls met up at Elsie’s house and swapped information.

I found that Frank, as a boy, went to the National school in Skipton and was taught by my aunt, Nannie Jane WRATHALL. This reminded me of my father, Frank Nelson WRATHALL, telling me about a visit to his sister at the school in Skipton when he was introduced to the class as “another Frank WRATHALL”. But I digress. Back to Christine and family later.

In my search for Ada I decided to ask around some of the older inhabitants of Bradley. Luck was again with me as the first lady I asked was the widow of a former member of the Steeton Male Voice Choir. She was pretty sure that I was after Ada GILL who had had the village shop at one time. She rang me later to say that she had spoken with another lady in her nineties, who was sure that Ada GILL was Hume’s cousin. She suggested that I contact Audrey BILSBOROUGH, also in the village, as she was Ada’s niece and a Gill before marriage.

The meeting with Arthur and Audrey BILSBOROUGH brought on another family history moment when they brought out their wedding photographs with Hume WRATHALL standing in for the deceased father of the bride. Also in the house was a chair that had belonged to Hume’s father, Joseph.

At this stage there was no real evidence linking Hume to my Wrathalls, so what had Christine to reveal.

My initial researches had found a substantial number of Wrathalls in the Linton/Grassington/Burnsall area in the 15 and 1600s, with a branch, my branch, moving to the Thornton-in-Lonsdale area in the mid 1700s. When I first came across Hume as a resident of Steeton I had assumed that he was probably from a family which had moved to the area from Upper Wharfedale to work in the mills. Research was confounded by inaccuracies in the census records. The 1881 census showed Joseph WRATHALL, father of Hume, as being born in Thornton-in-Craven, and Joseph’s father, Edward, in Bentham.

From the Online Parish Clerks website I found a record of Edward’s marriage to Agnes HAYTON, 12 Jul 1847, in the parish registers of Warton in North Lancashire. Here he is recorded as a bachelor of Thornton-in-Kendal. My check through the Bentham registers found no mention of Edward so I decided to try the Thornton-in-Lonsdale registers and bingo, there was the baptism of Edward WRATHALL, 4th November 1822, and also of Joseph, son of Edward and Agnes, 6 Aug 1848.

Then came the next family history moment when I realized that Edward was an elder brother of my great grandfather, Thomas WRATHALL (1824-1894). In the 1901 census the truth eventually prevails when Joseph’s birthplace is given as Westhouse, which is in the parish of Thornton-in-Lonsdale.

So now having come across Ada what have we, that is Christine and myself, established about Hume and the relationship between our families. The following indented records illustrate the different strands.

James WRATHALL 1798 to ???? & Ellin (or Ellenor) HALL
.....Edward WRATHALL 1822 to ???? & Sarah Agnes HAYTON
..........Joseph WRATHALL 1848 to 1922 & Sarah SMITH
...............Hume WRATHALL 1878 to 1951 & Annie SUGDEN
..........Francis WRATHALL 1870 to 1932 & Amelia PARRY
...............Edward WRATHALL 1893 to ???? & Lilian FOWLER
....................May Amelia WRATHALL 1920 & Norman ELLY
....................Frank R. WRATHALL 1922 to 2008 & Winifred Betty LONGBOTTOM
.........................James WRATHALL 1948 & Christine MORECROFT
.....Thomas WRATHALL 1824 to 1894 & Jane PHIZACKLEA
..........William George WRATHALL 1864 to 1936 & Elizabeth Alice NELSON
...............Frank Nelson WRATHALL 1901 to 1982 & Emily BOSTON
....................Derek WRATHALL & Barbara Jean MARTIN

I have been able to give to Christine the ancestors of Edward as follows:-

John WRATHALL & Ann PICKERSGILL married 27 April 1728
.....Thomas WRATHALL 1729 to ????
..........Stephen WRATHALL 1756 to ???? & Mary ROBINSON
............... James WRATHALL 1798 to ???? & Ellin (or Ellenor) HALL

Elsie’s line is off at a tangent in that Lilian FOWLER, the wife of Edward WRATHALL, was Elsie’s great aunt

But what of Hume the man and his achievements. He was a gifted musician playing the violin, the piano and the church organ. As a young man he played the violin in the orchestra at the Hippodrome, Keighley, but gave this up as he became more involved in conducting. He was the organist and choirmaster at the Primitive Methodist Church in Steeton for many years but undoubtedly his main claim to fame was in his success as the conductor of the Steeton Male Voice Choir, The Skipton Male Voice Choir and the choir of Prince Smith and Son of Keighley. In a report of the 25th anniversary of the Steeton Choir their success is summarized as follows:-

Number of competitions entered 1st 2nd 3rd 4th Unplaced
79 29 25 9 4 12

In addition it states that “the choir has given some 120 concerts since the war and figured successfully in the BBC North Regional Programmes on two occasions”. In 1925 under the heading “A CONDUCTOR’S TRIUMPH” the Keighley News reported “Mr. Hume Wrathall of Steeton, at the Shipley Musical Festival on Saturday achieved a personal success, when he conducted all the three winning choirs in the male voice class (alto lead). Mr. Wrathall’s success is all the more creditable by reason of the fact that he is a voluntary and not a paid conductor of any of the choirs he so successfully led to victory last week. Dr. Cooper (Weston-super-Mare), the adjudicator at Shipley, awarded first prize to the Skipton Male Voice Choir, second to the Steeton Glee Union, and third to Prince Smith and Sons’ Choir, Keighley”. In a competition at Skipton the previous week the same three choirs had taken first, second and fourth prizes. There are around a hundred newspaper reports of Hume WRATHALL conducting the choirs in competitions or at concerts and many contain high praise following some of the competitions. In 1933 a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian “paid a high tribute to Mr. Hume Wrathall of Steeton” after attending the festival at Morecambe. He must have been a hard taskmaster as there is also a reference to a whole evening’s practice being devoted to getting one line of a song right, but he clearly was a very talented conductor.

There would be many shields, cups and trophies etc. awarded to the choirs but Hume also received personal gifts. In 1930, on the occasion of his silver wedding, the Skipton Choir presented him with a pair of silver candlesticks. In 1935 he received “a handsome gold and platinum watch guard” and in 1947 was presented with “an electric reading lamp”. Peter LOFTS has been trying to locate any memorabilia associated with the Steeton Choir and/or Hume WRATHALL and if any readers of this article know of the whereabouts of anything thought to be relevant he would be pleased to hear from them – through me in the first instance if necessary. As Hume predeceased his wife it is thought that most items would be dispersed through the family of his wife, Annie SUGDEN.

One other item of historical interest is given in the obituary for Hume’s mother, Sarah in February 1927. Hume doesn’t get much of a mention, “deceased is survived by her son, Mr. Hume Wrathall, who is organist and choirmaster at the Primitive Methodist Chapel” but more is made of her father:- “Mrs. Wrathall was a daughter of the late Mr. Tom Smith, a native of Keighley, who had the distinction of being one of the first, if not the first, power loom weavers in the district. The deceased only recently recalled her father’s experiences during stormy times which prevailed at the time of the introduction of the power loom. Her father on one occasion had to stay three weeks in the premises where he worked to avoid the mobs.”

In looking through all the newspaper cuttings I was also intrigued to see that some of the social functions associated with the Glee Union took place at the refreshment rooms of Mr. J.B. WRATHALL in Keighley. From a quick look through the census records I found that John Benson WRATHALL was a son of Richard Coulton WRATHALL and two years ago I was in touch with Richard’s g-g-g grandson in Australia. More serendipity for another time, but I would be interested to hear from anyone with knowledge of their descendants. And, would you believe, John Benson had a sister called Ada but I can find no connection to Hume, although I am sure there must be one as Hume’s ancestors were from Linton and Richard’s from Burnsall.
In Jan. 2006, Derek sent a photo of Hume (taken from a group photo); click HERE to view it.
In Oct. 2007, the Keighley News Letters to the editor (Thursday 18th October 2007) had a submission by Dr. Peter Lofts, excerpted in part below:
Putting choir in picture

Steeton Male Voice Choir celebrates its centenary next year and accordingly, seeks to assemble as much of its history as it can.

Among photographs that have been donated recently are some of the founding musical director of the Steeton Male Glee Union, Hume Wrathall, in his garden at "Craglands", Eastburn, with his wife and mother.
In Feb. 2008, Derek mentioned the following:
..... Christine Wrathall ..... has just passed on the message that her father-in-law, Frank Richard Wrathall (b. 1922), died on Friday the 11th January in hospital at Lancaster. The funeral was at ..... Torrisholme on 29th January.