Hannah Frances Battersby, Nee Bentley c1890
Photo: Bet Wilkinson

Hannah was about three years old and her brother William Jnr aged about one when their father William Bentley snr, set out on a freezing December Thursday to provide for his family. Had William and his mates been fully aware of the danger in those days surely they would have stayed at home, but Hannah’s father and sixteen of his work mates were to perish together in a disastrous explosion on that terrible Thursday, 24th Dec, Christmas Eve, 1874. Hannah’s mother the widow Mary continued to live in the Bentley family farm house with her children and her husband’s younger brothers. Soon Mary remarried to bachelor William Powell, a collier born in Chesterton. Mary had three more children, at the time when wages were less than in other districts and by April 1883 the coal masters in the district were demanding a reduction of 15% in employee’s wages. Miners in the district went on strike, encouraged by travelling union representatives from Wigan and other districts not to return to work, for fear their districts would suffer the same fate, if the struggle was lost. Miners received some pay from the union, soup and bread handouts, but were also advised by the president of the Miners Federation to leave the district. People who did leave as advised could not be classed as scabs or strike breakers. Hannah’s mother Mary was expecting another child at the start of the crippling strike, that was to last for many months and the Bentley farm home that they had remained in, was sadly about to be lost. Work was available elsewhere with free rail tickets on offer to some leavers and a train station had opened in the Powell’s village in the previous year. Mass exodus with loss of experienced workers from the coal field followed and was a reason for so many people from Staffordshire arriving in places like Abram, Platt Bridge, Spring View, Wigan and other districts. Mary was recorded on Old Lane Wigan at the time she appeared to have lost her 4 week old baby, buried in Ince cemetery Wigan in November of 1883, towards the end of the miners strike in Staffordshire. Mary also lost her next infant and passed away herself within a couple of years of her move to Wigan, age 33. Her daughter Hannah was age fifteen by then and became a colliery girl living on Hope Street, Spring View at the time of her marriage to the boy next door. She married at Saint Marys church Spring View, when she was age 20 in 1890. Hannah then moved to Collinge Street later she lived on Foggs lane and eventually Victoria road Platt Bridge. Hannah’s brother William Bentley Jnr married age 22 at Saint Marys, Spring View on Christmas day 1896 twenty two years after his Fathers last day at the Bignall hill colliery, Audley, Staffordshire on Christmas Eve 1874.