Part one, click here: The Story of the Sanderson Family (Part One)
Saturday October 19, 1895. “The farm at Crosby, occupied by Mr John Walker, and owned by Mr R.B. Brockbank, has been let to Messrs Mark Sanderson and Sons, The Retreat Gilcrux. The farm at Gilcrux occupied by Mr Sanderson and Sons, has been let to Mr Robert Porteous, Allerby. Candlemas Entry.” (1)
But the story I wrote to get to know Esther, was imagined. I published it as fiction, shaped out of long walks and something else too. Esther came to me on the first day of February. Imbolc - in milk, in the womb’s belly - that quiet, ancient threshold between winter and spring. I’d been walking the field behind the old inn and suddenly, there she was. I reeled Esther in from the mizzle of the morning, she was standing in the stack yard behind the building, boots clarted with mud from the field Headland Dale, breath hanging in the cold air, the down above her mouth visible in the low light. Her grief, and her refusal to sentimentalise it, shaped everything about her
In my story, Esther is aching from incremental losses, husband, children… She has no way to make the loss tidy. Her grief doesn’t flow. It sticks. She cannot comfort others. She cannot come across a dead bird without coming undone. Only a farm labourer, a horseman, called Patrick McElvaney sees her. A man I invented, yes, but one who still walks the page beside her.
In the story, Patrick sings at the inn one Saturday night. He can barely read or write, but the air he sings is slow and deliberate, full of a crow’s age of hungering and believing and loving.
“Over the mountains and under the waves,
Under the fountains and under the graves,
Under floods that are deepest which Neptune obeys,
Over rocks that are steepest, love will find out the way.” (2)
Esther stops, hearing herself echo his words. Thinks her voice sounds too much like a hymn. Wonders what Patrick would think if she told him she’s no time for church, these days. Wonders what John, her husband, would have said
Later, Patrick places a hand on her shoulder and says, “Time isn’t always tender.
Mark must have walked the new fields at Crosby, beating the bounds. Deciding what to leave wild, what to plough. To take up a farm at Candlemas was to enter it at its hardest point. The land at its leanest. The weather still capable of cutting your face. No crops sown. Nothing to harvest. Only mud. Cold. And possibility
And so Mark moved to Crosby with Ann and his sons. The Retreat left behind. No time for nostalgia, just the next set of fields to steward, the next tenancy to prove yourself in.
Mark and Ann’s new landlord at Crosby, Mr Brockbank, was a Quaker. Mark, a Methodist, had spent years under the tenancy of Sir Wilfrid Lawson, the Liberal baronet and champion of temperance. This next move wasn’t only geographic. It was ideological. Quaker or Methodist, the agreement likely rested on principles: hard work, sobriety, diligence. The moral economy of the nonconformist countryside
RICHARD BOWMAN BROCKBANK 1824-191
I open the little memoir book (3) “printed for private circulation” in 1912, that I’ve brought from a bookshop online, hoping it might offer some clue to where, exactly, Mark and the family lived when they moved to Crosby. It doesn’t. The Nook - Brockbank’s own house - is pictured, and I make a note to ask a couple I know who live there and visit Gilcrux regularly where The Nook is, or was.
Once more, when I drive through this or that village I find myself thinking about house names and field names swallowed by plough and planning. Still, the memoir I’ve bought holds something. A life committed to farming, faith, and family.
Richard Bowman Brockbank was born in 1824, the son of a Carlisle grocer. He made his life in the Quaker tradition, and he kept Clydesdales (I know how Mark loved his Clydesdales.) Mr Brockbank read quietly before breakfast, believed in self-denial, astronomy, and the moral power of fresh air. A man of his time and, like Mark, of the land.
There’s evidence here and there, snippets, that the two men knew each other personally, landlord and tenant. Both had deep roots in West Cumberland. They raised children in a world where fields came first and faith shaped the edges of everything. It’s easy to imagine how a man like Brockbank would have looked favourably on Mark, a Methodist, sober, principled. A man who got on with the work.
At the end of February that year, a boon ploughing was arranged at Mark’s farm. (4) ‘Boon’ is a word with soil under its nails. Its roots are Norse. Bón meant a prayer or a plea. Old English had it too, in bēn. Over time, the prayer became the thing being asked for. A favour. A small mercy. Later, under the manorial system, a boon was no longer just words spoken upwards. It became a day’s labour owed to the local lord. Ploughing or whatever the land demanded. It wasn’t optional, but the word still carried a shadow of choice.
Mark’s Boon day drew forty-one draught teams, well turned out, horses ribboned, ploughs gleaming. Who kept the cleanest line, who’d brought the best gear, whose team worked in best rhythm? And what were the names of the magnificent Clydesdale horses?
Refreshments were brought out for the ploughmen mid-morning and again in the afternoon. At noon, a proper dinner was served. Messrs Metcalfe, Clark, Whitehead and John Watson helped Mark see to the logistics. Mr Blamire carved. A group of local women saw to the tables, their names all recorded, and Mark himself stood up to thank the men for the work they’d done.
Boon ploughing had always been part of the farming calendar, especially in places where the weather turned late, or when land changed hands and time ran short. But is there something in Mark’s boon day, that is, the scale of it, the number of teams, that suggests a wide regard for the man? It mattered that Mark succeeded here.
Sunday June 7, 1896. The Primitive Methodist Sunday school held its anniversary services at the chapel in Crosby. A public tea followed, and then - as recorded - the children were invited to continue their celebrations in one of the Sandersons’ fields. I love that small detail in the newspaper account (5) because it tells me the field wasn’t lent for gain. It was offered. A gesture from a family already busy with spring work, and carrying the weight of illness. Mark and his sons gave the children space to run, to make noise, to mark the day. It must have been a comfort for Mark, to keep the rhythm of village life steady even when his own house was shadowed by illness.
On Thursday 27 August 1896, a boiler exploded on the farm at Crosby. (5)
A steam threshing machine had been brought in, and one of Mark’s sons, the report doesn’t say which, was up early to light the fire. There was water in the glass, the engine was brought up to ten pounds of steam, and the pump used to raise the level further. But when threshing began, the boiler exploded. The force of it was enough to lift the boiler clear over the house, into the village. No one was hurt. Mark wasn’t home at the time and the newspaper makes a point of saying so, perhaps to correct an earlier rumour. It says he was not scalded
Threshing had long been the hardest part of the harvest. Done by hand with flails, it was slow, exhausting work, days on the barn floor, seed separated from husk by blunt repetition. Steam changed that. Threshing machines, powered by portable engines, could do in hours what once took days. But they brought danger with them. Boilers could buckle, belts whip loose. Accidents weren’t rare. Most farms hired the equipment in, along with a man to run it, but sometimes, as here, the work was done within the family. This was the modern harvest: faster for sure but more exposed to risks.
Ann Mason Sanderson died at Crosby on Friday September 18, 1896. (6) She was sixty-seven. Her death certificate gives the cause as chronic phthisis (tuberculosis of the lungs) and exhaustion. Her sister, Mary Quay, present at the end, registered the death the following day. Mary’s address was Mason’s Yard, Crosby Street, Maryport and I wonder if this is where Ann’s middle name came from, a yard, a place folded into a name?
Ann is not mentioned in the newspaper account of the boiler explosion, or in the notices of chapel teas and Sunday school anniversaries. She must have been too unwell to help, but she had made the move to Crosby with her husband and sons at the start of the year, through a winter’s flit...
That same autumn, 1896, a brief notice appeared in the Suffolk Chronicle. The Rev. Sir Charles Clarke, Bart., had let his farm at Ellough Hall, Beccles, Suffolk. He was in the process of selling all his horses, cattle, sheep, and farming implements. (7) The name Ellough Hall meant nothing to Mark then. Just another place, far off in the flat country of the east. But the land was changing hands. And one day, though he didn’t know it yet, Mark would take it on.
On Thursday 14 October 1897, (8) Mark’s eldest son, also Mark, married Catherine (Katie) Messenger at the Wesleyan Chapel in Flimby. By this time, Mark junior had found his voice, such as chairing a meeting of the Local Peace Union in Maryport, held under the auspices of the Association and presided over by the farm’s landlord, R.B. Brockbank. The resolution, that the meeting should support proposals to limit armament production among the nations, was carried unanimously. It was Mark junior who proposed it.
The next years brought more challenges. In early 1906, anthrax moved through the herd at Crosby. Five cattle died. Earlier outbreaks had already taken eight. A local butcher, Tom Gough, who came to deal with the first affected beast, was himself infected and nearly died. No one yet fully understood how virulent the spores could be. Infected carcasses were cremated. The papers noted the deaths and the risks. Mark kept going. Anthrax was part of farming life, but feared. It came with no warning. There was no cure. (9)
Essay by Bee Lilyjones.
Continued soon.
(1) Maryport Advertiser (1895) October 19. Available at: britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk (Paid subscription. Last accessed: Sunday December 7, 2025).
(2) Forbes, J. (1666) ‘Love will find out the way’, in Songs and Fancies. Aberdeen.
(3) Graham, M. (comp.) (1912) Richard Bowman Brockbank 1824-1912. Manchester: Thiel & Tangye. [Privately printed].
(4) West Cumberland Times (1896) February 29. Available at: britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk (Paid subscription. Last accessed: Thursday, December 11, 2025).
(5) Whitehaven News (1896) June 11. Available at: britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk (Paid subscription. Last accessed: Sunday December 7, 2025).
(6) West Cumberland Times (1896) 29 August. Available at: britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk (Paid subscription. Last accessed: Sunday December 7, 2025).
(7) East Anglian Daily Times (1896) 11 September. Available at: britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk (Paid subscription. Last accessed: Sunday December 7, 2025).
(The Rev Sir Charles Clark died three years later, in April 1899, aged 87, at his residence in Beccles. He had been a clergyman, a baronet, and the son of Queen Adelaide’s physician. Farming was only one part of his long life.)
(8) Sanderson, M. and Messenger, C. (1897) Marriage. England & Wales Civil Registration. Volume 10B, page 1049.
(9) West Cumberland Times (1907) February 7. Available at: britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk (Paid subscription. Last accessed: Sunday December 7, 2025).
Featured Image Description:
Header image for part two of a family history article about the Sanderson family. The photograph captures a cottage garden at golden hour, with tall flowering plants silhouetted in the foreground against a warm orange sunset. A farmhouse appears softly out of focus in the background. The golden light and domestic garden setting evoke a sense of rural life and the passing of generations. Image by Bee Lilyjones.