In early 1864, when cotton towns in Lancashire and Cheshire were impoverished by the boycott of slave-produced cotton in the American Civil war, a Stalybridge poet published 13 verses which rapidly became a cultural icon in the North-West. The poet was Samuel Laycock, the poem ‘Bowton’s Yard’ and the description of the mainly down-at-heel inhabitants of the 12 houses in the yard was recited as entertainment for decades, including at middle-class social functions.

The burning question was who had Laycock immortalised? In a letter to a local newspaper in 1865, the poet indicated that his characters were imaginary and not from Bolton’s Yard, a small part of a working-class settlement about a mile from his home. It seems likely that, in describing his fictional community, Laycock had subconsciously chosen a name that he may have heard mentioned locally.

The ten houses which made up Bolton’s Yard continued to be seen as the template for the poem, although censuses show that it was a different place to its near namesake. Where Bowton’s Yard had a variety of occupants who spanned a variety of occupations and social class, Bolton’s Yard was homogeneous in its poverty.

Laycock peopled his fictional yard with a small dame school, a widowed washerwoman, a shopkeeper who included Eccles cakes and gingerbread among his wares, a weaver with a large and ever-growing family, a bad-tempered landlady, an elderly woman selling ‘small drink’, a cheerful couple from Yorkshire, a religious old cobbler, the landlord who owned and rented out the houses in the yard, a man from the local brass band, a publican, and himself, a teetotaller balladeer.

Beneath the surface, lack of money lurks. The most recent tenants of number seven have just been evicted for rent arrears and their furniture carted off by the bailiffs. The out-of-work poet is sometimes slung out by his landlady when he cannot pay his rent. When she does allow him indoors, she keeps the house in the dark. The young son of the washerwoman is sent out to beg. The dame school has only a couple of pupils.

Laycock was not the first writer to describe the bad conditions endured by the working-class residents of Stalybridge. Twenty years earlier, Friedrich Engels, a German political philosopher who subsequently collaborated with Karl Marx, visited the town while researching for his book, The Condition of the Working Classes in England. In this, he portrayed Stalybridge as a repulsive and filthy settlement in a crooked ravine, with both sides of the valley occupied by an irregular group of smoke-begrimed cottages, houses and mills. The narrow dwellings occupied by workers were situated in courts, back lanes and remote nooks. Whether, as he explored the tangled nooks and alleys, Engels wandered through the one that subsequently acquired the name Bolton’s Yard is unknown.

Many such communities existed in poor areas in the 19th century. In order to house the workers they needed to power their nearby factories and mills, entrepreneurs hastily erected block upon block of cramped houses at the cheapest possible cost. Whether they were yards, courts, ginnels or places, overcrowding and hardship were the order of the day.

Laycock’s pen portraits were of such recognisable types that some people claimed to know who they were. In reality, such a diverse group of individuals and occupations was unlikely to be found in one small enclave of workers’ houses. The occupants of the real Bolton’s Yard can be identified from other records and give a different picture of a community which had fame thrust upon it.

As the cotton industry in north-west England took hold in the first decades of the 19th century, land that had once been undeveloped was taken over by factories and workers’ accommodation. With just a small local population, censuses reveal that many of the early occupants were migrant workers. Initially they were drawn from nearby parts of Cheshire, Lancashire and Yorkshire but soon they were supplemented by Irish men and women who had also been attracted by the opportunity to make a living. The main employer was the local cotton trade, but an occasional man laboured at a quarry or farm, reflecting the fact that part of the town bordered on open countryside.

Several dwellings were essentially small lodging houses, often headed by a middle-aged or elderly woman, described as a housekeeper. Most appear to be spinsters or widows who needed to find a way of maintaining themselves and possibly also some children. Although female employment in cotton mills was common in Lancashire and Cheshire, some women probably preferred the freedom of being their own boss, rather than being subjected to the long hours and possibly irksome rules of working in a factory. Some may have also cared for young children, enabling younger adult females in the house to go out and earn a wage.

The residency of Bolton’s Yard appears to be transient. There was little continuity between censuses, and it took until the 20th century before an occupant spanned more than a decade in the yard. This was James Mulick, a factory worker who can be located there in 1898 and 1925 and was possibly the longest resident. Across censuses, some former residents can be located in the same neighbourhood and a few had moved a couple of miles further away. There were several other named yards in the area where Bolton’s was situated and plenty of mills in the wider area. House moves probably reflected a change of employment. Factory owners built houses to accommodate their own workers and a tenant who took a job with a rival would have been required to vacate his house.

What is most striking about the inhabitants is that their lives were almost anonymous. One of the few who can be traced beyond census and BMD records is Wrixhom Buckley, who was charged with disorderly conduct in Bolton’s Yard in December 1868. A couple of policemen on patrol spotted him emerging from a house with a poker in his hand. Buckley lunged at one of the officers with the poker, but hit the door frame instead. In court a few days later he claimed that he was trying to make peace between his parents who were arguing, though he admitted that he had also boxed his sister’s ears. He was fined 5s and costs.

Nine months later Buckley was sentenced to two months in Manchester’s Strangeways Prison, with hard labour, for assaulting a female member of his family. This seems to have been a salutary lesson as no other prison records have been located. He worked in the local mills as a stoker or fireman, married twice, fathered children and remained in the Stalybridge area until the 1880s. After that he disappears from British records. American records indicate that the family emigrated at the end of that decade.

An occupant of No. 8 also left her mark. One Saturday afternoon in July 1881, stallholders at nearby Stalybridge market were keeping a close lookout after items had gone missing from various stalls from time to time. Mother and daughter Bridget and Hester Monaghan were seen behaving suspiciously. When one of the women distracted a stallholder and the other picked up his purse, a watching policeman arrested them. At the police station, other stolen trinkets were discovered in their bags and when their house was searched, more goods and pawn tickets were found.

The anonymity of the occupants of Bolton’s Yard would probably delight Samuel Laycock. People who do not come to the attention of the authorities or the press tend to be of good character. In his poems, Laycock portrayed working folk as goodly, hard working and honest, even when their lives were buffeted by poverty and harsh living conditions. That the real and fictional blend together so well shows that even though Laycock’s characters were fictional, they were a reliable depiction of the different types of person who made up many working-class communities in the latter part of the 19th century. {