Elizabeth Clegg

Elizabeth Clegg was born in 1858 and baptised that April at St Mark's in the Groves, the Sutton parish on the east bank of the River Hull — the second child of Robert Clegg, a cotton-mill packer, and his wife Ellen Pizer. Her father was a Rochdale man; the Groves where she was raised was a transplanted Lancashire enclave, its streets full of the warpers and winders and packers who had come east with the cotton trade, and the 1861 census finds the family among them at 14 Church Row.

Her childhood was not a settled one. Her mother Ellen died in February 1870, when Elizabeth was eleven, and the 1871 census shows the household carrying on without her mother — her widowed father, her brother Edmund and sister Sarah Jane, and her mother's aged mother in the house. Two of her siblings, Emma and John, had already died as small children; the family's losses are written plainly on the memorial their father would later raise.

In 1877, at nineteen, she married William Henry Brock at St James', Sutton — both of them living at Stoneferry, both signing their own names in the register. It is the marriage that joins the Cleggs to the Brocks: the record names her father, Robert Clegg, and it is through her four sons — George Robert, William Edmund, John Henry and Frederick Edward — that this Lancashire cotton line runs down into the family. Her married life belongs to the Brock pages; her father, widowed and ageing, came in the end to live under her roof, and died there in 1919 in his ninety-fifth year. Elizabeth herself died at Hull in April 1928, two years after her husband. A year after his death she had placed a single line for him in the Hull Daily Mail — "We hold you still in memory"; when she followed him, the notice read simply, "Reunited."