Robert Ardington was the one who broke the pattern — and paid for it. His father and grandfather had been Howden shoemakers; Robert became a joiner, married above himself, reached for a shopkeeper's independence, and lost it. He was baptised at Howden on the 30th of January 1820, the youngest son of William Ardington, cordwainer, and Jane Strafford. On the 20th of February 1841, at Hemingbrough parish church, he married Sarah Caukill, the daughter of a landowning Cliffe farmer — a match, his granddaughter Hilda remembered, "not approved of by Sarah's family who felt she was marrying beneath herself." The census of that June found the newlyweds not merely near the Caukills but inside Thomas Caukill's own farm household, the joiner son-in-law under the farmer's roof.
Then came the fall. By 1847 Robert had left joinery for trade — a grocer and flour-dealer, first at Howden's Market Place, then St Mary's Street in Scarborough, then the Bull Ring in Grimsby — and the venture failed. In September 1847 he stood in the Leeds District Bankruptcy Court, sitting at Hull: the Hull Packet reported the case in a single dry paragraph — debts of £57, earnings of twenty-four shillings a week, his final order granted at the first examination on condition he pay his creditors small instalments. It was a modest ruin, a shopkeeper undone by a shopkeeper's margins, in the crash year of 1847; in the same column a Grimsby hairdresser was adjourned for having no reasonable expectation of paying at all.
After that the family came apart. By 1851 Robert, still a joiner, had taken Sarah and the two surviving children to 13 Carlisle Street in Hulme, Manchester, with three lodgers to help the rent. Sarah, said the family, "was not happy with the marriage and the reduced circumstances in which she was living and ran away" — and after that census she cannot be traced at all. Robert stayed on in Manchester. The 1861 census finds him at 11 Ebenezer Place, a joiner still, aged forty-one, living as a married man with an Elizabeth born at Rhyl in Wales, and a young cabinet-maker, William Buckley, set down as his son — though the boy had been born in Manchester in 1843, when Robert and Sarah were in Yorkshire; a second household, presented as a marriage, over the wife who had gone.
He did not stay there either. The only death that fits him is far to the south: Robert Ardington, aged forty-six, registered in the spring of 1866 at Christchurch, Hampshire — the age giving his birth year exactly, an Ardington otherwise unaccountable in that county. A man who had already crossed the country more than once, dying at a further remove from everything he had known. Above him the line runs clear and settled — his father and grandfather Howden shoemakers, back to William of Gribthorpe, born about 1720; it was Robert who set it moving, and could not stop.
Composed from validated records · 2026-07-08