William Ardington was a Howden shoemaker all his life, and the family monument in Howden Minster is his — a stone that carries more grief than most. He was baptised at Howden on the 26th of November 1785, the eldest son of Richard Ardington, shoemaker, and Hannah Garnett; and on the 24th of April 1810 he married Jane Strafford there by banns. The register catches a small revolution: where his own parents had signed the 1784 book with crosses, William and Jane wrote their own names — the generation in which the family learned to sign.
He worked the trade his father had taken up on leaving Gribthorpe. The 1841 census finds him on Hailgate, in the heart of Howden, a fifty-five-year-old journeyman shoemaker with Jane beside him and a younger shoemaker lodging in the house — a street, on that leaf, of shoemakers. A journeyman he stayed: a man who worked for a master, not one himself, which frames what his son Robert would later reach for and lose.
The monument tells the rest, and it is a hard reckoning. William died on the 1st of February 1845, aged fifty-eight; Jane followed him in August 1846, aged fifty-four. But their stone in Howden Minster had been carved for their children first. Their son James had died on the 14th of July 1840 "in the East Indies", a private in Her Majesty's 16th Regiment of Foot, in his twenty-ninth year — a Howden shoemaker's boy who took the Queen's shilling and died half a world away. Their son Richard died in November 1841 at twenty-five; his wife Nancy three weeks after him, at twenty-eight. Of the children William and Jane raised, it was the youngest, Robert, born in 1820, who carried the line on — and who would break, at last, from the shoemaker's bench his father and grandfather had worked in Howden.
Composed from validated records · 2026-07-08