The Dark Hole Clough Baby (1893) Part One

On Sunday, 6th August 1893, three brothers who resided in Blackley, a small suburb of Manchester that has historically been classed as being in Lancashire, set off from their homes to pick blackberries from nearby Crab Lane. Their trip however was cut short when a sudden shower caused them to seek shelter in an area known as Dark Hole Clough.

Rambling through a plantation, the boys stopped to take cover under the canopy of trees but one of them, 12 years old Alfred Shorrocks, seeing a red flower in front of him left his friends to pick it.

Next to the flower and underneath some small shrubs and leaves was a brown looking parcel. Excited by his find, he ran back to his two brothers to tell them of his find. All three boys then went back to where the parcel was laying, and with curiosity getting the better of them, one of them looked around for a stick that he would use to try and prise it open.

Slowly, the small cap of a child peeked through the small opening of the parcel. What they had stumbled upon was that of the body of a fully clothed baby boy.

50 year old, Ashworth Read, married and with three children, was a well-known and well respected manufacturer and waste dealer from Burnley. Over the years he had built up several businesses and was so successful that he could afford to have two houses built on Brookland’s Road, Burnley. Not just for himself and his family but also that of his mother and father.

He would often spend many long hours working into the late evening and during the day he would spend a lot of his time traversing from Burnley to Manchester to attend meetings on a regular basis.

As for Elizabeth Remington, little is known but what we do know is that she had moved from Kirkby Lonsdale, Cumbria where she was already engaged to a man from Penrith by the name of Albert Barnesley, and she was around 25 years old when she was employed as a domestic servant within the Read’s home in July 1889.

Over the years, it seems Ashworth and Elizabeth had become close in ways which should never have happened and by the end of April 1893 she had started to become withdrawn and seemed to be in a distracted state of mind.

Speaking to her stepmother, Frances Remington on Tuesday 9th May, Elizabeth said that she had had a row with Mr. Read and would therefore be going away for a while to which Frances proposed Morecambe as being the ideal place to visit.

Frances would later go on to say that she remembered seeing Elizabeth looking rather stoutly, but put this down to her possibly having ‘dropsy’, a medical condition characterized by the accumulation of watery fluid in the body, and which also took the life of her father some years before. She even went to a chemist on the 6th May for medication to help her stepdaughter.

And having spoken to Elizabeth on the 9th May, Frances told Elizabeth that on her return from Morecambe, she was to come back home, to number 8 Townley Street, Burnley Lane where she would look after her.

Two days later, the 11th May, Elizabeth left the Read’s residence. She didn’t go to Morecambe, instead making her way to Manchester where she would find lodgings at the Central Temperance Hotel on New Bridge Street. It was owned by John and Mary King. She told the King’s that she had to be confined and that her husband, whilst a mate of a vessel, had left her. She also told them that she was in domestic service for Mrs. Read in Burnley.