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The Three Virgins
Miss Betty Biker was born in 1841 at Dam Head on Pasture Road Embsay (now known as the Manor House) where the Biker family had lived since the 18th century. There she ran a successful dressmaker’s business in the 1870’s where young ladies from middling and well-to-do families came to have dresses made in the latest colours and fashions.
Betty was the youngest of three surviving children of William Biker and his wife Mary (Bell) and lived at Dam Head with her brother John, a joiner and farmer who had married Ann Elsworth in 1872, her mother’s unmarried sister Hannah Bell, and her eldest brother Andrew who is described in the census as ‘an imbecile’. Andrew helped on the farm and also delivered fabrics, patterns and dresses for his sister.
Two other dressmakers worked with Miss Biker, her unmarried aunt Hannah Bell, born in Colne in 1816, and Miss Jane Smith, born in Embsay in 1837, who lived in part of the School House on East Lane. Miss Biker also employed and gave tuition to young Embsay and Eastby girls in the art of dressmaking. Two of these were sisters Annie and Sarah Greenwood of the Mason’s Arms Eastby, and Annie recorded her time at Miss Biker’s in her diaries, along with details of some of their customers and the dresses and other items they made.
It is Annie who referred to the three dressmakers variously as ‘the three virgins’, ‘the three old maids’, ‘the blooming old virgins’, or ‘old virgins left blooming alone’. Her diary entries for 1878 record that their conversations often turned to marriage and their state of maidenhood, and each in their own way advised Annie to marry, or not to marry.
Annie described Dam Head as an ‘old fashioned house but in beautiful order … with some splendid old oak furniture made in 1636 … & some very curious old bedroom doors.’
Miss Bell at 62 was resigned to remaining a spinster, whilst Annie describes Miss Biker, who was 37, as ‘living in hopes’ and that she would ‘like to be married’. But not 41 year old Miss Jane Smith, who Annie intriguingly quotes as saying ‘she never had a bit of fancy for anyone of the Masculine gender’, to which 23 year old Annie, who had already had a few romances, added: ‘I wonder is she human?’. Later that year Annie wrote: ‘Miss Smith is guaranteed to be an old maid. She is awfully prim and talked away very bitterly against wedding… she is quite settled down to be an old maid & says she is very warm about it, she loves her cat, & feeds her dog & makes it fat.’
Dresses in the 1870’s were voluminous and needed for everyday use as well as Sunday best and special occasions, and Miss Biker had invested in sewing machines which came into domestic use in the late 1860’s. Annie wrote that they took some getting used to and records ‘I cut out Kilts & Machined for Mrs Allison’s dress.’
Miss Biker also supplied Mourning dresses. There was a strict code for mourning depending on who had died but it was common for the women of a family to wear black for at least a year, especially the better-off. On 31st January 1880 Ann Phillip (née Shacklock) wife of John Phillip of Crown Villa Embsay died. She was from the Shacklock family who owned Crown Spindle Mill and her siblings and nieces came to Miss Biker for mourning dresses. On 13th February 1880 Annie wrote: ‘I went to Miss Biker’s early, got to work on the Mourning dresses. The Miss Shacklock’s came to get tried on’.
Annie and her sister Sarah also made dresses for themselves whilst working at Miss Biker’s. She wrote that she ‘took some Olive Satin Cloth to make a dress’, and of Sarah making a ‘Prune coloured dress’ and a ‘blue print Princess Robe’. Also of cutting out ‘my black silk jacket lined with Scarlet Flannel’ and commencing ‘a Black Polonaise for myself with kilted skirt’. On another occasion ‘we cut out Mamma a large Black Cape (or Opera Cloak) & lined it with a beautiful Scarlet Quilted Silk lining that used to be Grandma Greenwood’s & trimmed it with a Grey Ostrich Feather Border,’ and added poignantly ‘poor old Grandma, I wonder, who will wear my things’.
Annie captures something of the friendly atmosphere at Miss Biker’s when on 21st January 1880 she wrote that it was ‘Fine, with a cold & hard frost. I went on to Miss Biker’s, we commenced work & chatted away & sang old fashioned songs, and I recited Shakespeare for the old maids’.
Although Annie tells us that Miss Bell and Miss Smith ‘both intend retaining their virginity’, things would eventually change for Miss Biker, and on 30th May 1878 Annie wrote: ‘I went up to Miss Bikers. There was a Mr Higgin there from Colne, sat chatting a bit with the old maids.’
John Higgin, who was a prosperous house builder in Colne, was a friend of her mother’s family, and was married with three children. However, three years later, his wife Susannah died, and on 19th April 1881 Annie records that Miss Biker and her aunt went to the funeral.
By 9th May, only three weeks after his wife’s death, Mr Higgin had proposed marriage to Miss Biker. Annie wrote: ‘Miss Biker spoke of her intended marriage, & we discussed all & arrived at the conclusion that it was the best thing in the world for both parties.’
At this time, it was not unusual for men to re-marry soon after the death of a wife, primarily as a mother to their children. But John Higgin was 47 and his children were adults. He had known Miss Biker, who was 40, for many years, so, we can only assume that there was a personal as well as a practical attraction, especially as Betty was bringing with her, her brother Andrew and her Aunt Hannah Bell to John Higgin’s home at 81 Albert Road Colne.
As a wedding present, Annie had given Miss Biker ‘a Crotchet Petticoat’ she had made, and on Thursday 30th June 1881 Annie, Sarah and Kate Atkinson, another of Miss Biker’s pupils, went to the wedding at Holy Trinity Church Skipton. Annie tells us it was ‘very wet & dull all through the day’ but ‘it was quite a grand affair. Long may they live and happy may they be.’
In 1890 Betty’s aunt Hannah Bell died in Colne aged 74, and only two years later her husband, John Higgin, aged 58. By the 1880’s Dam Head had been re-named the Manor House and in the late 1890’s Andrew returned there to live with his brother John and his wife Ann, and it was there that Andrew died in 1900 aged 65.
Betty also returned to live at the Manor House in 1909 following the death of her brother John’s wife. Betty herself died there in 1910 aged 68, after which John Biker gave up the Manor House and went to live with his son Tom, a Cotton Manufacturer at Laneshawbridge near Colne. This ended over a century of the Biker family’s tenure of the Manor House.
John Biker died at Laneshawbridge in 1917 and was buried at St Mary’s Embsay where Betty, Andrew, their parents, and their aunt Hannah Bell are also buried.
As for Miss Jane Smith, the perennial spinster, she lived all her life in Embsay and died in 1905 aged 67. She is also buried at St Mary’s Embsay with her parents John & Mary Smith. All their gravestones can be found in St Mary’s Churchyard.
Like Miss Biker, Annie Greenwood also married in 1881 to a sub-contractor at Upper Barden Reservoir, George Dinsdale, and my next article will detail Annie’s account of her own wedding in Embsay and their honeymoon in Morecambe.
David Turner, EwE Historical Research Group
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