Mrs John Hartley
(1821-1909)
[March] 1863

[The preceding sitting in the Silvy daybooks is Mrs Hartley’s eldest daughter Rosa.]

Born on 26 March 1821 at Willenhall in Staffordshire, Emma Thornycroft was baptised at St Lawrence’s Church in Darlaston on 17 February 1822. Her father was the ironmaster George Benjamin Thorneycroft, who founded the Shubbery Ironworks in Wolverhampton in 1824, and in 1848 became the first mayor of Wolverhampton.

On 20 August 1839 at the Collegiate Church in Wolverhampton ‘Emma, second daughter of George B. Thorneycroft, Esq., of Chapel House, near Wolverhampton’ married ‘John Hartley, Esq., of Sunderland’ (Birmingham Journal, 24 August 1839). Like his father-in-law, John Hartley also became a successful ironmaster.

The family appear on the 1861 census living at Tong Castle in Shropshire, which they leased from the Earl of Bradford. Also present on the night of the census were ten servants, including a house steward, a butler, a footman and a groom.

The Hartleys were still at Tong Castle when the census was taken in 1881.

John Hartley died there on 30 October 1884, leaving an estate valued at £90,543.

In 1891 Emma was living at Tong Castle with her unmarried daughter Rosa, her widowed daughter Alice Terrot and Alice’s three children Charles, Alice and Gerald.

Mrs Emma Hartley died, aged 88, at Tong Castle in Shropshire on 21 July 1909, leaving an estate valued at £24,342. She was buried beside her husband in the churchyard of St Bartholomew’s Church in Tong.