The Valentine’s Day foundling who went on success as school head
ON FEBRUARY 14, 1837 a baby boy was found abandoned in Ormskirk.
The baptism register for the parish church records the baptism on March 1, 1837.
William Valentine Ormskirk was baptised by the curate.
On the 1841 census the foundling is the adopted son of Martha Yates, née Harrison, widow of Croston-born surgeon Ralph Hod(g)son Yates.
Ralph had died in early February 1840, aged 42.
Ralph and Lathomborn Martha lived in Burscough Street across from Hants Lane.
They had one daughter, Elizabeth, born in 1820, the year after they married in Standish, where Ralph had been a surgeon before moving to Ormskirk.
On March 30, 1836, more than 10 months before the baby boy was found abandoned, Surgeon Ralph Hod(g)son Yates of Ormskirk appeared at the Liverpool Assizes on a charge of rape.
The case was dismissed and Dr Yates was acquitted of the charge.
His widow, Martha, was a “landed proprietor” which meant she had an income from property and in 1851, still living in the large house in Burscough Street, her adopted son is still with her, but still has the name William Valentine Ormskirk, birthplace unknown, and he is not apparently in any kind of employment aged 14.
Ten years later, a William Valentine Yates, born Ormskirk, is a certified schoolmaster in Newhall, Derbyshire.
Newhall was a small coal mining village with a tiny schoolhouse, with just a pupil teacher assisting William.
William married Mary Ann Darlington in 1873 and he also took a new position in his school teaching career.
He was appointed headmaster of Windermere Grammar School.
When William V Yates arrived there in the early 1870s it was the old school.
The foundation stone had been laid by William Wordsworth in 1836. By the early 1880s the old Windermere Grammar School was too small and in so a new school, with just two classrooms, was built at Undermillbeck, to which William took his 17 pupils in 1885.
His wife, Maryann, was a kindergarten school teacher, their own small children being educated in the small school.
In the early 1890s the school started to take boarders and also took on two new masters.
Windermere Grammar School had gained an excellent reputation throughout Cumberland and Westmoreland and William was responsible.
In 1900, William retired from his position at the grammar school and took his family to Ingleton in Yorkshire, where he became the headmaster of the village school and the sub-postmaster.
William and Maryann had several children, their youngest son, Cecil Hubbard Yates, joined the Royal Navy aged 14 and served throughout WWI on HMA Ark Royal and HMS Pembroke.
He received his Victory and British Medal and 1915 star.
While the Ormskirk foundling found wonderful success as a teacher and then as headmaster in Windermere, his adoptive mother, Martha, had died in 1866, and her estate, despite her apparently being the proprietor of houses, was less than £20.
Her only next of kin was the man specifically listed as her married daughter, Elizabeth, wife of the assistant overseer of the poor at the Ormskirk Workhouse.
The workhouse at that time was on the corner of Moor Street and St Helens Road.
The house in Burscough Street was left to her daughter and son-in-law, Matthew.
The house next door must have also belonged to Martha Yates because her grandson took that over.
He was also an overseer at the Union Workhouse.
Numbers 90 and 92 Burscough Street remained in the Harrison family for several decades into the 1930s.
It may well be that when Ormskirk foundling William Valentine Yates, who at some point achieved a degree, left home to make his own way in the world as a teacher, he didn’t stay in touch with his adoptive mother Martha.
He did however give one of his sons the name Ralph, after his adoptive father, whom he lost when he was just three years old.