The youngest daughter of John Walmsley, Emma (b 1835) had a short and tragic life. She was just three when her father died in 1838. In due course she became a straw-bonnet maker like her sisters but in 1857, at the age of 21, she married William Croston, the youngest son of John Croston, a Liverpool block maker. William was born a few months before her in 1835 and his father too had died when he was still young. Instead of following in the footsteps of his older brothers and maintaining the block making tradition of his father and grandfather, William became an apprentice to a pawnbroker, Ezekiel Mason, in Toxteth Park. This choice of occupation was dictated by family connections. Ezekiel was related to John Croston’s wife Anne and was also the husband of William’s older sister Jane. As it happened, Emma’s older brother Joshua was also a pawnbroker at this time and also living in Toxteth Park. This coincidence may be how William and Emma met. Their wedding in 1857 at St John’s in the Haymarket was followed before the year was out by the marriage of Emma’s older brother John Head Walmsley to William’s older sister Mary Underwood Croston.
William and Emma lived out their short married life in Duncan Street in Liverpool, literally round the corner from John Head and Mary’s home in Upper Pitt Street. At some point prior to his marriage William abandoned pawnbroking and returned to the family occupation of block maker. Their only child William John Croston was born in 1858 but then just a few months later in 1858 William died of kidney disease at the age of 23. Not long after, Emma herself was clearly in declining health. By 1861 her mother Mary Ann, who had been living with her son William in West Derby had moved back to Cornwallis Street in Liverpool and had Emma living with her. The infant William John, however, was being looked after by Emma’s oldest sister Elizabeth in Thingwall. Emma then moved to Buckley in Flintshire, where her sister Margaret had been living for a few years. She died there in the autumn of 1861, still only 25.
Orphaned at the age of three, William John was brought up by his aunts. When Elizabeth herself moved to Buckley, she appears not to have taken William John with her. Instead he was taken in by his father’s sister Mary Underwood Walmsley (who was widowed in 1865) and lived in the lodging-house she kept in Upper Pitt Street. In 1867 his fortunes improved when the family applied to have him admitted to the Blue Coat Hospital school. Since his uncle William Walmsley had attended the school and then taught there in the 1840s and 1850s, the school had not changed much and had about 330 pupils. For the second intake in October William was one of six orphans amongst 65 applicants for 17 vacancies. His prospects of acceptance would obviously have been helped by his uncle’s attendance and his status as an orphan. William John was duly accepted and stayed at the Blue Coat for five years. In 1872, at the age of 14, he was placed as an apprentice with Gray & Davison of Colquitt Street, the Liverpool branch of an esteemed organ-building company. Gray & Davison made a point of taking apprentices from the Blue Coat, which clearly had considerable success in developing musical talent, as evidenced not just by young William John but also his uncle the church organist William. It seems highly likely that it was William who first inspired his nephew with an interest in organs. William John remained an organ builder until his death in 1898.
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