Margaret Bury

Margaret Bury was born in Chorley in 1866 and moved to Great Harwood along with her widowed mother and sisters sometime at the end of the 19 th Century.

She was a weaver in a local cotton mill and in 1911 was driven from her home when angry unionists made threats against her, accusing her of being a ‘blackleg', they hammered on her door with clogs, shouting threats and throwing mud and stones at the windows. A police inspector and six officers escorted her along with her sister and mother to the railway station and guarded them until the train arrived, as the hostile crowd followed with a burning effigy.

Miss Bury was one of three people locally who refused to join the union causing a lock out by the mill owners, which resulted in 16,000 weavers remaining idle.