Whitlam Street, Saltaire

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Whitlam Street was named after the sixth and last-born son of Sir Titus and Lady Caroline Salt. A sad distinction, shared with neighbouring Mary St, is that the naming was posthumous – the street came into existence several years after Whitlam died of measles at the tender age of four, in April, 1851. All other Saltaire streets named after people were named when the individual was still alive.

Whitlam was Lady Caroline’s maiden name. In the 1820s Titus Salt frequently travelled to the traditional wool producing areas of Lincolnshire and Norfolk, and it was during one such trip that he met Caroline, youngest daughter in the very large family of wealthy sheep farmer George Whitlam of Manor House, Grimsby. The Whitlam family had close ties also with other Bradford woolmen of the time – Caroline’s sisters Amelia and Lucy married George Haigh and Charles Timothy Turner respectively, and the three sisters for a time lived within short distances of each other in Bradford’s Manor Row and North Parade.

Whitlam was born and spent his short life at the family’s Crow Nest estate, Lightclffe, near Halifax. On his death, Whitlam was initially buried in the graveyard of Bramley Lane Congregational Chapel at Lightcliffe, near the Salt family home of Crow Nest. His younger sister Mary (2) died five weeks later, and she too was laid to rest in the same graveyard. Ten years later their bodies were exhumed, and interred in the newly built family mausoleum in Saltaire Congregational Church, where they remain to this day.

© Barlo & Shaw