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Monument Inscription
1865
T.THORPE.
Family History
This tasteful, albeit plain, memorial says little to indicate the anguish suffered by the family to which it belongs.
Made out of local stone the memorial gives only the barest detail of the person lying beneath it. The truth is that T. Thorpe refers to a little boy called Thomas Thorpe who lived his short life in the village of Busby with his parents Thomas Thorpe and Janet Jollie.
Young Thomas’s father was not a wealthy man, working in the labouring class of printfield worker. The family would most likely be living in one of the houses belonging to local mill owners in a terrace row, such as Durham Terrace in Busby. These room and kitchen homes, with no running water or indoor toilet facilities, were still preferable to some of the cottage hovels scattered around the village in those times.
Perhaps it was living in such conditions that contributed to this youngster, at the tender age of three years, contracting the condition known as diphtheria. The toxins produced by this condition overcame his small frame and after four days of suffering he was to expire on 3rd February, 1865 at home in Busby.
The little body may well have been carried in the arms of his father to the graveyard at Mearns where he rests to this day.
A daughter named Mary, later born to this couple, was to perish as a result of contracting tuberculosis aged fourteen months, on 29th July 1874.