William Thornhill Kidd (1803-1865)

William Thornhill Kidd was born in Cottingham near Hull to a family of the dissenting tradition.  He attended the Homerton Academy in London which provided a university-level education to Nonconformist Ministers who were denied access to mainstream higher education. Kidd owned and managed a pharmacy shop in Hull in the early 1830s and applied for a position in a local free dispensary.

In March 1836 Kidd was appointed Minister and Registrar to the new Sheffield General Cemetery following a competitive recruitment process. This was a prestigious role and he was responsible for carrying out funerals, keeping the burial registers and taking money for sales of plots and gravestones. In August 1836 he married Sarah Jeff and they had a son, George, in the following year. At this time Kidd was associated with various educational and charitable organisations including the Sheffield Mechanics Library, the Religious Tract Society and the Congregational Union Town Mission. Clearly he was an industrious and socially responsible individual and through his connections would have encountered well known Chartists including Isaac Ironside. But he was also a religious conservative, at one point suggesting burning books contrary to the Christian religion that had come to the Mechanics Library.

As early as 1839 the administrative and financial aspects of his job were not going well and in 1841 the Cemetery Office was broken into and a significant amount of money stolen (see here for the full story). Kidd was held responsible and initially the Directors of the Cemetery Company dismissed him but later relented and he was recorded as having resigned. This softening of their attitude to Kidd may be explained by his location at the time of the June 1841 Census which was in a private psychiatric asylum in York. We can only speculate on the sequence of events that brought him there: did he have some sort of mental health issue that led to his problems at the Cemetery? Or did the whole experience of the theft result in some sort of breakdown?

Kidd and his family remained in Sheffield after this episode and he took up various posts as Registrar of births, deaths and marriages for Ecclesall Bierlow and Heeley. He retained his connection to the Mechanics Library (taking the Chair at one meeting in 1844 in the absence of James Montgomery).

Given the circumstances of his departure from the Cemetery it may come as a surprise to hear that Kidd was reappointed Chaplain to the Nonconformist section in 1853 after the sudden death of Mark Docker (see further details here) But he seems to have served without incident until his resignation on grounds of ill health in 1865. At the AGM reporting his resignation he was described as having ‘… for so many years discharged with great diligence and feeling the important duties of Chaplain…’. He died not long after his resignation and was buried in the General Cemetery (Nonconformist area plot KK 22). The inscription on his gravestone includes the following quotation from the bible:

To them who by patient continuance of well doing seek for glory and honour and immortality – eternal life. (Romans 2:7)