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THOMAS 'GIANT' SISSON - THE BIG LAD FROM COTMANHAY

A regular feature at You and Yesterday are the brief pen-pictures of those 'unusual' local citizens we have labelled 'Derbyshire Characters'. Here Peter Seddon makes the passing acquaintance of Thomas 'Giant' Sisson of Cotmanhay and Ilkeston, and wonders if anything more is known about him.

The portrait of Thomas 'Giant' Sisson commissioned by the Duke of Rutland to mark Sisson's remarkable feat of enurance during a miners' strike

Thomas 'Giant' Sisson was given his sobriquet for one very good reason. As they used to say of him in and around Ilkeston - 'he were a big lad'.

He wasn't a 'Giant' in the tall sense - more in the wide sense - although at 'only' 22 stones at his top weight he would today be considered not too out of the ordinary.

But Sisson lived in the nineteeenth century, when 'fast food' was a swift-footed rabbit to be caught for the pot. And 22 stone was quite a weight then, enough to earn a man a certain local celebrity.

Thomas Sisson was born in Cotmanhay, Derbyshire, around 1839. He worked down the pit from his early teenage years and married his wife Louisa three years his junior. The couple settled in Ilkeston, and at the time of the 1881 Census they were living at 17 Church Street, Ilkeston, with four sons.

One particular incident perhaps sealed Thomas's celebrity. He worked at the Rutland Colliery in very harsh conditions, and during a strike he and a group of fellow miners decided on direct action.

They pulled a wagon-load of coal all the way from Ilkeston to Belvoir Castle, the stately home of the Duke of Rutland, whose family, the Manners, owned the Rutland Colliery.

The feat so impressed His Grace that he had a portrait painted of the stoutest puller - who of course was Thomas 'Giant' Sisson. That portrait is shown here.

I have been unable to establish an exact birth date for Thomas Sisson, and have not come across a death date at all, nor his place of burial. Perhaps someone can add those details here, or give some more information on a man who was evidently a larger-than-life character in more ways than one.

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County:  Derbyshire

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