Stonemason and monumental sculptor, born 25 May 1872 at Rainhill, Lancashire. At the time of the 1891 census, his father, Thomas Welsby (1850–1903), was a quarry master, his younger brother Arthur, aged 17, a mason. Ten years later, Thomas was quarry proprietor, Samuel, quarry manager, and the firm was trading from Rainhill Quarry as Thomas Welsby & Son. In 1903 Samuel Welsby married Elizabeth Baldwin, of Widnes. By 1911 at the latest, he had established himself in Liverpool as a monumental mason and by 1921, working from Widnes, Cheshire, as a master monumental mason. During the 1930s he lived in Calderstones Road, Mossley Hill, Liverpool, and operated from the Allerton Monumental Works, Woolton Road; in the 1939 register he described himself as a monumental sculptor. He died, aged 67, on 22 November 1940, in Liverpool; his business must have been highly successful, his effects (as noted in the National Probate Calendar) amounting to the considerable sum of £8,828 9s. 3d. During and after the First World War he executed a number of war memorials, the earliest, that for Prescot, Merseyside (thought to have been designed by William Rigby, of Eccleston Hill Quarry, St Helens), consists of a stone soldier on a tall granite pedestal and was erected as early as 1916. Another, of the same type, was erected at Moulton, Cheshire (designer not known) in 1920. A third, comprising a Celtic cross and designed by C. Brighouse, an architect operating from Ormskirk, was erected for the men of Lathom and Burscough (Lancashire) in 1922. The firm continued into the 21st century as Welsby Memorials Ltd, under the ownership of the Grassi family.
Ancestry sources: England censuses for 1891, 1901, 1911 and 1921; Church of England Marriages and Banns … Parish Register, Farnworth (Cheshire), St Luke; Kelly’s Directory, Lancashire, 1905; Kelly’s Directory, Liverpool and Suburbs, 1938; 1939 England and Wales Register, Lancashire, Liverpool; England and Wales, National Probate Calendar, 1941.
Bibliography: Gov.UK: ‘Samuel Welsby (Memorials) Ltd’; Historic England: (i) Lathom and Burscough War Memorial; (ii) Prescot War Memorial; Liverpool Trade and Street Directories; E. Morris and E. Roberts, Public Sculpture of Cheshire and Merseyside, Liverpool, 2012, pp. 140, 166–67.
Terry Cavanagh, September 2025