People
John Nicholson
the Airedale Poet

Then they went daan to th' river Aire an th' tawk turned onto John Nicholson an his sad end...Winterbottom pointed aght whear he'd crossed the river, an whear he wor faand deead .....an' (they) spekilated on th' strange inconsistancy ov his life an' his labours
John Hartley Seets Yorkshire and Lancashire or Grimes comical trip from Leeds to Liverpool by canal


John Nicholson
born: 29th November 1790 Weardley nr Harewood
died: Friday 13th April 1843 bank of the River Aire opposite Dixon's Mill

Though greatest bards have sung most earthly things,
And scarcely left me room to touch the strings,
Yet humbly would I from the crowd retire,
And strike, though feebly, the responsive lyre
By Nature's hand, O, may my harp be strung,
While I attempt the Vale that ne'er was sung!
Airedale in Ancient Times

John Nicholson was not really of Saltaire but the place of his death has associated him with the village as is shown by many nineteenth century sources such as Hartley's comic dialect tale quoted above. More recently, in 1993, Tony Harrison's play Poetry or Bust, exploring the theme of Nicholson's poetic ambition and commissioned by the late Jonathan Silver, was presented at Salts Mill by the Northern Broadsides Theatre company.
If you examine Bradford artist W.O.Geller's engraving of him(above) - the only picture we have - it is apparent that the Yorkshire woolworker has been transformed into Lord Byron - there is even a lightning flash just to the left of his elbow.
Nicholson was the son Thomas Nicholson a small worsted manufacturer and enthusiastic Methodist of Eldwick at the head of Shipley Glen. He was sent to school there and later spent one year at Bingley Grammar School.Although intended by his father for a manufacturer he was first set to learn woolsorting. His mind however was set on literature and he earned his living for the rest of his life as a sorter or comber.
In 1810 his first wife died in childbirth and for a while Nicholson moved in the direction of becoming a methodist preacher. But in 1813 he married again and ceased to have any connection with the Wesleyans after 1815.
In 1818 he was working at Ellis Cunliffe Lister's Red Beck Mill between Shipley and Manningham but he was also gaining a reputation; as John James later put it:

He possessed at this season of his life, a ready and abundant flow of conversation, lighted up with humorous sallies, and happy and ingenious turns of thought. He also had acquired a sufficient fund of information to enable him to take part effectively in any discussion which might arise. Besides the quick repartee, the striking recitations of poetry, and the flashes of wit and merriment, with which he was wont to set the table in a roar, all conduced to render his company highly attractive to his literary friends. When engaged in animated conversation, his eye beamed with fire and intelligence, and his whole countenance and manner became excited and expressive of a remarkable man.

He was part of Bradford intellectual society such as it was - all accounts of the town at the time agreeing that most conversation was about moneymaking. He was well known for producing satirical squibs and eventually was commissioned to write a play, the Robber of the Alps for the Bradford Old Theatre.
His next play was the Siege of Bradford - that is he moved from the fashionable sub-Byronic to celebration of local patriotism. This was produced in 1820 and published, together with some of his poetry in 1821. The volume was dedicated to the merchants and manufacturers of Bradford. and contained the following effusion:

Hail Glorious Commerce! Goddess of our isle!
...........................................................
Thou has a daughter, whose industrious hands
Supply the earth with stuffs of richest hues,
In which are dressed the sultan and the slave -
Princes and Kings, Jews Pagans,Turk and Priest,
The Indian Ladies and the Persian dames, -
Bradford her name, now known throughout the world

The Civil Wars when Bradford supported the King - an assertion which would have surprised 17th-century Bradfordians( 1 ) were succeeded by a period of peaceful trade yet then ....few were the goods/ Which then with weary steps, were brought/ On the jaded pack-horse to the little town, - /A public house the only piece-hall was, / And one small table held the merchant's store. / Behold how chang'd! so many now her goods,/ That she can form a zone to gird the world;
Nicholson seems to have had a talent for impromptu verse and that and a eye - not necessarily a cynical eye - for what the locals , particularly those with money, would like ensured a certain success and he built on it with a long poem called Airedale in Ancient Times. This is in the form of an imaginary journey from Goredale where Projecting masses to the clouds are piled/And Grandeur revels in her palace wild,and which he took to be the source of the river, to Leeds how changed, since Loidi's castle stood/Encicled by the ancient park and wood!/Where streets are now, the shining pheasants flew,/ Or cattle cropped the daisies closed with dew. Finally he flatters his readers, although he may have thought that he was warning them,With all our modern concerts,parties, balls/Assembly rooms, our theatres and halls,/Are we more happy than the ancient lord who lived contentedly in his hall but arose to do his duty when summoned to it?

Such were the sons of Leeds when Towton's plain
Was crimsoned o'er with thirty thousand slain;
Their king they loved, and for their king they died.
While Wharf's clear stream roll'd on a purple tide;
And if our favoured isle continued free,
Such must the modern lords of Britain be.

This is pretty conventional stuff with a similar confusion to his ideas about the siege of Bradford - in this case which king were they being loyal to - Edward IV or Henry VI? Presumably in Nicholson's royalist imagination it does not matter and all kings merge into one the better "to combat error in each varied form/Which comes o'er England as a sweeping storm as he put it in his poetical attack on the Owenites
His talent for occasional verse is shown by his lines on the Crow Hill bog burst of September 1824( 2 )

What gigs what carts what marvelling hearts
Are pressing the mountain brown
To see a bog the valley clog
And in deluge tumble down

Old trees which sprung when Homer sung
And wither'd heath and wither'd bent
Which bloom'd, as it may be presumed
When Roman hosts were hither sent

But the summer's heat the heaps of peat
Had dry'd in many a gaping chink
and when so dry the the clouds on high
Send down a flood to give it drink

And as each flaw with greedy jaw
Quaft with unsatiated thirst
The lightenings flashed, the thunders crasht
And its tremendous bowels burst

Charybdis' shore should never rore
Nor Cylla murmer half so hoarse
Its works gave way & could not stay
But joined the deluge inits course

The scaly fry in myriads die
And eels full half a century old
No more can creep amid the deep
But helpless on the flood are roll'd

Leeds folks amaz'd in terror gaz'd
The river's contents beat their skill
But news went down to that great town
A bog had burst upon a hill

The learned men were eager then
That chymists to the hill should fly
for if the bog kept running still
Their trade must cease - they could not dye

So many went - the heath and bent
Were by their footsteps worn away
When they were there what did appear
For Crowhill bog had run away!! ( 3 )

This is the work of an accomplished writer of verse with the talent to take a contemporary event and to turn into entertainment The writer knows how to carry the listener or reader along with him impart a sense of the scale of the event and its suddenness and rareity. True the classical allusions are second hand but then so are most peoples' including those of Nicholson's social betters. It is not perfect - what on earth is the antecedent of the pronoun starting the third line of stanza five? - but it is not meant to be - it would not be to insult his memory to say that this would go down well with a pub audience.
To compare Nicholson to other well-known non-gentleman writers such as Cobbett,in prose, Burns or Clare in poetry would be absurd. There is a sense in which it does not matter because what is important about Nicholson was that he had found a local audience. He could place the cliches of poetry since the Lyrical Ballads and since Scott in the setting of Aire or Wharfe and they would entertain, and with a certain effort on his part, he could sell them. He even had the support of employers who, flattered by their hand's fame allowed him time off work;for example J.G.Horsfall did this when the poet was living at Harden Beck near Bingley and later, in less happy circumstances Titus Salt was willing to indulge him at Union St in Bradford.For a while he gave up the worsted trade and wandered around the North of England peddling his books door to door.; although it was later stated that he drank it all his sons remembered their father bringing home considerable sums of money at this time.But Nicholson's ambition took him further and he made the mistake of seeking his fortune in London.

In the capital he found that he was regarded as at best a figure of fun the uncouth Yorkshire yokel about whose adventures paragraphs appeared in the press - a foil to metropolitan sophistication. He even made the mistake of reminding the highly successful sculptor Sir Francis Chantrey that he had once worked on a milk cart in Sheffield.They may have both come from the West Riding but this typical Yorkshire sally - reminding a man that he is no better than anyone else however well he has done for himself - was not appreciated.
He returned home but made another futile expedition south from which his wife rescued him.
His ambition having been foiled Nicholson remained in Bradford and while remaining part of a group which included his own brother Tom Nicholson, who ran a tavern on Westgate,Abraham Holroyd,bookseller in Westgate and ,much later, the bookseller at Saltaire, and the historian of Bradford ,John James; Nicholson also gradually acquired the reputation of a drunkard.
On Friday 13th April 1843 shortly after the trial of Feargus O'Connor and other Chartists at Lancaster assizes on charges arising from the general strike of the previous year.an accident occurred on the stepping stones which crossed the River Aire to Lower Baildon from the lane which ten years later was straightened and renamed Victoria Rd. John Nicholson, on his way to visit his aunt at Eldwick had, in John James' words, made several calls on the way, drunk he slipped and landed in the water. He managed to pull himself on to the opposite bank where he was seen still alive by a lad going for milk early the next morning. Frightened by the poet's groans the boy went on and completed his errand telling no one at the time what had happened. Forty minutes later Nicholson was found dead.
He was buried in the presence of a large crowd at Bingley churchyard.
His verse continued to be printed after his death - in 1876 there were rival editions one edited by Abraham Holroyd and published at Saltaire the other dedicated to Sir Titus Salt. Gradually as the generation that knew him stopped editing anthologies so his verse disappeared and as the generation that read their anthologies vanished so did he.
What was it that caused such a stir amongst his contemporaries.? Perhaps it was a combination of his local success and his personality - he affected those who published verse and lived in the memories of those who read it.( 4 )
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(1) Bradford was a Puritan town and so strongly for Parliament that the Fairfaxes felt compelled to defend it despite the hills which allowed it to be commanded by the enemy's artillery..Return
( 2 ) This event is remembered now only because of its association with the Rev Patrick Brontë who preached on its lessons at Haworth Church and took it as the subject for his poem 'The Phenomenon'.
Crow hill lies to the west of Haworth on the border of the West Riding and Lancashire. In the summer of 1824 it dried up and a cloudburst on the 2nd September of that year saturated the dry peat to such an extent that the whole mass exploded and was swept into the gorge by Ponden Kirk and down the River Worth to the Aire at Keighley. The effect reached Leeds where the water was for some days unsuitable for dyeing cloth.
Nicholson's lines, written on the same day as Brontë preached his sermon, were not published until 1976( J.Ogden Nicholson-unpublished poems the Bradford Antiquary: the journal of the Bradford Historical and Antiquarian Society New series - part XLVI October 1976 pp 37-44) Return
( 3 ) The MS of this poem is in Keighley Library and according to Ogden(op.cit.) was formerly in the possession of 19thC Bradford historian William ScrutonReturn
( 4 )It is instructive to compare him with Branwell Brontë who, whatever his behaviour, was truly loved by his friends - who even went so far as to argue that it was he, not Emily Brontë, who had written Wuthering Heights. Leaving aside the gender politics of this assertion(a) we have to ask what it was that kept his friends loyal? The phrase once used of him 'genius of personality' seems to answer that case. he was so much part of his friends' lives that they could not conceive of him not creating something that would last. Despite the younger man's greater talents it must be said that Nicholson was far more successful for he published several books - which sold. Return
(a)Best answered by the old servant of the Brontës, who when she was asked about it by Halifax journalist Whitely Turner at the beginning of of the 20thC replied: 'What and me seeing Miss Emily writing all the time......' ( I'm afraid that that is a quotation from memory but its original will be found in the 3rd (1913) edition of A Springtime Saunter in Bronte Country


There is no complete edition of Nicholson's verse but the various 19thC versions turn up now and again on the antiquarian market or in Yorkshire car-boot sales.
The quotations on this page are from The Poetical Works of John Nicholson (the Airedale Poet) with additional notes and a sketch of his life byW.G.Hird London Simpkin Marshall and co 1876

There is another biography of Nicholson on a site dedicated to the nineteenth century Keighley dialect poet Bill o'th Hoylus End

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