Author: Hardaker, Joseph
Biography:
HARDAKER, Joseph (1789-1840: ancestry.co.uk)
He was baptised on 27 Dec. 1789 at Haworth, Yorkshire, the only son of six children of John Hardaker and his wife Mary Tennant, who had married at Batley in 1780. His parents were probably hillside farmers who supplemented their income by hand-woolcombing, but marriage banns for the sisters describe John Hardaker simply as a “labourer.” Suffering from chronic ill-health, Joseph managed to escape manual labour and became a solicitor’s clerk before eventually establishing the first apothecary’s shop in Haworth. He was respected in the town as a man who by dint of intelligence and industry had raised his station. He seems to have run the shop with his younger sister, Betty Hardaker (1807-88). She married Robert Lambert, a labourer, in 1839 and on Joseph Hardaker’s death they took over the shop. The Brontës knew it well and Branwell obtained his laudanum there in the 1840s. Hardaker never married. He died on 18 Feb. 1840. He had become a convert to Roman Catholicism and was the first person to be buried in the new Catholic chapel in North Street, Keighley. (ancestry.co.uk 5 Jan. 2022; findmypast.co.uk 5 Jan. 2022; Leeds Mercury 22 Feb. 1840; Bradford Observer 27 Feb. 1840; C. F. Forshaw, The Poets of Keighley, Bingley, Haworth and District [Bradford 1891]; Abraham Holroyd, A Garland of Poetry; by Yorkshire Authors [1873], 52-3; A Brontë Encyclopedia [2007]) AA