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Author: Hawkes, W.

Biography:

HAWKES, W. (fl 1829)

There appears to be only one recorded copy of the author’s only known literary work, but it is signed by the author--“William Hawkes July 22. 1830”--and contains ms notes with a view to a second edition (which never appeared). The one review that has been traced, in the Birmingham Journal of 22 Aug. 1829, disapprovingly refers to the author only as “W. H.” and gives a less than lukewarm account of the poem. He is not to be confused with W. or William Hawkes Smith, who was active as a writer on architecture and social reform in Birmingham about this time, but it is possible that he was “Mr. W. Hawkes,” a partner in the Eagle Foundry of Francis, Smith, and Hawkes in Birmingham, whose design for the Clifton Suspension Bridge was well thought of locally in 1829. (The commission however went to I. K. Brunel.) A William Hawkes of Birmingham also signed a petition in 1837 to invite the British Association for the Advancement of Science to hold its annual meeting in the city. If this tentative identification is correct, he was a Baptist, the son of Thomas Laker or Lakin Hawkes and his wife Susannah Smith; his birth in Birmingham—specifically in what is now a suburb, Moseley, King’s Norton, Worcs.--on 4 Apr. 1800 was registered at Dr. Williams’s Library on 7 Oct. 1802, with John and Sarah Ryland as witnesses. He did not marry and in the 1851 Census was recorded as an “Iron Founder” living with his unmarried sister and two servants. His death at King’s Norton in 1866 was also registered outside the system for C of E parish burials. (findmypast.com 8 Mar. 2022; ancestry.com 10 Mar. 2022; Birmingham Journal 22 Aug. 1829, 19 Dec. 1829, 2 Sept. 1837; information from NLS)

 

Other Names:

  • W. H.
 

Books written (1):

Birmingham: printed by C. Hammond, [1829]