Author: Hird, James
Biography:
HIRD, James (1810-73: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born at Cullingworth, near Bradford, Yorkshire, on 17 Apr. 1810, and baptised at Bingley on 10 June, the son of Thomas Hird, a woolcomber, and his wife, who was possibly the Hannah Illingworth who married the clothier Thomas Hird at Bradford Cathedral on 31 May 1807. At six he went to work in a factory to help his widowed mother but by the 1830s his situation had improved and he had become first a schoolmaster at Wilsden, from where he signed the preface to the work listed here, and then a bookkeeper in a brewery. He had signed the temperance pledge on 18 May 1833, but eventually became one of the managers at the Old Brewery Bradford. He subsequently became an innkeeper, a builder of cottages, and a farmer of 24 acres. He married first Ellen Bailey, in 1840, with whom he had at least five children. After her death in Aug. 1857, he married Jane Bailey on 27 Oct. 1858 at Bradford Cathedral, with further issue of two daughters and two sons. They lived comfortably at Bowling Rock Lane, Bowling, Bradford, with him taking an active part in civic life on the Town Council. Around 1870, he built a large residence, Olicana Mount, in Ilkley, near Leeds, where he died on 12 Nov. 1873. Jane Hird survived him and died in 1878. In addition to the work listed here, he published three further books of poetry: The Prophetic Minstrel (1839), The Cypress Wreath (4th and 5th editions 1847) but no copies have been located, and A Voice from the Muses(1866). (ancestry.co.uk 22 May 2022; findmypast.co.uk 22 May 2022; Bradford Observer 24 Dec. 1834, 27 Aug. 1857, 28 Oct. 1858, 17 Nov. 1873; Leeds Intelligencer 6 July 1839; Newsam, 223; C. F. Forshaw, The Poets of Keighley, Bingley, Haworth and District [1891], 84-7; Peter Turner Winskill, The Temperance Movement and its Workers [1891] 1: 158-9; J. Norton Dickons, A Catalogue of Books, Pamphlets, etc. Published at Bradford [1895], 72) AA