Author: Layton, George
Biography:
LAYTON, George (1792-1873: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born at Briscoe, Yorkshire, and baptised on 1 Dec. 1792 at Romaldkirk, the son of William and Betty Layton. He received “a tolerable education” (Mackenzie and Ross) and became a teacher at a school in Bowes and then at Heworth Shore, on the Tyne. With the failure of the school he worked as a labourer at the firm of Messrs. Doubleday and Easterby, at Bill Quay, but was dismissed following a political speech he gave on the Town Moor, Newcastle, about the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester. He then opened a school at Northshields and voiced early support of Chartism, advocating annual parliaments, universal suffrage and secret ballots. He returned to Doubleday and Easterby as a warehouseman but fell out with their principal agent and was forced to leave. He then opened a public house but it failed and he was declared insolvent. Generously, the principal agent with whom he had fallen out, James Wright, found him a position as warehouseman at the chemical firm of Messrs. T. B. and L. Rowe, of Brentford, Middlesex. He remained there and rose to become head of the firm. In addition to the work listed here, he published a work on navigation: The Description and Use of Layton’s Rotary Navigator (Brentford, 1833). He continued his political activity and was sometime Secretary of the Brentford Political Union. He married Frances Redshaw on 1 Apr. 1820 at St. John’s, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. They went on to have at least six children. In 1841 he was still in Brentford as a soap maker at Old Brentford Windmill Lane, but he had moved to Whitby by 1851 as a soap manufacturer and remained there for over ten years. His wife died in Boulogne, France, in 1856. By 1871 he had moved to Warrington with a married daughter and two grandchildren, giving his occupation as “out of business, retired.” He was probably the George Layton who died on 6 June 1873 at Bellevue, Wakefield, Yorkshire, who was of “Old Brentford, Middlesex, in his 82nd year.” (ancestry.co.uk 29 Oct. 2022; findmypast.co.uk 29 Oct. 2022; Eneas Mackenzie and Marvin Ross, An Historical, Topographical, and Descriptive View of the County Palatine of Durham [1833] 2: 231n; Sheffield Independent 12 June 1873) AA
Other Names:
- G. Layton