Author: Leacroft, E. B.
Biography:
LEACROFT, E. B. (1737-1805: ancestry.co.uk)
Edward Becher (or Beecher) Leacroft was baptised on 30 Sept. 1737 at Wirksworth, Derbyshire, the eldest of four children of Robert Leacroft and his wife Bridget Becher (sometimes Beecher), who had married at Halam, Nottinghamshire, on 20 May 1736. He was articled to an attorney in Wirksworth in 1756. He remained in the Midlands all his life but like Erasmus Darwin and Anna Seward (qq.v.) sometimes moved in the fashionable circle of Lady Miller (q.v.) at Batheaston. He signed his Poems for the Vase at Bath Easton (1781) from Wirksworth as E. B. L, a “Midlands Highlander.” The poems are mostly undistinguished but "Sketches of Modern Manners" (14-23) and "Monody written at Matlock Bath" (41-3) and other topographical poems are of some historical interest. He died on 5 June 1805 and was buried on 10 June at St. Mary’s, Southwell, Nottinghamshire. There is a portrait by Joseph Wright at the Cantor Arts Centre, Stanford. (ancestry.co.uk 30 Sept. 2021; findmypast.co.uk 30 Sept. 2021; Stephen Glover, The History of the County of Derby, ed. Thomas Noble [1829] 1: 106) AA