Author: Ord, John Walker
Biography:
ORD, John Walker (1811-52: ODNB)
The son of Ann (Ovington) and Richard Ord, a partner in a leather business, he was born at Guisborough, Yorkshire, and attended local schools before going to the University of Edinburgh as a medical student. He was apprenticed to Robert Knox, the anatomy lecturer who became infamous for employing the body-snatchers, Burke and Hare. Ord, who had started writing poetry before going to university, was more interested in literature than in medicine. In Edinburgh he contributed to periodicals and met John Wilson and James Hogg (qq.v.); he wanted to marry one of Wilson’s daughters (probably Margaret) but she married someone else. He and Matthew Smith Milton (q.v.) are said to have found themselves in legal difficulties over some satirical verses they had published and they left Scotland before Ord completed his studies. It may have been these two events—the failure of his relationship and the legal trouble—that later caused Ord, in England, to express bitter anger at the Scots and Scotland. Ord travelled to Wales and Holland with Knox but by 1836 he was in London where, with Milton, he founded the Metropolitan Journal of Literature. Although this folded after sixteen issues, Ord and Milton then launched the Metropolitan Conservative Journal. Milton died in 1838 and the periodical was amalgamated with The Church of England Gazette, jointly edited by Ord and Michael Augustus Gathercole. However by 1839 Ord was in Edinburgh having suffered financial difficulties; in that year he applied to the RLF citing an action for libel from William Maginn for which he had to pay £300. The RLF awarded him £20 and £10 more in 1840. Ord moved to Sunderland where he managed The Northern Times. The 1841 census shows him in Guisborough with his parents but in 1842 he applied again to the RLF saying that his employment had been terminated. When he was refused further assistance he wrote that he must then appeal "to the colder charity of the Workhouse or the grave!". He was a patient at York Hospital lunatic asylum for seven months in 1848; one account says that his insanity was “incurable" but at the time of his death he was living in Guisborough and working on an epic poem, “Bible Oracles.” His other publications include History and Antiquities of Cleveland (1846), an edition with a memoir of Thomas Pierson’s (q.v.) Roseberry-Toppin (1847), and Rural Sketches and Poems (1850). (W. H. Burnett, Old Cleveland [1886], W. C. Newsam, The Poets of Yorkshire [1845]; ancestry.co.uk 21 May 2020; ODNB 21 May 2020; RLF file 961)