Author: ROSS, James
Biography:
ROSS, James (1801-1891: ancestry.com)
Born at Rawdon, Yorkshire, on 12 May 1801, the son of Samuel Ross (1769-1810) and his wife Mary (b 1771), the poet was baptized at St Wilfrid, Calverley, on 7 June. He is identified in the 1841 England census as a woolen cloth finisher resident at 48 Mill Street, Leeds. His wife, Betty (1796-1877), was born at Mossley, Lancashire, to Obadiah Wigglesworth (1769-1834), a shopkeeper at Bradford, Yorkshire, later a whitesmith, and his wife, Ann Chetham. Married by banns on 1 Sept. 1822 at St Peter, Leeds, the couple had two children, John Ross (1823-1874), in 1841 a “stuff maker up,” and Joseph Ross (1828-1900), in 1851 also a “maker up of stuff.” He died on 16 Feb. 1891 and was buried in Leeds’s Beckett Street cemetery. He shares a headstone with his wife, with his son John, and with John’s wife. Inspired by the reforming work of Richard Oastler and Michael Thomas Sadler, and provoked by John Nicholson’s (q.v.) The Factory Child’s Mother, he published The Factory Child’s Father’s Reply. The poem commences, “Hail! noble Sadler, hail!” and “Hail! fearless Oastler, hail!,” and with a quotation from “a Lady:” “Thanks to the gen’rous brave / Who nobly fight to save / The poor little factory slave.” The newspaper press and periodical reviewers overlooked the poem. (ancestry.com 27 May 2024; freereg.org.uk 27 May 2024; J. T. Ward, The Factory Movement 1830-1855 [1962], 51-52) JC