Author: Waddell, James
Biography:
WADDELL, James (b 1765, d c. 1830: ancestry.com)
Nicknamed “the cobbler poet laureate of Plessey,” James Waddell was born to John Waddell and Elizabeth Miller, a daughter of William Miller (d 1773), at Morpeth, Northumberland. Of the few known details of his life, most must be gleaned from his self-published 1809 volume of poetry, Poetical Works. At age twelve, and perhaps earlier, he attended a private grammar school conducted by Widdrington Bourne (b c. 1726). Formerly a silk dyer, secretly a Roman Catholic, Bourne was, in Waddell’s words, an “excellent Mathematician, Grammarian, and Diarian.” In 1778 he was apprenticed to cordwainer John Bunn of Morpeth. On 7 July 1791 at Stannington, Waddell married Ann Rutherford (b c. 1769). They had at least six children. Their son James (1795-1819), born at Plessey, near Stannington, died in a collier accident at Killingworth, where his family had moved in about 1814. According to his son James’s obituary, Waddell and his wife were for a time Methodists but returned to the Church of England. In his Poetical Works, Waddell names Charles Brandling, MP for Newcastle (1784-1798), and Brandling’s wife, Elizabeth (Thompson) Brandling, as his patrons. The sixteen woodcuts in his book are by Thomas Bewick (1753-1828). If the woodcuts are original to Waddell’s book, presumably Brandling or some other sponsor paid for them. (ancestry.com 3 May 2023; findmypast.co.uk 10 May 2023; E. Grindrod, “A Short Account of James Waddell,” Youth’s Instructor [1821], 313-17; W. V. Smith, “Widdringon Bourne of Morpeth, A Papist Schoolmaster in 1764,” Transactions…Architectural … Society of Durham and Northumberland, 12 [1967], 287-88) JC