Joseph Skipsey

Poet

• Born: March 17, 1832
• Birthplace: Percy Main, near North Shields, England
• Died: September 3, 1903
• Place of death: Harraton, England

Biography

Joseph Skipsey was born on March 17, 1832, at Percy Main, near North Shields, England, the eighth child of Cuthbert and Isabella Skipsey. His birth was not as eventful as the miners’ strike going on at the same time. Miners were fighting for shorter (twelve-hour) work days, as well as a higher (three- pence) hourly wage. On July 8, 1832, during a heated row between a special constable and a miner, Skipsey’s father, Cuthbert, stepped between the fighting men to mediate and was shot to death by the constable.

In 1839, Skipsey went to work as a trapper in the coal mines at Percy Main, near North Shields. As trapper, he was responsible for opening and shutting the trap door as the coal tubs rolled through, regulating the ventilation. The seven year-old did this work sixteen hours a day.

In the dark of the mines, young Skipsey made up songs that he and his coal mine mates would sing to pass the time and make up for the miserable conditions. Those conditions were so dangerous that Skipsey would later recount witnessing the death of other children who slipped down from their hoist of chains, tumbling to their deaths. Teaching himself to read and write by the “occasional” candlelight—by fingering the outlines of imitated playbills and notices in the dust of the mines—would later help Skipsey record such death, as well as the lives and conditions of the working miners. This hard life would also contribute to a stern and serious demeanor the poet bore into adulthood.

At seventeen, he was promoted to putter, for five shillings a week. With only the Iliad, Paradise Lost, and the Bible to read (and, at first, memorize), Skipsey took a week’s wages and purchased a complete Shakespeare. At twenty, he walked to London to get a railroad job, but returned for six months to work as a miner again, in Coatbridge, Scotland. In 1854, he married his landlady, Sara Ann Hendley. After the half-year mining stint, he went on to the collieries near Sunderland, tried teaching, and then moved on to Choppington, Northumberland.

At twenty-seven, Skipsey was at last able to escape the mining life, publishing his first full-length work, Poems. He found work as under-storekeeper at the ironworks of Hawks, Crawshay and Sons in Gateshead through James Clephan, editor of the Gateshead Observer. When one of his eight children was killed in the local factory in 1863, the poet moved on to Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where he worked as assistantlibrarian to the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society. Rather than doing his job “in an altogether and satisfactory way,” he spent the majority of his time reading.

At the advice of friends, he gave up library work, only to return to mining a year later. Now a hewer, Skipsey would continue mining work until the age of fifty, when he and his wife, Sara, would go on as caretakers for the Bentinck Board- Schools in Mill Lane, Newcastle. He would return to the Literary and Philosophical Society in the early 1880’s, but to lecture on “The Poet as Seer and Singer.”

Again by way of friends’ influences, the poet found work as porter and janitor at the newly opened Armstrong College (which would become Durham University College of Science), but although he was well recommended by friend Robert Spence Watson, Skipsey was out of place there as well. Upon the results of a visit where Lord Carlisle, walking the halls of the school with the principal, stopped to talk to the janitor and Joseph Skipsey had to put down coal scuttles to shake hands, his friend Watson decided that it “was quite impossible to have a College where the scientific men came to see the principal and the artistic and literary men came to see the porter. It was not easy to find the proper place for Joseph Skipsey.”

While he may have been displaced once again, in 1889, Skipsey had published an ample amount and had begun to develop a literary reputation—one which had taken him to the newfound company of Dante Gabriel, William Michael Rosetti, the Holman Hunts, and Theodore Watts (-Dutton). His literary connections would see him into retirement—when Burne-Jones negotiated a civil list pension of ten pounds sterling a year for Skipsey, which was increased in 1886 to twenty-five pounds, with a gift of fifty pounds from the Royal Bounty.

With the recommendation of various literati appointing Joseph and Sara successors and custodians of Shakespeare’s birthplace at Stratford-on-Avon, and with his pension, Joseph Skipsey retired on June 24, 1889. The continual nagging of tourists claiming that Bacon had written most of Shakespeare’s work, combined with Sara’s homesickness, compelled Skipsey to resign on October 31, 1891. He retired fully on his pension and with the help of his children, who took him and Sara in alternating turns. He spent his last days reciting Shakespeare more than writing his own poetry, and visiting friends. When Sara died in August of 1902, Joseph Skipsey would follow, dying in his son Cuthbert’s home at the age of seventy-one, on September 3, 1903.