Harry Mead delves into a book about a remarkable shoemaker and writer in Georgian Bedale.

ROBERT Hird was a shoemaker in Georgian Bedale with a taste for knowledge.

He once wrote: “I have had much pleasure in reading instructive books on divinity and geography … the history of nations and towns ... and England.”

His cultural leanings were recognised by some of his wealthier and well-educated customers.

Visiting Thornton Watlass Hall for an order, he was given a tour of the family portraits by the owner, the Rev Frederick Dodsworth, who also showed him a book by the Venerable Bede.

Similarly, at Kirkby Fleetham Hall, Richard Strangeways, described by Hird as “a scientific gentleman”, introduced the shoemaker to his extensive ornithological collection.

Hird read gazetteers, encyclopaedias, and dusty tomes in Bedale church.

Of his local discoveries, he wrote: “I found in my neighbourhood that Richmond, Northallerton, Ripon and Wensleydale etc had their histories, wherein are many valuable records and transactions which might otherwise have been buried in oblivion.”

But there was little, if anything, on Bedale.

Hird remedied this defect in amazing fashion – with a poem of 3,000 four-line stanzas.

As Dr David Kirby, a presentday historian of the Bedale district, remarks: “There are scores and scores of poems on people and places, but not on such a scale about one single locality.”

Hird added a preface and many general observations.

The poem itself is rich in the minutiae of local life during Hird’s time (1768-1841).

Not everything has changed, least of all people. Keen gardeners today will see themselves in Hird’s description of their Georgian counterparts: “Their stuff is all their talk/And how they best their fine flow’r grow.”

Besides his epic poem, Hird left notes chronicling his family history, notable events, like Waterloo, and random matters – local deaths, accounts, church and chapel affairs, and much more.

All were contained in four notebooks, which Hird urged “be kept by family for posterity.”

His early successors did so, and, though the notebooks later passed into other hands, and one has been lost, the surviving three are now safe in official archives, where Dr Kirby, a retired university lecturer, has studied them to produce a fascinating book* on Hird and his era.

In 1834, he was one of 16 shoemakers in Bedale and neighbouring Aiskew.

A few years later, four were in Emgate alone, where Hird had his shop.

This was a popular venue for what Dr Kirby calls “talking sessions” – local people dropping in to chat about events of the day.

But top of the bill for this was the grocery shop of John Calvert, a great reader of newspapers.

On his death, Hird observed: “No more you list’ning throng surround his door/To hear the news, which he did tell.”

Hird himself was something of a radical. He sympathised with the “labouring poor”

and disliked what he saw as land-grabbing by the gentry, especially to further their shooting interests. “The rich seize all for prey,” he wrote in his Bedale poem.

Though no republican, he wasn’t uncritical of royalty either.

The persecution of Catholics under Queen Elizabeth prompted him to ask: “Why call her good, or that church right which takes away the life of man for his opinion?”

Hird recorded local changes which doubtless were also happening elsewhere.

Thatched hovels were being replaced fast. At Aiskew, he observed a number “level’d at a slap.”

A landowner turned six fields into one and, by drainage, “made the wet lands dry.”

Bedale’s first drains, in Emgate, enabled horses to climb the hitherto muddy bank without slipping. Continued throughout the town, the programme “cleaned the streets, dried the ground and drove away the ague.”

Dr Kirby’s book is titled from what Hird called the “joyful days” of his boyhood, an unbridled romp through a semiwild countryside, captured in his remark: “I cannot say we’d any bounds/For we did run all o’er!”

A touching passage in his long poem describes the start of his courtship of Elizabeth Smith, his future wife. “A distant lover did I stand” – until he encountered her picking radishes in a garden: “This was time of earthly bliss/I took of her a tender kiss.” A possible rival witnessed the embrace. “Out of the garden he had crept ... to see what I would do ... He saw that I could woo.” Sadly, seven of the couple’s 16 children died in infancy.

Though Hird attended a local school, many people were so uneducated they believed a date on a bridge was a magical symbol. Some still regarded thunder as God’s wrath.

One man kept his sister “tyed down in bed in a state of lunacy.”

But, during Hird’s lifetime, the nude bathing in Bedale beck which he had enjoyed as a youngster became unacceptable. A bawdy song once sung at weddings was already only a memory.

Dr Kirby suggests that, by the 1830s, Bedale “was indeed a much quieter town than it had been at the end of the 18th century. There had been a profound transformation of its public life.”

Towards the end of his life, Hird added “author” to his job description. Dr Kirby says: “One day, someone will almost certainly write a large book about Robert Hird.” He describes his 140-page volume as “only an introduction to Hird in the town of his birth and its surroundings.”

Hopefully, Dr Kirby himself will provide the fuller biography he rightly feels is justified.

For Hird is that rare figure in British history – an individual of sharp identity among the generally anonymous ranks of ordinary British citizens – in this case, in the final phase of pre-industrial England.

Dr Kirby says that, if Hird’s writings hadn’t been preserved, “Bedale’s heritage (indeed North Yorkshire’s) would have been very much the poorer.”

Readers of his absorbing book might conclude that the loss would have been even wider.

*Days of Joy: Robert Hird at Home in Bedale by David Kirby (£12.50 from Bedale News, Bedale, or £13.70 from the author, Fairfax House, 1 Castle Meadows, Snape, Bedale DL8 2TT