JOSEPH’S poetry reflects the harsh life of the pits where he worked until he was fifty, as well as his own tragedies.* Of eight children, he lost two to workplace accidents and three in one month to scarletina. His father, Cuthbert, was unlawfully killed by a policeman during a strike in 1832, when Joseph was three months old.
In 1863, friends hoped they had found him some relief as sub-librarian of the Literary and Philosophical Society in Newcastle.* Skipsey voraciously read the Lit-and-Phil’s books, but neglected to lend them to increasingly irate members. After a few unhappy months he returned to the pit, until retirement in 1882.
Skipsey then worked as a school caretaker and college porter,* until in 1889 he was invited to become curator of Shakespeare’s cottage in Stratford-upon-Avon.* Again the well-intentioned plan misfired: the mocking scepticism shown by some tourists towards the museum’s artefacts became so depressing that two years later he returned to Gateshead,* where he died on September 3rd, 1903.
See for example ‘Get Up!’, from ‘Carols from the Coalfields’ (1886).
See the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
The jobs suited him quite well, but Watson felt there was something amiss when Skipsey was porter at Armstrong College (later Newcastle University). “I saw from that time 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.”
The list of those supporting his appointment is truly impressive, and includes among many others Robert Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Bram Stoker and William Morris. There was, however, a question about his strong Northumberland accent. “I know that my pronunciation is not quite like yours,” replied the big man with dignity, “but I must be allowed to say that I conceive it is much better, and should like to proceed to prove it.”
Watson explains that some visitors, notably those from the USA, were convinced Baconians (people who think that Sir Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays). “He felt that if he were to make this his life’s labour he would end by doubting the very existence of Shakespeare, and so he resigned his place and came home to the North.”