Primitive Methodist temperance advocate, born at Ouseburn, Newcastle upon Tyne. The son of a butcher, he was apprenticed to a flax-dresser at 14. He became a prominent figure in the early temperance movement on Tyneside, owmed a temperance hotel for a time and later ran a successful coffee-roasting business and became chairman and director of a building society. He was active in the parliamentary reform movement 1830-1832 and supported the Universal Suffrage Union, the Liberation Society and the early trade union movement.In his closing years he was a Tynemouth town councillor and mayor in 1887. According to the Newcastle Daily Chronicle, his name was 'probably better known than that of any other advocate of the temperance cause throughout the North of England. His career supplies a wonderful illustration of what energy and determination may accomplish in the moulding of the human character.'