In the early 1820s Stokesley seethed with political controversy.  Young men and women horrified their elders by buying radical literature from Mr Armstrong’s shop and the Stokesley Paper War between the clockmaker Robert Armstrong and the Methodist businessman Thomas Mease polarised opinion in the town [see Radicalism in Stokesley in the 1820s].  In 1825, the year after Thomas Mease published the last edition of The Extinguisher in triumph over his now absent adversary, a new monthly magazine began to appear in Whitby.

The literary war begins 

Whitby, however, had no tradition of radicalism.  Published by Mr Robert Kirby, the Whitby Repository and Monthly Miscellany was almost a house journal for the Congregationalist Church in Silver Street and its first editor was the minister, the Revd William Blackburn.  It was modelled on The Gentleman’s Magazine and its content was religious, sentimental, literary and scientific.¹  Its declared intention was that ‘personal invective, satirical abuse and scurrilous reflections … would be foreign to our pages’ - as will be seen, this high-minded prospectus was not invariably carried out.  Within a couple of years, following disagreements with the editor of the Repository, the Whitby Panorama and Monthly Chronicle was launched in January 1827, edited by the Presbyterian minister, the Revd George Young.  Laymen entered the literary fray when in the same year Mr Ralph Horne, a young printer, launched the Whitby Magazine, assuring the public that it would contain “nothing offensive to morals or decorum”.²  However, this would not prevent him from entering into acrimonious conflict with the other magazines. ³

The Retreat, a club for young writers 

The young people of Whitby were passionately devoted to literature.  In 1825 a club known as the Retreat started up, chiefly to provide contributions for the newly-founded Repository.  Its members were aged from their mid-teens to their late twenties, and they wrote under pseudonyms: for example, Miss Jane Forth, the daughter of a local gardener, who taught in a ladies’ school in Flowergate, was J***; Miss Mary Langdale was Norna of the Fitful-head; Stephenson Bulmer⁴ was Allan Fairford; and John Buchannan was Vincent Shadewell.⁵  John Buchannan was then a young clerk at Messrs Preston and Walker, solicitors.  He and his fellow clerks, James Myers and John Watkins, were to become prominent figures in this literary world. 

James Myers 1807-29

James Myers was the eldest of the three, born in 1807.  The only child of an excise officer, his precocious talent was noticed early when at the age of ten his first poem was published in the Northern Star, or Yorkshire Magazine. 

According to his friend and admirer John Watkins, his abilities at Mr Routh’s school soon set him high above his fellows, and outside lessons he amused himself with scientific study.  At fifteen he had wished to go to London to become an engraver, but his mother feared for his health during the close confinement of such an apprenticeship and he was persuaded to take up his second choice, the law. 

Myers was an idealistic and hard-working young man.  He wrote for the Repository in the time he could spare from his legal studies and set off for London to complete his articles in high hopes of a future career in the profession.  He was bitterly disappointed to discover the underhand practices and political expedients adopted by his fellow clerks in pursuit of their own advancement in the profession and for monetary gain. 

In December 1828 he left London intending to set up his own practice in Stokesley, but almost immediately found that his health was failing.  He went home to his widowed father in Whitby and died of consumption in August 1829.  The following year John Watkins, evidently anxious that his friend’s work should not be overlooked in the literary ferment of Whitby life, published The Remains of James Myers presenting a collection of Myers’ writings together with the first of his two biographies of the author.

John Watkins 1808-57

John Watkins was born in 1808, the son of Francis Watkins of Aislaby Hall and the nephew of the Whitby poet and writer William Watkins.  A keen author in his early twenties, writing for the Repository and the Magazine, John’s first book was The Stranger’s Guide through Whitby and the Vicinity, published in 1828 (with later editions in 1841, 1849 and 1850).  In 1830 he produced his Remains of Myers and also Scarborough Tales, by a Visitant. 

However in 1834 after a violent quarrel with his employer, he launched into polemical writing.  His pamphlet A Letter to the Lawyers, which was dedicated to his friend John Buchannan, could not find a publisher in Whitby for fear of legal action and was published in Beverley. 

Thereafter his interest lay mainly in politics and he became an ardent Chartist, a friend and admirer of Ebenezer Elliott (the poet known as the Corn Law Rhymer), and subsequently his biographer and son-in-law.  His works included Lay Sermons, pub 1835; The Five Cardinal Points of the People’s Charter Separately Explained and Advocated, pub 1839; and Wat Tyler; or the Poll-Tax Rebellion: An Historical Play in Five Acts.

John Buchannan 1810-91 

John Buchannan was the youngest of the three.  Born in 1810 in East Row, Sandsend, he was the son of a master mariner who was lost at sea when John was a very young child.  His mother, who kept a shop in the village, died of consumption soon after the death of her little daughter.  John, not yet 6 years old, was now alone, left in the care of his young aunt. 

His mother and her sister had become members of the Silver Street Congregational Church on hearing the preaching of the minister Mr Arundel, and evidently the church took John under its wing.  Three church members were the executors and trustees of his mother’s Will.  When he was a child it was feared that he too would fall victim to consumption and he was sent to live for a while in the Yorkshire dales under the care of a “good old Wesleyan”,⁶ Willie Sinclair.  Sinclair’s strong faith made a strong impression upon him. 

When John was 8 years old, his aunt married a local seaman, James Pyman, and began a family of her own - presumably John grew up in this household.  He certainly continued to attend the Silver Street Church.  Unlike others of the family, John was not sent to sea⁷  - presumably because of his abilities at school and the fact that his mother had left him some money, but perhaps also because of fears for his health.  Instead, at the age of 14 or 15 he was sent to work as a clerk in the office of Mr Preston, the solicitor. 

It was at about this time that he joined the Retreat and began to write.  Before his 17th birthday he was hard at work on producing a volume of his poetry.  According to Watkins, he valued the constructive criticism of their friend Myers, but it seems from the preface to the poems that a major influence was the poet James Montgomery.  Montgomery (1771-1854) was a celebrated poet and editor, remembered today for some of his hymns - particularly Angels from the Realms of Glory and Hail to the Lord’s Anointed. 

Buchannan met Montgomery, according to one account⁸ in the household of Mr John Holt, a Whitby shipowner and member of the Silver Street Church.  The poet very kindly looked through the poems in manuscript and Buchannan thanked Montgomery for his “unaffected kindness” and “friendly criticisms” in his preface.  This may have taken place in December 1826 - Montgomery was in Whitby at that time and wrote his poem when travelling alone in a chaise from Whitby to Scarborough.  This was the year when a notable Whitby figure, the Revd William Scoresby, seaman, scientist and finally Anglican clergyman, came back to the town in October to preach in the parish church on the loss of two whaling ships, the Lively and the Esk.  Scoresby would later become Vicar of Bradford, as a result of which he would meet some true prodigies of literature - the Brontë family. 

On 23 November 1827 John Buchannan issued a prospectus for his volume of poetry, but interest was slow - after 6 months only 107 Whitby subscribers had put their names down for the book, and more than half of these had been approached personally.  The book was published in 1828, the preface dated 22 May.  It is not clear how many copies of Albert; Hilda; and other Poems were eventually printed, but it went into a second edition in 1830.  The printer was Mr Robert Kirby of the Repository; consequently the Panorama carried a slashing review. 

In the December of that year Buchannan was appointed editor of the Repository, aged only 18.  He combined the duties of an editor with his legal studies, as in December 1827 he was formally articled to his employer on payment of a premium of £100, presumably from the money left in trust for him by his mother. 

Following his appointment as editor, the Repository carried an open letter to the other Whitby editors signed "Geoffrey Hopewell", which was probably Buchannan’s work.⁹  It pleaded for all editors to ‘join cordially in carrying on the good work of improvement, moral and intellectual, amongst the inhabitants of Whitby and the neighbourhood.’  However, as the next issue contained a long and gloating report on the demise of the Panorama, peace was not restored. 

The Repository clashes with John Walker Ord 

In 1829 the editorial staff of the Repository clashed with John Walker Ord, a young writer who was later to become an eminent Cleveland author.  Ord was then 18 years old, the son of a Guisborough tanner and leather merchant.  He would shortly go to Edinburgh to make a start on his medical studies, but in the meantime he had begun writing for the press.  Several of his poems appeared in the Whitby Magazine during the year, but in the August edition of the Repository the following notice appeared:

“Our contributors at Gisbro’, will please not to send their communications by post or coach, but by waggon, in order to incur as little expense as possible.” 

This infuriated Ord, who wrote an angry letter to the editor:

    “I am not one of those foolish individuals who think so highly of their own productions as to imagine they stand alone in merit, but I had the simplicity to imagine that, at least, they were worth paying the postage of, or, if not the postage, at least, the coach conveyance.  Were I sending poetry to the loftiest periodical that ever was, I would not send it by the WAGGON.” 

As a result, the September issue of the Repository featured a piece entitled “Editorial Conversations, No. 1.  Scene: Editor’s Box, Ruswarp - time, 9 o’clock, evening.  Characters: The Editor, Vincent Shadewell, Jabez Snarler.”  It is indignantly described by Edmund Barrass in the chapter on Ord in his A Gallery of Eminent and Popular Men¹⁰  as follows:

    ‘In the course of the dialogue, the editor alludes to the notice to correspondents in the last number, and Vincent Shadewell volunteers to read to the others the letter sent by J.W.O., “for our mutual benefit;” then follow their remarks on the subject matter of it, and though they gravely settle that he is nothing, “that he is nothing but a blackguard,” as their friend Hogg would say - they shew their position by contrast, for in somewhat less than half a page the following elegant expressions fall from the “lips polite” of these accomplished gentlemen - “creature,” “reptile,” “mongrel,” “blackguard,” “infamous scrawl,” “venomous reptile,” &c., &c.  I need not add that this circumstance put an end to any further contributions to the Repository.  But [Ord] continued to write occasionally to the Magazine, and also gave a rejoinder to the “Noctes.”’ 

The Magazines fade away 

After three years' work as editor, John Buchannan had to make the ‘humiliating acknowledgement’ that he had not increased the number of subscribers, and he handed over to the Revd Joseph Ketley, a Unitarian, who edited the journal in 1831 and 1832. In 1833 Robert Kirby himself carried out the work of the editor, but in December the Repository finally faded away.  Its successor The Whitby Treasury lasted only six months and two subsequent attempts in the 1850s and 1860s to start up new magazines also failed.  It had outlasted its rivals, the Panorama and the Magazine. 

Epilogue 

By the early 1830s it seems that several of the contributors were far more concerned with politics than literature.  Stephenson Bulmer was active on the Conservative side; John Watkins would shortly become a Chartist, supporting radical reform.  In 1839 he was arrested in Whitby for his advocacy of Chartist principles, but was released on the intervention of Lord Normanby, then Secretary of State.  He spent his later years in London. 

John Buchannan’s path led him away from writing - for which Watkins blamed the law.  Buchannan became a prominent Whitby lawyer, coroner, County Court Registrar, agent for Lord Normanby, etc, and was active in the Whitby Mechanics' Institute and the Whitby Literary & Philosophical Society.   He certainly took his duties as a lawyer extremely seriously, as can be seen in the comments made at Whitby County Court shortly after his funeral by the judge, Mr F A Bedwell :

    ‘… The late Mr Buchannan was a man of wide experience, he had passed through much and was a man of great reading and learning, and he had lived through a period which had been very trying to the faith of many men and which had led many into scepticism; but Mr Buchannan had in a most singular manner and with the steadiest constancy preserved his faith unimpaired, and had a good reason for all the views he took on every question of right and wrong, and for the hope and faith that were in him.  One characteristic that Mr Buchannan had, was, he believed, common to the solicitors in Whitby generally, and that was this – that he certainly promoted, whether he originated it or not, a strong desire to stop litigation whenever he could.  That was a characteristic on which he [the judge] congratulated the lawyers and the public of Whitby.  There was a desire on all sides to avoid as much as possible bringing their clients into litigation.  That had been done with very considerable advantage to the public by the solicitor, and often with an utter disregard to his own personal and professional interests.  As to the late Registrar's talents and acquirements as a lawyer they were so widely known and established that his death was recognised as a loss by the whole profession...’¹¹

Buchannan evidently sought to uphold throughout his life the ideals so dear to James Myers, the friend of his youth. 

However, other factors must have played a part - principally his family life and interest in religion.  He was married twice.  In 1835 he married Sarah Margaret,daughter of Mr John Holt, but was left a widower two years later when Sarah died soon after the birth of their daughter.  In 1841 he married Ann Langborne, daughter of George Langborne, Whitby shipbuilder and owner¹².  She died in 1849 some months after the birth of their fourth son.  Buchannan did not remarry.  Miss Jane Weatherill of Staithes, an elderly lady who was a relation of the artist George Weatherill, came into the household to look after the orphaned children.  Buchannan’s third son died at the age of 11. 

Buchannan’s religious progression was a singular one.  In his early twenties Buchannan had been an active member of the Silver Street Congregational Church.  He was much praised for his preaching abilities and sometimes conducted services.  However, he and Sarah appear to have moved to the Primitive Methodists, as following her death a “neat marble tablet” to her memory was erected in their chapel in Church Street.  During his marriage to Ann Langborne, who came of an Anglican family, he evidently attended the parish church at Lythe.  At the end of his life he became a Roman Catholic, and was received into the church on his deathbed.  It is not clear from the newspaper notices following John Buchannan’s death how widely this religious development was expected or known. 

One man emerged from the literary wars of the late 1820s still firm in the hope of producing a lasting journal for Whitby.  Ralph Horne, the young printer of the Whitby Magazine, in 1854 started up a new venture - the Whitby Gazette.  From uncertain beginnings it prospered, and in January 1858 it became a proper weekly newspaper, run by the Horne family for 120 years.

1 as described in the list of British Periodicals 1821-30 held at the University of Minnesota cf http://mh.cla.umn.edu/britper.html

2 see the online archives of the Whitby Gazette for the story of Ralph Horne, its founder

3 for a history of the Whitby periodicals, see Chapters of Whitby History 1823-1946 by H B Browne

4 Stephenson Bulmer was later to write on religious topics, eg The Deity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, plainly inferred from His being exhibited in Scripture as the object of worship, 1833.  He was at one time a schoolmaster, then a clerk in the Whitby Old Bank.  A Wesleyan preacher

5 Whitby Authors and their Publications by the Revd Gideon Smales; pub Whitby 1867

6 John Buchannan’s description, according to his obituary in the Whitby Times and North Yorkshire Advertiser, 1 May 1891

7 unlike, for example, his much younger cousin George Pyman, who first went to sea at the age of ten.  He became a wealthy Hartlepool shipping magnate

8 according to the obituary

9 cf Chapters of Whitby History 1823-1946

10 published in 1851 by Braithwaite, Stokesley

11 from the report in the Whitby Times and North Yorkshire Advertiser

12 Captain James Cook’s ship the Discovery was built at the Langbornes’ yard

The poetry of James Myers, John Watkins, John Walker Ord and John Buchannan can now be found on the internet.