Self styled ‘The Yorkshire Burns’, William Wright (1836-1897) – better known colloquially as ill o’ th’Hoylus End – was Keighley’s unofficial poet laureate of the later Victorian era.

By turns warp-dresser, sailor, soldier, showman and pamphleteer, his lively, rough and ready character became legendary in his lifetime.

Between 1873 and 1879 he produced an annual ‘Howorth, Cowenheead an’ Bogthorn Almenak’. The Lord Chamberlain banned his play, The Wreck of the Bella. His Random Rhymes and Rambles was published in 1876, and his better-known Revised Edition of Poems in 1891, though much of his work survives on penny broadsheets, sometimes of a scurrilous nature. His most notable work, a pamphlet History o’ Haworth Railway, has run through numerous reprints since 1867.