REED AND heald maker John Farish was one of the founders in 1825 of the Keighley Mechanics’ Institute, “a society for mutual instruction” and part of a national movement to bring education and libraries within reach of all classes.

Although Farish’s membership number was 1, he served only sporadically on its committee. This dour son of a Scots packman – he lost eight of his 10 children in infancy – regarded the reading of novels as “only another kind of mischievous excitement”.

Instead, his own nightly studies, shared for nearly 40 years by a succession of pupils, amounted almost to an obsession.

He is said to have taught himself arithmetic, algebra, mensuration, trigonometry, “certain parts of geometry”, mechanics, electricity, galvanism, hydrostatics, pneumatics, chemistry and optics. He could make barometers, and understood clockwork, telescopes and microscopes.

Farish died aged 72 in 1858. More than 200 men who had been his pupils paid his funeral expenses.

His grave in Utley cemetery, originally surmounted by a globe representing knowledge, records their “grateful remembrance of his many virtues”.