Robin Longbottom examines the colourful life of a 19th century entrepreneur

“I WAS born Hawwood hill Slack oposet the village of Bogthorn on the 6 day of March 1815 my fathers names were George Leach and he was a native of Cullingworth and my mother was Mary Judson, a native of Keighley....After their marriage they lived in a low cotage only one story high and this is the birth place of your humble servant.” So wrote James Leach in 1892 at the beginning of “his own Byography”.

In the latter half of the 19th century, James Leach, better known as 'Pie', was one of Keighley's most well-known characters. His popularity and fame were such that after his death in 1893, his widow auctioned his personal possessions to a public that clamoured to buy a memento of his life.

His handwritten “Byography” was bought by Henry Whitehead, a Keighley tanner, and passed down through his family before being donated to the Keighley Local Studies Library in 2014.

Despite poor family circumstances – his father was a handloom weaver – he received some education, and was taught to read and write at a school at Sykes Head in Oakworth. He started his working life as a woolcomber in the family cottage, which had then been turned into a combing shop.

In 1833 he married Sarah Waterhouse and made ‘blacking’ for shoes and lead spoons, which he hawked around the local area. However, unable to make ends meet, he then turned to handloom weaving, bought weft and warp and started a manufacturing business. He and his wife had a loom each and he also put work out to other weavers. Unfortunately, his new business coincided with the introduction of the worsted power loom and was not successful.

However, he was an enterprising man and would turn his hand to anything that would earn him an honest shilling. Over the next few years, he ran a grocer’s shop in Mill Hey, Haworth, then took a share in a coal pit at Oakworth. At the pit he worked as a banksman, a surface worker who sorted the coal and arranged for its sale. When the coal pit failed, he then opened a beerhouse in the “downstairs room” of his cottage in Bogthorn, but gave it up when the “raucous cursing and swearing and the obscene language” became too much for his wife.

After the failure of his beerhouse, and another short spell woolcombing, he applied for the post of Keighley night watchman (policeman) and was one of two appointed. His job was to patrol the streets at night, call out the hour, check that doors were locked and apprehend drunks and vagrants. In 1851 tragedy struck with the death of his wife, Sarah, and his two children, Mary aged seven and George aged four. Shortly afterwards he resigned as night watchman.

In 1853 he married Sarah Hanson who had a grocer’s shop at 51 Low Street in Keighley and established himself as a greengrocer. For a while he worked in Liverpool and sent home to the shop “all kinds of fruits such as oringes, appeles, plums and coconuts” bought at the wholesale markets. On his return he made fruit pies that were sold from the grocer’s shop and earned him the nickname Pie. He entered local politics and was elected to the Local Board of Health, gaining notoriety for his outspoken opinions. In 1872 he made an excursion to London that later became the subject of one of his many lectures at the Mechanics Institute.

When his wife died in 1889, he sold the shop in Low Street and moved to a house he had built in North Street. In 1892 – at the age of 77 – he married his third wife, Margaret Bowes, a lady less than half his age. Pie Leach died the following year.