Life of Robert Collyer

Robert Collyer, born in 1823 in Keighley, was an internationally famous preacher and a writer of distinction. From the age of fourteen he was apprenticed to the blacksmith Jackie Birch in Ilkley. Birch had also taught Collyer's father. For seven years previously, growing up in the days of the Industrial Revolution, Robert Collyer had worked long hours in the linen mill at Blubberhouses. Collyer later wrote in his memoirs: 'I was tired beyond telling, and thought the bell would never ring to let us out and home at last to bed.'

It was in Ilkley that Collyer developed his love of books and reading. John Dobson, a local preacher who organised a class for young men, would lend the boy books to read by candlelight or by the light of the flame from the forge. Collyer attended the Wesleyan Chapel at the bottom of Bolton Bridge Road. Often he would go with the local preachers when they went to take the pulpit. Once he was called upon to take the service himsef but by all accounts this was not a success. Collyer later recounted the reaction of the Addingham cobbler who said: 'tha'll never mak a preacher while tha lives...When tha' preaches a sermon tha' must say 'thus saith the Lord, and not lose thi way reasoning about it.'

In 1850, after the death of his first wife, Collyer emigrated to the United States with a new bride. He found work near Philadelphia making claw hammers and developed his gift for preaching and oratory. In 1859 he took a position at the Unitarian Church in Chicago but apparently retained his native Yorkshire accent. One American lady said 'I canna mak out a word he says but I always feel better for listening to him.' In these years Collyer worked as an agent of the Sanitory Commission during the American Civil War.

Collyer's book: 'Ilkley, Ancient and Modern' written in collaboration with J. H. Turner was published by William Walker and Sons of Otley in 1885. In 1897 Collyer accepted a request to move to New York to take on the Pastorate of the Church of the Messiah of Fifth Avenue and became one of the foremost preachers of the Unitarian Church and a famous lecturer. This enabled Collyer to travel widely to Rome and many other countries. He became the personal friend of many literary figures including Emerson and Longfellow. On Collyer's last visit to Ilkley in 1907 he performed the official opening of the Public Library and accepted the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters from Leeds University. Collyer died on November 30th 1912, within 8 days of his 90th birthday.

Quotes from Robert Collyer:

On Ilkley:
"In my leisure moments, far away, when I look back through the vista of 54 years, it is the old Ilkley I see, the nice little place, the brook gleaming down open to the sun with wild blossoms growing on its margin among the stones; the old thatched houses with their bits of garden; the miller's house with its wealth of roses shaking in the wind on the side next the meadow and mill; old Mr. Fozzard with his workshop by the stocks which had lost their power to hold the waifs and strays; the old smithy with the house and garden; the Wheat Sheaf run by the old batchelor. ... The heart has a long memory and mine holds the old Ilkley as I fondly believe perfect and entire within those lines: of their homes and their inmates and what they were doing for their life and living in those early times...I can see the faces as well as the homes of my old neighbours as I sit in my room among my books in New York".

On books and reading:
"One happy day, some good soul gave the little boy a big George Third penny and he needs must go and spend it forthwith on a stick of candy in the store. There the sticks were, in a beautiful glass jar in the window, and he must first gaze at them prolonging the anticipation of purchase. Then he saw, close to the jar, a tiny book with the fascinating inscription, 'The History of Whittington and his Cat, William Walker, Printer, Otley,' and bought the book...and in that purchase lay the spark of a fire which has not yet gone down to white ashes- the passion, which grew with my growth, to read all the books in my early years I could lay my hands on."

"How many books will you number? So many every man and woman in the town, rich or poor, will hold on equal terms and can say, ''This is our library, a trust in which we are all partners subject to the terms established when you take them to your homes for your own delight, that there shall be timely return for our good Sir Walter Scott says 'so many friends who borrow his books are good book-keepers but bad acountants."

"And now may I tell you what I mean by good books from my own experience, for I can find no better way. There are books which stimulate you as the wines do, of which you can sip slowly, feeling the glow and glamour, to be aware in time that you want something which holds a fiercer fire. And books you can read as some take drugs, to relieve their pain or shut out the desolation, or afford you blissful visions for the time. You may devour books in an over measure that, it may be, will do no harm, except to waste your time and prompt the question 'Will a man fill himself with the east wind? "

On the library:
The four essential foundations of a town: the church, the school, the Town Hall and the library: "and the library comes last as a rule, but until it comes the town in the common estimation takes a back seat."

On his final visit to Ilkley:
"And before this journey to the Motherland, the last I can hope to make I had crossed the ocean seven times to see my kith and kin first and then as they say make a bee line to Ilkley: with my heart in my mouth to stand beside my graves in your churchyard, drop in to see the old friends whose life was blended with mine and talk with them of the days that are no more and yet are for evermore while I live on the earth steal into the old church by my home and touch there the memories of the living and the dead, mellowed by the enchantment of time and distance...then I must drink at the old white wells, climb to the crest above to drink in the glory of the moors and dells and beauty of our Wharfedale. So it is true that I did not leave my old Ilkley, but carried it with me and hold it still".