You might be forgiven for never having heard of John Nicholson - even more so for not being able to quote a line of his poetry. A drunken Yorkshire woolsorter who met a watery end in the River Aire, Nicholson wrote a single volume of verse that was published privately by his employer, Sir Titus Salt. He was inclined to overestimate the extent of his poetic ability; he chose to commemorate the publication by heading for the capital to commission a bust of himself, only to be arrested for haranguing a statue of Shakespeare in the foyer of the Drury Lane Theatre.
Nowadays, you would struggle to find anyone familiar with his Beauties of Bingley or Airedale in Ancient Times. Anyone, that is, except for that rather more successful Leeds-born lyricist, Tony Harrison, who wrote this ribald verse-biography of Nicholson in 1993. The piece, Poetry or Bust, has been revived to mark the 150th anniversary of Salts Mill, which has undergone its own remarkable transformation into a Hockney shrine-cum-kitchenware outlet. With a great sense of poetic justice, the piece is staged with gusto (featuring music and clog dancing) by Barrie Rutter's Northern Broadsides company in the very woolshed where Nicholson used to inscribe his compositions in films of sheep-fat. Harrison has a great deal of fun with this, endlessly toying with the assonance of grease that fleece releases.
His assessment of Nicholson seems harsh: he suggests that the poet might have been the West Riding's answer to Robbie Burns, were it not for his want of temperance, talent and integrity. And Nicholson is condemned for cravenly producing the kind of poetry his patrons paid to hear, which is a little unfair. You may think that anyone on a mill-worker's wage could be forgiven for supplementing their income by any means possible.
The nadir came, however, when Nicholson penned a heartfelt polemic on behalf of the Chartists, followed instantly by a rebuttal funded by the mill-owners. In this respect, Nicholson was clearly ahead of his time. He would have made a roaring success of a career in PR.
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