John Taylor (Geordie songwriter)


John Taylor was a 19th-century Dunston born songwriter and poet and an accomplished artist and engraver.

Early life

John Taylor was born in 1840 in Dunston, Gateshead,.
John Taylor began adult life as a clerk at the Newcastle Central Station
After several years he became impatient at not gaining, in his mind, sufficient promotion, and left to "better himself" as a traveller for a brewery.
Like many other short cuts this, in time, he found had its drawbacks, and possibly the slower progress of the railway might in the end have been better.
He was a prolific writer of songs and many won prizes in the competitions run by both John W Chater and Ward's Almanacs.
It was to him Joe Wilson allegedly said whilst talking in the Adelaide Hotel, "Jack, ye can write a sang aboot as weel as me, but yor sangs divn't sing, an' mine dis."
He was also a first class and versatile artist, as was his predecessor Edward Corvan, and an accomplished wood-engraver providing the plates used for the pictures of William Purvis, Captain Benjamin Starky, Joseph Philip Robson, and Geordy Black, the character played by Rowland Harrison, in Thomas Allan’s Illustrated Edition of Tyneside Songs and Readings of 1891.

Family

His father was an employee of the North Eastern Railway Company and was selected by the patentee to operate the machine which printed the first standard railway ticket

Death

John Taylor died on 24 September 1891, aged 51, and was buried in Dunston Churchyard.

Works

These include: