[2] John Wareing Bardsley, his son, wrote in 1901 of his parents as "holding firmly to the old Evangelical school with a tendency to Puritan asceticism".
[5] Under Bull's influence, he took part in the Ten Hours Bill agitation and factory movement, with Richard Oastler.
[7] Records show another candidate, John Butterfield, ordained deacon at the same time, who nominally was to be the assistant.
Bardsley became a family friend, regularly bringing his wife Sarah to Haworth Parsonage for tea on Saturday afternoons.
[16] Caught up in a ramifying dispute involving William Scoresby, the vicar of Bradford, Bardsley resigned.
[10] He had had expectations of Bull's position at St James's, the new church built by Wood; but Scoresby's efforts to keep Bradford's churches financed by a 50% levy on surplice fees saw Bull and Bardsley leave the area, while Wood closed St James's.
[19][20] In 1841 Bardsley was one of the group of northern clerics agitating for factory reform, that included John Compton Boddington at Horton cum Bradford, William Morgan (1782–1858) in Bradford,[21] and William Margetson Heald the younger at Birstall.
[24] He joined Hugh Stowell and Henry Walter McGrath in the Manchester area anti-Catholic campaigns of the 1850s.