James Losh
[13] The Friends to the Liberty of the Press was set up on 18 December 1792, and in March 1793 Losh supported its dinner for Frend, who had been expelled as Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, for a pamphlet Peace and Union.
[15][18] When Joseph Priestley emigrated to America that year, Losh, with Frend, Higgins and Tweddell presented him with an inkstand.
[19] At this period he also involved himself with the investigations of Edward Christian into the circumstances of the Mutiny on the Bounty, assisting with interviews of mutineers who been brought back to the United Kingdom.
[20][21] Losh belonged to the London radical circle of William Godwin:[12] they are thought to have met on 3 February 1794 at a dinner given by James Mackintosh.
[24] Losh has been suggested as the source of Wordsworth's introduction, but Gill writes that more likely it was William Mathews, his closest college friend.
[28] In it, Constant supported the Directoire by now ruling France, and argued that the aims of the First Coalition attacking it went well beyond restoring the House of Bourbon.
[30] Losh attended a Bath anti-war meeting of 1 February 1797, of a group in which Edward Long Fox, William Coates and the banker Joseph Edye were prominent.
[31] Losh in 1796 and 1797 paid visits to the north-east, where a family alkali business was being set up at Scotswood-on-Tyne in partnership with Archibald Cochrane, 9th Earl of Dundonald.
[11][33] In March Wordsworth announced, by letter from Alfoxton House, his long poem The Recluse to Losh and James Webbe Tobin.
[40] In Newcastle, Losh prospered both as a lawyer, and in business;[41] comments in his diaries from 1812 onwards suggest profitable legal work in bankruptcy and arbitration.
[42] He was partner in the family alkali works; a shareholder in a brewery in Hexham; and held partnerships in coal mines.
[43] The stoppage of the local bank Sanders, Burdon & Co. on 30 June 1803 did cause him losses, which he sustained by selling coal and brewing interests.
[44] His "very moderate" Whig positions, wide contacts and sympathy with certain workers' grievances led Losh to be involved in a number of industrial disputes.
[50] Losh spoke at meetings that supported the Anti-Slavery Society's petitions of the mid 1820s, with John Ralph Fenwick M.D.
[55] In a diary entry for 1814 he dismissed the educational reformers Andrew Bell and Joseph Lancaster as "very useful but very vain men", anticipated in essentials by Pestalozzi.
[56] At the end of his life, in 1832, Losh criticised publicly his fellow coal owners for a short-sighted view, in leaving pitmen illiterate.
[59] In 1824 there was opposition to the idea from Armorer Donkin and William Armstrong, who proposed a canal; but Losh carried the day.
[60] Involved as chairman and shareholder in the company from 1825, he led a deputation to London in May 1833 that obtained an exchequer loan to finance ongoing work.
The Society had a bust of Losh made, by David Dunbar the younger;[62][63] and in 1836, after his death, a statue by John Graham Lough.
