John Horsefield

James Cash, a journalist, amateur botanist and the first chairman of the Manchester Cryptogamic Society,[3] says Horsefield received some education for a short time when he started work: the weaver for whom he served charged two shillings (10p) per calendar quarter to instruct his young employees in reading.

Anne Secord, a historian of 19th century popular science, quotes an attendee of the society, Thomas Heywood, who describes it as being "without any regular place of meeting, without funds, without books and without rules; a sort of members, but no body, having only one object in common – their love of plants".

[10] The Whitefield society arranged for funds to be pooled to buy books for communal use, enabling the 16-year-old Horsefield to read James Lee's 1760 work, An Introduction to Botany.

It provided information on Linnaean taxonomy as it applied to plants, and from it Horsefield copied details onto a piece of paper he pinned to his loom to commit them to memory while he was working.

There is some evidence to suggest that in the period of social unrest that followed the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and which saw the introduction of the Seditious Meetings Act, gatherings of botanists may have been used as cover for the activities of politically radical reformers such as Samuel Bamford.

[6] Horsefield, who witnessed the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, had such sympathies and recounted that With politics I had little to do practically; but in 1816, after the war was over – an event which I had been taught to look to for the restoration of good trade – finding ourselves disappointed, that year of dear provisions and no work turned all my neighbours, as well as myself, into a kind of politicians.

[6] He attended the Manchester Mechanics' Institute,[18] supported the idea of self-education and, according to Harvey Taylor, a historian, "typified the Lancashire autodidactic seeker after self-culture.

"[19] Having obtained his own garden in 1819, he promoted his interests by founding the Prestwich Botanical Society on 11 September 1820,[20] presiding over meetings in a pub where plant specimens were brought together for identification and where those who could not read were taught the science of botany by those who could.

In 1830 he succeeded Hobson as president of an organisation with a wider geographical base and which held Sunday meetings in pubs for the purpose of educating the amateur artisan botanists.

[22] He noted how the procedure for imparting the knowledge had to be changed such that, certainly by the 1850s and possibly as early as 1830, the president's role was to select specimens from those brought to the meeting and identify them to the attendees, who sat in silence.

But, from the noise and confusion caused by each person telling his neighbour the name of the specimen, some being unable to pronounce it, some garbling it, and all talking at once, we have been constrained of late years to adopt another method.

[22] But he did not produce any written works directly relating to botany, and in 1847 turned down the opportunity to write on the flora of Manchester with Buxton, whom he met in 1826 while they were independently studying plant life on Kersal Moor and whom he introduced to the Prestwich Botanical Society.

[1] He remained a gingham weaver and during his lifetime the sole financial benefit from his interests came when he raised a new hybrid lily[32] – Tigridia conchiflora – in his garden and sold it to a Manchester nurseryman, Thomas Watkinson, for £10.

After his death on 6 March 1854, Esther, with whom he had six sons and five daughters,[e] received £37 from this fund, and he left 37 bulbs of one of the earliest hybrid daffodils to be cultivated, Narcissus horsefieldii, that raised another £2 11s (£2.55).

Where'er Botanic science could be learn'd New links disclosed – new species yet discerned Where'er by wood or lane or heath or hill God op'ed the book that taught Botanic skill There HORSEFIELD's foot from dawn to eve was seen to learn – to teach – to be what he has been, An honour to the soil that gave him birth: Oh, may that spirit for whose loss we grieve Our God accept – our Saviour Lord receive.