Hinckley

Hinckley, Leicestershire

Written in 1925:

Hinckley claims to have been the first seat of the hosiery manufacture in the county - for William Iliffe set up a frame here in 164o - and hosiery is still the staple trade of a busy little town with about fourteen thousand inhabitants. But to me its chief interest is its association with John Nichols, the county historian, through his wife, Martha Green, whom he married in 1778. Nichols put Leicestershire under a debt of gratitude which will be acknowledged even more fully as the years pass by. He is Leicestershire's County Historian in the sense that there will never be another like him. He did not indeed write with his own hand those eight huge folios, the first two of which appeared in 1795 and the last in 1815, twelve years after he had nominally retired from business. Nichols was a busy printer and publisher, and he had many irons in the fire beside his Leicestershire venture. Well, indeed, for him that he had, for at one time he had already lost £5000 by it. And yet he persevered, because his honour was engaged. He encouraged his innumerable correspondents to complete their allotted tasks of copying charters and transcribing from records, books and monuments; he drew freely upon the services of clerics and antiquaries in all ranks of life; noble¬men were coaxed by him into sending copies of their family pedigrees; and .he must have employed copyists by the score all over the county. The labour was simply prodigious, nor does Nichols appear to have "edited" with a blue pencil the masses of copy which poured in upon him. Whole pages are inserted which make one wonder why Nichols thought it worth while to print them. But his method was to throw it all in; he was no respecter of persons so long as they had the slightest connection with Leicestershire. Yet those who know their Nichols best would not desire a page of it away. After all, it is always easy to skip, and if in some respects these eight great volumes are a vast dustbin, what an immortal dustbin it is and what prizes there are for the busy chiffonier !

John Nichols was a learned printer, apprenticed to another learned printer, William Bowyer, when he was a boy of twelve, and himself the father of a learned son who carried on the family tradition. He was the friend of Stukeley and Gough and Ducarel and all the learned antiquaries of his day; many an erudite bishop used to find his way to Red Lion Court to chat with Nichols in his shop; he knew Cradock and Johnson, with whom he doubtless talked of Johnson's early days at Market Bosworth; and he achieved one of the great ambitions of his life when in 1804 he was elected Master of the Skinners' Company. In 1808 he suffered a crushing misfortune, for his business premises in Red Lion Court were destroyed by fire, and he lost £10,000 because the building and his stock were grievously under-insured. But he did not allow his reverses to daunt him, and when he died in 1826 at the age of eighty¬one many of his old friends wrote both eulogies and elegies upon his brave career. John Nichols, in a word, was a splendid type of publisher and book man with a genuine love of scholarship, a veneration for learning and antiquity and a superb readiness to cast his bread upon the waters in fine faith and splendid assurance. The eight volumes of his "Leicestershire" are a monument to his memory as imperishable as the Pyramids.

From Highways and Byways in Leicestershire by Frederick L Griggs, pub.1926, Macmillan and Co.

County of Leicestershire
Family Places in Leicestershire
Church Walk
A Yard at Hinckley

The County of Leicestershire

Pictures from Highways and Byways in Leicestershire by Frederick L Griggs

(click on thumbnail to display)