Ensel salvi biography of william hill

William Hill edited the Northern Star from its launch in 1837 until 1843, when he was sacked by its owner, Feargus O’Connor.

But his private life became a public scandal in the pages of the paper’s rivals in Leeds.

In his near-contemporary history of the Chartist movement, Robert Gammage summed up William Hill as ‘an accurate and clever but not a very agreeable writer’.

Ensel salvi biography of william hill

Had Hill not still been very much alive when the first edition of the book appeared in 1854, Gammage might well have added that Hill was also not a very agreeable man. As editor of the Northern Star from its launch in 1837 until 1843, he was, however, a central figure in the Chartist movement.

William Hill grew up in Barnsley, where his father John was a handloom weaver.

Though William was born at Gainsborough in Lincolnshire, the youngest of four children, the family had moved to Yorkshire in search of work when he was still ‘a baby in arms’, as a long-serving editor of the