he picked up. From here he began to write his own verses and poems before finally committing them to paper and, ultimately, to print. Marriage and family In 1852 he walked to London in his search for work and found employment there on the railways. It was here that he met his bride-to-be, his landlady Sarah Ann Fendley. They returned North and he found a job at Choppington, and then Pembroke Colliery, near Sunderland. Joseph Skipsey married Sarah, from Watlington, Norfolk, in December 1868 and she bore him five sons (including Joseph b. 1869 and Cuthbert b. 1872) and three daughters (including Elizabeth Ann b. 1860 and who was living at Harraton at the time of her father’s death). The three named children were the only ones to outlive their father. Later life His first volume of his own works was published in Durham in 1858, a copy of which came to the attention of James Thomas Clephan, at that time editor of the Gateshead Observer, a relatively new newspaper and the first in Gateshead. When told by Skipsey of his dire situation, Clephan obtained a job for him at Hawks, Crawshay and Sons ironworks in Gateshead. Following the death of one of his children, Skipsey moved to Newcastle in 1863 and became an assistant Librarian at the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle upon Tyne for a short time. The job did not seem to suit him and, as the pay was poor, he returned to working in the pits, eventually settling at Backworth, where he remained until 1882. On the death of three of his children within the space of a month, he wrote in the family bible: "On October 16th my son Cuthbert died in his fourteenth year, on the 24th of the same month so did my little Emma 1 year and 9 months old and the 30th our dear Harriet in her seventh year leaving us with our Elizabeth Ann Pringle only. The children died from scarletina. Let me say that three more lovely and affectionate children were never born in this world. Their loss has bowed their parents head down to dust of our reflections and their deaths have enlikened the belief that the dear jewels were wrongly treated. Joseph Skipsey. March 8th 1869. Also William - he was killed by a waggon on the Tyne Main Way near Gateshead on 7 September 1860."