group in which Edward Long Fox, William Coates and the banker Joseph Edye were prominent. He also joined the Catch Club of the loyalist Henry Harington. 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. He married in 1798, and spent time at Shirehampton. In March Wordsworth announced, by letter from Alfoxton House, his long poem The Recluse to Losh and James Webbe Tobin. Losh found Shirehampton bad for his health, however, and moved back to Bath. There he and Wordsworth dined as guests of Richard Warner in July 1798. E. P. Thompson concluded from Losh's diary at this period that he was quitting radical politics, discouraged. Newcastle radical and Whig Losh moved back north, to Newcastle upon Tyne, in 1799. The match had caused a cooling of his relationship with his uncle Joseph Liddell, who up to this point had given him generous support. First staying with his brother George, he then lodged with Thomas Bigge. In time he bought a house in Jesmond, The Grove, where he and Cecilia his wife settled. Losh supported Bigge in producing The Oeconomist, Or, Englishman's Magazine, an anti-war monthly. In 1802 he backed the creation of the New Institution for Permanent Lectures, for which Bigge was pushing. In activist causes he was an ally also of William Turner, Unitarian minister with a congregation in Hanover Square. In Newcastle, Losh prospered both as a lawyer, and in business; comments in his diaries from 1812 onwards suggest profitable legal work in bankruptcy and arbitration. He was partner in the family alkali works; a shareholder in a brewery in Hexham; and held partnerships in coal mines. He was left land by both his brother-in-law and an uncle. 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. His "very moderate" Whig positions, wide contacts and sympathy with certain workers' grievances led Losh to be involved in a number of industrial disputes. In the keelmen's strike of 1819 he came out on their side. In 1832 he was appointed recorder of Newcastle; the position was open to him as a Unitarian only after the legislation of 1828, as was remarked at the time. On the previous occasion, in