Allonby Characters - 2

Moore Kitchen
Moore was brought up in the Reading Room house at Allonby. He was not always dressed as smartly as he is in this photograph. He was a coal miner and walked from Allonby to work at Birkby Pit every day. Even if he took the footpath over the fields this would have meant an eight-mile (13km) round trip - six days a week.

He was an amateur taxidermist with a particular fascination for seabirds. On his walk to work, he would often find dead specimens along the way. He took them home for mounting and, eventually, his collection was put on display in the Reading Room.

Captain Joseph Osborn

Captain Osborn in his retirement, at home in Osborn House,
Browtop, Workington.

Joseph Osborn was born at Allonby in 1823, the son of a yeoman farmer and one of seven children. He first went to sea in 1840 aboard the ‘Concorde’ sailing, out of Maryport, to the West Indies and South Africa. In 1846 he married Jane Roper; they had at least ten children. By 1850, he had moved to Liverpool and was making long voyages to Canada, Cuba and South America.

Between 1853 and 1875, Joseph kept a record of all his voyages, first as a Mate and then as Master. These were purchased by the National Maritime Museum in 1980 and are now available for research there. As well as containing the standard information one would expect, (bearings, weather details, journal entries, etc), the logs also contain nearly one hundred drawings and sketches in ink, pencil and watercolour of various ships, coastline profiles, and sea-birds.

Capt Osborn was at sea for over thirty-five years. He traded out of Liverpool to Cape Town , Calcutta , Amoy , Singapore , Hong Kong , Foochow , Demerara, Bombay , Madras , Sydney , and many other ports around the world. For eight months he was on Government Service, carrying supplies from Bombay to Abyssinia for the war that Britain had declared, in 1855, on the "King-of-Kings" Theodore.

Joseph Osborn outside his home in Liverpool

His longest period of service was the twelve years he spent on the barque 'Recorder'. His last command was the ‘Jane Sprott’ on which he made several voyages to Australia . He retired from the sea in 1875 due to failing eyesight and spent the next eight years overseeing the building and fitting of Liverpool ships for the firm of Fisher and Sprott. He retired altogether in 1883, at 60 and died in 1908, aged 85.

The 'Jane Sprott'