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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
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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.
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.
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Joseph Osborn outside his home in Liverpool |
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The 'Jane Sprott' |
Excellent pages, thanks, if you have no objections I would like to add this page section to the https://maryporthistory.uk are you from Allonby?
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