The practice of reporting was not then universally popular, and Byrom occasionally met with a humorous adventure. “Orator” Henley, whom Pope has immortalised—
The great restorer of the good old stage,
Preacher at once and zany of his age.
objected to his sermons being reported on the ground that “he might have his discourses printed against him.” He threatened to turn out the “chiel amang them takin notes,” and when Byrom would not desist, even when the “manager” offered to return the shilling he had paid for admission, “went on so much faster than usual that he took the only way to stop me,” thus effectually getting rid of the unwelcome attentions of the inexorable shorthand writer. On another occasion when Byrom exercised his talents in assisting the High Church party to oppose the application to Parliament for an Act to establish a workhouse in Manchester for the employment of the poor, a scene occurred which is best related in his own words. A subscription had been raised in the town to defray the cost of erection, and it was proposed that the house should be managed by twenty-four guardians, eight to be nominated by the Whigs, eight by the Tories, and the remainder by the Presbyterians. Dr. Peploe, the Whig Bishop of Chester, who was also warden of Manchester, undertook to present the Bill for forming the guardians into a corporation; but the Tory and High Church party offered a strong opposition to the scheme. Through some delay the measure was defeated in the first session of Parliament, and on being reintroduced in the succeeding year it was opposed by Sir Oswald Mosley, of Ancoats, who, fearing that his interests as lord of the manor might be prejudiced, had, in the meantime, caused a large building to be erected for the purpose near Miller’s Lane—the present Miller Street. Byrom, whom the Whigs denounced as an incendiary and threatened to pull to pieces, was very active in supporting the Tory opposition, and gave evidence before the Commissioners. He appears on the same occasion to have occupied himself in taking shorthand notes, when the scene occurred which he thus describes in a letter dated February 20, 1731:—
I must tell you to get another petition ready to offer to the House that a body may write shorthand in the cause of one’s country. I have ventured to stand the threats of a complaint and the danger of a committee in defence of that natural right of exercising the noble art which I have acquired. At the last committee but one I was threatened by a Scotch knight (Sir James Campbell) whom I provoked to execution of his said valiant threatening yesterday, for in the midst of Serjt. Darnel’s reply out he comes at the instigation of one Brereton, and suddenly and loud pronounces these terrible words—To oadur, oardur, I speak to oadur; I desair to knaw if any mon shil wrait here that is nut a clairk or solicitur? and an universal silence ensuing I was going to speak for myself but a member of my acquaintance winking that I had better not, I repressed my rising indignation. Nobody said anything to the knight’s query, only Sir Ed. Stanley (M.P. for the county of Lancaster, and afterwards eleventh Earl of Derby) hinted that there was no great harm done; and my friend the serjeant himself said that the gentleman was famous for writing shorthand, and for his part he was under no apprehension by his taking down anything he should say, and so returned to his matter; and the apparition of danger vanished; but if these attacks upon the liberty of shorthand men go on I must have a petition from all countries where our disciples dwell, and Manchester must lead ’em on.
On the 12th May, 1740, Byrom’s elder brother, Edward, the “Brother Byrom at the Cross,” died unmarried, when John, the poet and stenographer, became the head of the family and owner of the estates at Kersall.
Mr. Espinasse, in the first of his admirable series of “Lancashire Worthies,” says that Byrom’s biographers “do not give the precise date of the death of his elder brother, Edward.” The information is supplied in the stenographer’s “Shorthand Journal,” in which occurs this entry:—
May 12th (1740).—Edward Byrom, of Kersall, elder son of Edward Byrom, of Manchester, and Dorothy, daughter of John Allen, of Redivales, near Bury. He was born March 4th, 1686, and died May 12th, 1740.
By his acquisition of the family estates at Kersall, Byrom was placed in a position of comfortable independence, and able to relax from the drudgery of teaching shorthand, though it was some time before he could be induced to withdraw from London and its pleasant society to settle down in quiet retirement in Manchester. Two years after this addition to his fortune he received the welcome intelligence from Lord Morton that the crowning act of all his anxieties—the Act securing to him for a period of twenty-one years the exclusive right of publishing his “Art and Method of Shorthand”—the nation’s testimony to the merits of the system—had passed the House of Lords and received the royal assent; an Act which, singular to say, appears to have been obtained without any cost.