John Bradbury was a famous botanist; he didn’t live on Cocker Hill but was educated there by John Taylor, also a botonist, at the Cocker Hill Academy.
John Bradury was born in 1768 and began his career in the cotton mills. In 1809 he was sent to America to explore and to survey the potential of the colonies to supply cotton. Returning to England in 1812, Bradbury spent five years writing Travels in the Interior of America in the years 1809, 1810 and 1811 which gave apparently thrilling accounts of his adventures and life amongst the Indians. I found an online copy of Travels in the Interior of America on google docs. Not read it yet though!
Fed up with England he went back to America again. He was warmly welcomed back and he got a job as curator and superintendent of the botanical gardens of St Louis giving his family good prospects in a new home. In St Louis, Bradbury was often visited by Indian Chiefs whom he had met in the wild. Maybe this prompted his desire to revisit their haunts and in 1825 he undertook an expedition which proved to be his last. Whether he died through natural causes or by accident is unknown.
His grave is in Amercia.
John Bradbury has a Blue Plaque to commemorate his life at the entrance to Stalybridge Country Park.
Further information can be found on Tameside MBC’s website –http://www.tameside.gov.uk/blueplaque/johnbradbury
This is very interesting. There was another botanist who went to America at about the same time. He was from Ashton and had a very unhappy end. I enclose an extract from my next book.
They walked up the hill on the new road out of town. The sky turned grey. Yellow flecks lingered on the horizon of the hill. They walked through the park with the same name as the library past the faded crumbled ruins of the mansion that had once hosted paintings from around the world and the faint nostalgic pencil drawings of a young man with a passion for the arts and architecture in the manner of John Ruskin, his inspiration. Whispers of Victorian beauty rose from the ground and the profile of a beautiful woman with golden hair in a bun sitting at the window looking toward the town and sighing for its welfare. They walked round to the back of the football club and off the pathway into the dale of shrubbery and laurel bushes mixed with hawthorn. She walked down to the stream and stood amongst the greenery. She turned to him.
‘We are all alone here. We could be deep in the English countryside. There is not a sight or sound of house or home, people or things. It’s beautiful here.’ She stood with her back leaning on the brown bark of an old beech tree and looked to the sky through the greenery as she recited.
‘O bury me not in a churchyard grave
But down in some woodland dell’
She paused and reflected.
‘I don’t know that poem,’ he said.
‘I found it in a book in the library. It’s by a man called William Bedford who lived in the next town.’
‘I’ve never heard of him.’
‘Nobody has except you and I. He is special to us. He was a poet and a socialist like you! He was also a botanist. He couldn’t make his way in this country so went to America where he became broke and killed himself with laudanum.’
‘How sad. Did they bury him in a woodland dell?’
‘I don’t know, but strangely they found his body in the woods and a letter describing his own slow death as it happened.’
A breath of wind trembled amongst the leaves of the trees like a sigh. It whispered cool and calm and fell at their feet.
‘O bury me not in a churchyard grave
But down in some woodland dell
And over my head let the wild flowers wave
The flowers I love so well
Let the primrose pale, that scents the gale
And the daisy there be found
Let the harebell blue, and the violet too,
And the campion, blossom round.’
There is more information on John Bradbury on Wikipedia. It says he was Scottish but born near Stalybridge ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bradbury_%28naturalist%29