Gordon Bottomley

• Name — Gordon Bottomley • Born — 20 February 1874 • Birthplace — Keighley, West Riding of Yorkshire, England • Died — 25 August 1948 • Place of death — Silverdale, England • Resting Place — St. Fillan's Chapel, Dundurn, Perthshire • Spouse — Emily Burton • Occupation — clerk, playwright, poet

Bottomley was born in Keighley, West Riding of Yorkshire on 20 February 1874, the only child of Maria and Alfred Bottomley. He was educated firstly at home by his mother and then at the local grammar school. Aged seven, Bottomley contracted a tubercular illness that would affect him for the rest of his life. As a result, he was invalided for long periods of time and was unable to travel widely or live in a town. Bottomley became a junior clerk at the Craven Bank in Keighley at the age of 16. However, after an illness in 1891, he was transferred to the Bradford branch. Here he first visited the theatre and saw the Oscar Wilde play Lady Windermere's Fan. This stimulated his interest in plays. Following another bout of illness in 1892 Bottomley left the bank and moved to Cartmel, Lancashire to live a life of passionate intense meditation and contemplation and began writing poetry. It was here in 1895 that he met Emily Burton. They married in 1905. The couple lived from 1914 in Silverdale, near Carnforth until their deaths. In the 1920s he was president of the Village Drama Society. In 1944 he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters at the University of Leeds. Bottomley died in 1948, outliving his wife by less than a year. Their ashes are interred at St. Fillan's Chapel at the base of Dundurn, Perthshire.

Among the most notable of his friendships was that with the artist Paul Nash. The two men were brought together in 1910 by Nash’s love of poetry and Bottomley’s extensive knowledge of painting. Bottomley encouraged the young artist and in exchange, Nash made several designs for Bottomley’s plays that he exhibited or used as illustrations. Despite increasingly divergent tastes in art, their friendship survived and a prolific lifelong correspondence between the two men was published in 1955. Bottomley studied the work of artists and was a dedicated collector. He bought artworks when he could afford to and his friends also gave him their art in gratitude for his support and friendship. In the 1940s Bottomley and his wife Emily gave their personal art collection of six hundred paintings, prints and drawings to the Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery in Carlisle, Cumberland. The bequest included a nationally important collection of works by the Pre-Raphaelites including pictures by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, Arthur Hughes, Ford Madox Brown, Elizabeth Siddal and Simeon Solomon. The collection also included work from artists of other genres including those of Stanley Spencer, Samuel Palmer, Albert Moore, Frederic, Lord Leighton, Henri Fantin-Latour, Lucien Pissarro, William Nicholson, Walter Crane, Charles Conder, Jessie Marion King, William Morris's daughter May Morris, William Rothenstein, Charles Ricketts and of course Paul Nash. About 150 of these works were displayed in a temporary exhibition at Tullie House, "Pre-Raphaelites and Beyond: the Emily and Gordon Bottomley Bequest", from 7 July to 16 September 2001.

• The Collected Poems of Isaac Rosenberg (1937) edited with Denys Harding, Schocken Books, New York