Tom Poole was born in Nether Stowey in 1766, the eldest son of a tanner. He was self-taught, his father refusing to allow him to go to university and with a voracious appetite for learning, amassing a library of books that impressed many eminent men of the day.

He was a committed radical and very often offended the more conventional inhabitants of Stowey.

He was the poet Coleridge’s most faithful friend. From the moment the two men first met in 1794, Poole saw the greatness in Coleridge and helped and supported him. Coleridge came to live in Nether Stowey to be near Poole, and it was here that Coleridge and Wordsworth wrote ‘Lyrical Ballads’, the foundation of the Romantic movement.

It is a measure of his quality that Poole enjoyed lifelong friendships with many other influential men of the time, including Humphry Davy, the Wedgwood brothers, the writers Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt and Robert Southey, and Andrew Crosse, the scientist from Broomfield.

The Women’s March

In London, Poole became acquainted with Coleridge’s friend the civil servant John Rickman, and at his suggestion carried out statistical work intended to help implement the Poor Laws. In 1804 he was employed by Rickman, offering his time free, making an abstract of the thousands of returns ordered by the House of Commons from parish overseers.

From the library’s point of view, the best thing that Tom Poole ever did was to provide its building! In 1812-13 he funded and built the village school on land in the tanyard donated by him. This was only the second free school in the country and could offer education for up to 200 children. This large, light, airy building houses our library today, and the library is named after Tom Poole in grateful tribute to him.

Tom Poole died of pleurisy in 1837, at the age of seventy-two. At his funeral, his relative Mr Sandford said: ‘The charm of his character, the true secret of his influence, lay in his sympathy with his fellow men … There is not a rich man among you who did not prize and use his friendship. There is not a poor man within miles of his residence, who in his difficulties, his sorrows, or his wrongs, could not look to him for advice, condolence, or redress.’

His memory lives on in the village. Ask Stowey residents to name the most important person in the history of the village, and they will say: ‘Thomas Poole’.

The Acquaintances of Tom Poole

Download

Thomas Poole Booklet
from the Friends of Coleridge
by Terence Sackett

Politics, Human Rights, and Slavery.

Tom Poole’s concern for the poor was part of his wider commitment to radical politics and human rights.

The local lawyer, Symes, saw Tom Poole carrying Tom Paine’s revolutionary book The Rights of Man (which among other things helped foment the American Revolution and independence from Britain). Symes was so angry that he snatched the book from Poole and tore it apart. Later, in 1802 Poole met Tom Paine in Paris, describing him as ‘an original, amusing fellow’. In 1803 Poole tried to stop Paine being burnt in effigy in the village.

Like Tom Paine, Poole supported the French Revolution, seeing it as a clarion call for liberty and freedom for all men. He was also a passionate campaigner against slavery. Indeed, he wrote a deeply-felt anti-slavery article for Coleridge’s radical newspaper The Watchman. In it, he tells of a dream future in which he travels to the West Indies and sees a statue to a liberator of the slaves, ‘that heroic avenger who has given liberty to our hemisphere’. The liberator ‘came like a storm which broods over a guilty city ere it blasts it by its thunders. He was the exterminating angel whom the God of justice armed with his sword. He has demonstrated, that sooner or later cruelty shall be punished; and that Providence has instruments in reserve, whom it lets loose on the earth to re-establish that equality which iniquity and ambition may destroy’.

Poole ends his article in the hope that ‘every good man’ will campaign for the abolition of the slave trade.