Benefactor
Whether "the Publique Faith of the Nation" ever made good his money to Harrison we do not know, but he probably cared little whether his loan of cash, horse, and arms was repaid or not. He was in the lifelong habit of giving, and he gave in many directions. Leeds in his time was a growing place; it had many poor folk in it, and it was not much provided with hospitals for the sick and infirm amongst them. In 1643 one Jenkinson founded a hospital at Mill Hill: Harrison supplemented this, ten years later, with a home for indigent poor. But this was one of his last public benefactions; he had begun them or made his first notable addition to them in 1624, when he built a new home for the Grammar School first founded by William Sheafield. At that date the school was being taught in a building called New Chapel in Lady Lane: Harrison built a new home for it on a piece of his own property, on a site somewhere between the top of Briggate and Vicar Lane. That he was regarded within a short time after his death as a munificent patron of the Grammar School is proved by the fact that Ralph Thoresby speaks of him, in connection with it, as "the Grand Benefactor ... never to be mentioned without Honour, the ever famous John Harrison". A house at the school was named after him.
Read more about this topic: John Harrison (Leeds)
Famous quotes containing the word benefactor:
“I shall be a benefactor if I conquer some realms from the night, if I report to the gazettes anything transpiring about us at that season worthy of their attention,—if I can show men that there is some beauty awake while they are asleep,—if I add to the domains of poetry.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Let us not deny it up and down. Providence has a wild, rough, incalculable road to its end, and it is of no use to try to whitewash its huge, mixed instrumentalities, or to dress up that terrific benefactor in a clean shirt and white neckcloth of a student of divinity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“He who gives himself entirely to his fellow-men appears to them useless and selfish; but he who gives himself partially to them is pronounced a benefactor and philanthropist.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)