of the Institute of Electrical Engineers, or, as it was then known, the Society of Telegraph Engineers and Electricians, from its foundation, becoming president of that society in 1886–7; his presidential address has been republished in pamphlet form, London, 1887.
Bright died suddenly of heart disease on 3 May 1888, at his brother's residence at Abbey Wood, Kent, and was buried in Chiswick churchyard. A marble bust of Bright was executed by Count Gleichen (Prince Victor of Hohenlohe-Langenburg), and exhibited at the Royal Academy; plaster duplicates are now in the possession of the Institutions of Civil Engineers and of the Electrical Engineers. He married in 1853 Hannah Barrick, daughter of John Taylor of Kingston-upon-Hull.
[Life Story of Sir Charles Tilston Bright, by his brother, E. B. Bright, Westminster (1899); Robinson's Reg. Merchant Taylors' School, ii. 277; obituary notices in Proc. Inst. Civil Engrs. vol. xciii., and Electrical Review, 11 May 1888.]
BRIGHT, JOHN (1811–1889), orator and statesman, was born at Greenbank, Rochdale, Lancashire, on 16 Nov. 1811. He was the second child of Jacob Bright of Rochdale by Martha Wood, the daughter of a tradesman in Bolt on-le-Moors, Lancashire. His father's family had been settled in the seventeenth century upon a farm near Lyneham, Wiltshire, three miles south-west of Wootton Bassett. In 1714 Abraham Bright of Lyneham married Martha Jacobs, who is said, without foundation, to have been a Jewess. They migrated to Coventry. Their great-grandson, Jacob Bright, was born at Coventry in 1775, the youngest of eight children of William Bright by his wife, Mary Goode. In 1802 Jacob Bright moved to Rochdale. He was at this time bookkeeper to John and William Holmes, who soon afterwards built a cotton-spinning factory, known as the Hanging Road Factory, at Rochdale. His first wife was Sophia Holmes, his employers' sister. She died 10 May 1806. His marriage to Martha Wood took place on 21 July 1809. The issue of this second marriage was seven sons and four daughters. The first child, William, born in 1810, died in 1814. From this date John Bright, the second child, was the head of the family. John Bright's mother died on 18 June 1830, aged 41. Jacob Bright, his father, married a third wife in 1845, Mary Metcalf, daughter of a farmer of Wensleydale, Yorkshire. By her he had no issue. He died on 7 July 1851, aged 76.
In 1809 Jacob Bright took an old mill and house called Greenbank on Cronkeyshaw Common, Rochdale, and it was here that John Bright was born. He was at first sent to the school of William Littlewood of Townhead, Rochdale. In 1822 he was removed to the Friends' school at Ackworth near Pontefract, where his father had been educated. The family had been quakers since the early days of that sect, and the knowledge that one of his ancestors, John Gratton, had been a sufferer under the penal laws of Charles II stamped a lasting impression upon John Bright's mind. In 1823 he was removed to a school kept by William Simpson at York, and thence in 1825 to a school at Newton near Clitheroe, Lancashire. Here he first acquired his love of fishing, for which he found opportunity in the {SIC|neighburing}} river Hodder. He first became interested in politics during the excitement of the Preston election of 1830, when Orator Hunt [see Hunt, Henry] was returned against Edward George Geoffrey Smith Stanley (afterwards fourteenth Earl of Derby) [q. v.] He was at this time and throughout the struggle for the reform bill of 1832 accustomed to read the newspapers aloud to his father and family in the evenings. In 1830 he paid his first visit to London by coach. The journey, as he afterwards narrated in a speech at Rochdale illustrative of the advance of material progress, cost 3l. 10s., and occupied twenty-one hours. At this time he was taking part in the management of his father's mills, now increased to two, at Rochdale. His first public speech was delivered at Catley Lane Head, near Rochdale, in 1830, in support of the temperance movement. His second and third followed not long afterwards on the same theme, at the old Wesleyan chapel, Rochdale, and at Whitworth. These speeches were all committed to memory, and in the course of the third the speaker broke down. In consequence of this failure, and at the suggestion in 1832 of the Rev. John Aldis, a baptist minister then stationed at Manchester, he abandoned speaking by rote. Thenceforth he spoke as a rule from carefully prepared notes, the opening sentences and the peroration alone being written out.
During this period of his life Bright joined in the current amusements of his contemporaries. Down to 1833 he was an active member of the Rochdale cricket club. He does not appear to have been a first-rate player, his average for that year being six runs only. His real interest was in public life. In April 1833 he assisted in founding the Rochdale Literary and Philosophical Society, and presided at its first meeting. The political opinions formed during these
