The Importance of Teachers

In the UK, Wednesday 17 June 2026 was National Thank a Teacher Day. It is a day to celebrate not only teachers, but also the wider school community of support staff, early years practitioners and college staff who help shape young lives.

Most of us who have experienced schooling can probably think of a teacher we would like to thank. Perhaps it was an inspirational teacher who took us under their wing, recognised that we needed help, or spotted a talent before we recognised it ourselves. Perhaps it was someone whose teaching style opened up a subject in a new way. Literature, film and television return to this theme again and again. From Goodbye, Mr Chips and To Sir, with Love to Dead Poets Society, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie to The History Boys, Mr Holland’s Opus and more recent television such as Abbott Elementary, fictional teachers have often been used to show how one adult can change the direction of a young life.

One such little-known teacher was recently honoured at Cartmel Priory: the Reverend William Taylor, remembered for the inspiration he gave to a young William Wordsworth.

Wordsworth was born in 1770 in Cockermouth, Cumbria. His birthplace, now Wordsworth House and Garden, is in the care of the National Trust and is presented as it would have been when the Wordsworth family lived there in the 1770s. As a boy, Wordsworth was sent to Hawkshead Grammar School, where he studied from 1779 to 1787. It was there that he encountered one of the most important teachers of his youth.

William Taylor was born in 1754 at Outerthwaite, near Allithwaite and Flookburgh, on the Cartmel Peninsula just north of the wide expanse of Morecambe Bay and its sands. From these local beginnings Taylor went on to Hawkshead Grammar School and then to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he became a Fellow. He later returned to Cumbria and became master of Hawkshead Grammar School, first as a teacher and then serving as headmaster between 1782 and 1786.

Hawkshead Grammar School. Copyright Jeff Appleyard

Hawkshead Grammar School itself was founded in 1585 by Edwin Sandys, Archbishop of York. The school is no longer in use as a school, but is now open as a museum. It still contains historic benches and desks associated with generations of schoolboys, including William Wordsworth. The museum also preserves a remarkable historic library, with more than 1,800 books dating from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. In its heyday, Hawkshead was regarded as one of the best schools in the north of England.

Taylor seems to have made a deep impression on Wordsworth. He encouraged the young pupil not only to read poetry, but also to write it. Wordsworth later remembered him in The Prelude as “an honoured teacher of my youth.” Taylor was clearly an inspirational figure, and not only, we may assume, to Wordsworth. But the story takes a sad turn. On 12 June 1786, Taylor died aged only thirty-two. He was buried in his own parish at Cartmel.

We know that Taylor was conscious of his approaching death because Wordsworth later recalled his words: “My head will soon lie low.” Eight years after Taylor’s death, in 1794, Wordsworth visited his grave at Cartmel. This was several years before the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798, the volume by Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge that is often seen as a landmark in the development of English Romantic poetry.

The moment at Cartmel stayed with Wordsworth. In his 1805 text of The Prelude, Book X, he described finding Taylor’s grave in Cartmel churchyard and remembering the teacher who had first encouraged his poetic efforts:

—that I had chanced to find
That morning, ranging through the churchyard graves
Of Cartmell’s rural town, the place in which
An honoured teacher of my youth was laid.
While we were schoolboys he had died among us,
And was born hither, as I knew, to rest
With his own family. A plain stone, inscribed
With name, date, office, pointed out the spot,
To which a slip of verses was subjoined—
By his desire, as afterwards I learned—
A fragment from the Elegy of Gray.
A week, or little less, before his death
He had said to me, “My head will soon lie low”;
And when I saw the turf that covered him,
After the lapse of full eight years, those words,
With sound of voice, and countenance of the man,
Came back upon me, so that some few tears
Fell from me in my own despite. And now,
Thus travelling smoothly o’er the level sands,
I thought with pleasure of the verses graven
Upon his tombstone, saying to myself,
“He loved the poets, and if now alive
Would have loved me, as one not destitute
Of promise, nor belying the kind hope
Which he had formed when I at his command
Began to spin, at first, my toilsome songs.”

William Taylor’s grave in Cartmel churchyard. Copyright Jeff Appleyard

Taylor’s grave carried lines adapted from Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, apparently chosen by Taylor himself. The choice is deeply fitting: Gray’s poem reflects on obscure lives, unrealised promise, mortality and remembrance. In Taylor’s case, the promise he helped nurture was not his own alone, but that of one of the greatest poets in the English language.

On 12 June 2026, the anniversary of Taylor’s death, a commemorative plaque was unveiled at Cartmel Priory by Professor Stephen Gill, Professor Emeritus at Oxford University and a leading Wordsworth scholar. The commemoration adds another place to the Wordsworth map of Cumbria. For Wordsworth enthusiasts, it links Cockermouth, Hawkshead, Cartmel and Grasmere in a single story: the story not only of a poet, but of the teacher who helped him begin.

A Wordsworth-themed visit to Cumbria might include:

• Wordsworth House and Garden, Cockermouth – the poet’s birthplace and childhood home.
• Hawkshead Grammar School Museum – the school where Wordsworth studied and where William Taylor taught.
• Furness Abbey – the romantic ruins visited by Wordsworth and recalled in his poetry.
• Wordsworth Grasmere and Dove Cottage – Wordsworth’s home from 1799 to 1808, and one of the most important literary sites in the Lake District.
• Allan Bank, Grasmere – briefly home to William and his family.
• Rydal Mount, Rydal – Wordsworth’s final home, currently closed while its future public access is secured following acquisition by the Wordsworth Trust.
• Cartmel Priory – the burial place of William Taylor, Wordsworth’s “honoured teacher.”

A Cumbria Blue Badge Guide can connect these places into one coherent Wordsworth story: the poet’s childhood, schooling, friendships, family life, landscape, poetry and memory. It is also a reminder, on National Thank a Teacher Day, that even the greatest achievers in life do not emerge in isolation. Somewhere near the beginning, there is often a teacher.

Featured image: Cartmel Priory. Copyright Jeff Appleyard

 

About the author 

Jeff Appleyard, MITG, is a Cumbria Blue Badge Guide and Licensed Driver-Guide. Jeff is a volunteer guide at Cartmel Priory and Flookburgh Church, and serves on the committee of his local history society. He is a member of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, the Cumbria Industrial History Society, and the Cumbria Vernacular Buildings Group. He is also a volunteer Cross Bay Marshal, assisting the King’s Guide to the Sands across Morecambe Bay, and has hiked extensively throughout the Lake District. As a member of the Wainwright Society, he has completed all 214 of Alfred Wainwright’s Lakeland fells. Meet Jeff here