Peter Turner Winskill (April 27, 1834 – May 10, 1912) was an English temperance reformer and historian.[1] [2] [3]
Peter Turner Winskill was born at Newcastle upon Tyne, Northumberland, April 27, 1834, with a disease considered hopeless by the physicians of his native town. His father, Thomas Winskill, had been a lay preacher and temperance advocate before becoming an alcoholic. Peter had at least one sibling, a brother, James Lockley Winskill (died 1879), who became an officer on board one of the Tyne steamers.
At the age of six, he removed with the family to Houghton-le-Spring, County Durham, England. He was cured of his infirmity by a local pharmacist, and received a brief elementary education at the town's National and Barrington School. He and the family suffered because of the father's alcoholism, and few who knew him in his boyhood ever imagined he would have been able to render such service to the temperance cause as to become an acknowledged historian of the movement. Encouraged to the cause by his mother, he became an active worker from the age of seven, securing many signatures to the abstinence pledge. He was a juvenile Independent Order of Rechabites in the early 1840s.
After working briefly as a pupil teacher, he was employed for three years in the building trade, before removing to Middlesbrough where he became an iron moulder in 1851.
He was one of the original members of the Young Men's Temperance Association, beginning his public career as a reciter, singer and essayist.
After his marriage, he spent some years in Derbyshire as a book and insurance agent and temperance advocate, walking many miles to and from his meetings. From 1863 to 1867, he was again in Middlesbrough as an auctioneer, then to Sunderland, and back to Derbyshire for a short time. In 1871, he became an agent for the Warrington Total Abstinence Society, serving with success for over two years, introducing the International Organisation of Good Templars (I.O.G.T.), the Sons of Temperance, and other organizations, and commencing his career as a temperance historian.
In 1882, the family removed to Liverpool, where they were well known. Peter Turner Winskill died in Liverpool, May 10, 1912.
On February 14, 1857, Winskill married Elizabeth (born 1837). She was a teetotaler and the mother of his fourteen children, which included: