Details of the life of William Pickard Mann are scarce, although a brief biographical entry in ‘Old Yorkshire’, edited by William Smith, describes him as a schoolmaster from Middleham, North Yorkshire. He attended St Bees Theological College in Cumberland, with a view to entering the Church of England. In 1868, Mann addressed a letter to MP Gathorne Hardy, then the Conservative Home Secretary entitled ‘Disestablishment and Confiscation’, in fervent opposition to the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, which Mann saw as a prelude to the eventual mass confiscation of Protestant-held territory in Ireland.
