George Jacob Holyoake

Born in Birmingham in 1817, George Jacob Holyoake came from a working family and was educated in part through the Mechanics' Institute. He was strongly influenced by the social ideas of Robert Owen, became a lecturer and writer, and later built a reputation as a newspaper editor and public advocate for reform.

Holyoake is best remembered as a leading English secularist and as the person credited with coining the term "secularism" in 1851. He also played an important part in the co-operative movement, writing and speaking in support of practical social change, and he edited influential papers including The Reasoner and The English Leader.

His career was marked by controversy as well as endurance: he was imprisoned after a blasphemy prosecution in the early 1840s, an episode that made him a notable figure in debates about free expression and belief. By the time of his death in 1906, he was widely recognized as a major voice in nineteenth-century radical, secular, and co-operative life.