The most famous cunning-man in nineteenth-century Somerset. Born to a shoemaker and his wife in Lyng, a hamlet near Taunton. Billy learnt the craft of making clay pipes which he sold door to door around the villages of Somerset, Devon and Dorset. He later settled in Taunton where he became known as the 'Wizard of the West'. Cutting a distinctive figure in a long Inverness cloak and sombrero hat with rings on his fingers, he never married. Unusually he never went to prison, one obituarist said , Brewer "was always careful, in his pretence at fortune-telling and his charms and counter-charms, to keep outside the pale of the law."