My Bowles Sussex Family History


My Dad rarely talked about his forebears. He had grown up in a family business and perhaps it was all too close to him. But my Mum would talk about her side all the time. It was always the Bowles, the Bowles, the Bowles. The stories would just come out about that wonderful late Victorian family and all their fabulous offspring. Being young, it didn’t really register and then she died.

My Uncle Geoffrey, who was nine years older, was slightly closer in time to these Bowles and had many early reminiscences. Fortunately, he agreed to write down all of his memories for us and that was one of the last things that he did before he died.

This Bowles history comes very much from his account.

Origins

The first family sighting is in Leicestershire. Samuel Boulds was a tailor in Desford, a village a few miles west of Leicester. He married Mary Button there in 1798 and they had five children, Samuel, Elizabeth, John, Ann, and Joseph.

Did the family come from Leicestershire? Boulds was the most used variant of Bowles in the county. Or was Nottinghamshire the origin? There were many more Bowles there, including the family at Worksop. Or could it possibly have been Staffordshire? Bould was a local Staffordshire name. We don’t have any indication.

Two of the sons, Samuel and John, picked up their father’s tailoring trade. Samuel stayed in Desford but John, perhaps second in the pecking order, moved to Brighton on the south coast in the early 1830’s. The name he then used was Bowles.

In 1834, he married Mary Ann Pelling and set up a tailor’s shop, first at 2 Steine Lane and then, from 1845 to 1862 when he probably gave it up full-time, at 50-55 George Street. Steine Lane has long since vanished but George Street remains much as it was; and you can still imagine their shop and them living upstairs or next door. A son, Henry John, was born in 1845.

Henry John Bowles

Uncle Geoff painted an endearing picture of how Henry John Bowles met his wife.

“My grandfather Bowles was the headmaster (from 1880) of Hanover Terrace Primary School and was also the amateur conductor of the Brighton Sacred Harmonic Society, which, apart from other occasional concerts, did an annual show of Handel’s Messiah in the Dome during Holy Week.

One year the committee were recommended a soprano soloist from Wakefield, our Emily Attree. She was invited down for an audition, duly sang at the performance and married Grandpa six weeks later. Who said that the Victorians were stuffy!”

Henry, aged 22, and Emily, aged 20, were in fact married in 1867. There is a beautifully preserved photograph from this time of Emily in a long black evening gown with music in hand as if about to sing.

So far so good. But there are some unexplained mysteries about this time.

First, how did a man from such a poor background become so cultured?
and
second, what exactly were his relations with his parents?

The birth record shows clearly that he was the son of John and Mary Pelling. Yet this was over ten years after they had married, he was 42, she 36, and their marriage up to that time had produced no children. The 1871 Census shows the son at 50 George Street established as the head of the household and the parents relegated to livers-in. John Bowles died soon after. But his wife ended up in a workhouse where she died in 1874. How could the son have allowed this to happen?

His Family

Henry and Emily became the patriarchal late Victorian family. They had moved around this time to Athelstan House, 157 Ditchling Rise, a large house on the hill rising to Ditchling Road. There were nine children to bring up, four boys and five girls. This was Uncle Geoff’s depiction of his various aunts and uncles.

"The first child, Alice, an absolute terror to us all, became head mistress of a school in Erith, Kent.

Next a son, Stanley, who took part in the first Olympics of 1896 as a hundred yard runner (but came nowhere), and went out to South America and worked for the Eastern Telegraph Company in Montevideo. He was killed on a golf course at the age of 28 (in 1899) when a whirlwind picked up the hut in which he and his companions were sheltering.

Next came John, but here again we have a mystery. For his name was never allowed to be mentioned in my grandfather’s house, except that he drank!

The next child was my Aunt Lilian - and what a character. She had a really beautiful voice and became a concert hall singer with the stage name Lilian Lea. She sang in command performances in Windsor, so she must have been really good. I can remember hearing her records (those old old ones with a recording only on one side and beginning with the announcement “This is an Edison Bell record.” Collector’s items now.

Aunt Lilian went on a tour of the US in 1920 or so, met a stage producer by the name of John Lester and then married a Frank Edwards who was a gag-man in the silent days of Harold Lloyd and Laurel and Hardy. He turned out to be religious maniac, working in the Hollywood studios devising custard pie routines for six or seven months of the year and then carting off Aunt Lilian (and her daughter Lily by John Lester) to Honolulu in an annual attempt to convert the natives to his particular form of religion. When the cash ran out, he returned to write more gags.

He died just before the beginning of talkies; but as sound-on-film became a must, Aunt Lilian set up a studio as a teacher “ex-gold medallist of the Royal Academy” (which she never was) and made a fortune teaching the early stars of the talkies how to learn a universal diction. Daughter Lily married the manager of Enrico Caruso but it didn’t last long. And I long since had no thought of cousin Lily until I heard that she was still alive at the ripe old age of 88.

The next in the Bowles line was my Aunt Nelly. She too went out to South America and married the manager of Eastern Telegraph in Buenos Aires. Their only daughter Doris Burden still lives in Pasadena, California and I hear from her quite often. We have a special bond. It was she who taught me to ride a bike when I was seven years old. Doris must be 80 at least now.

Next Bowles child was my Uncle Wally, a bit of a wag, a man quite convinced that he was the best player of the one-string fiddle in England, and the father of my cousins Thelma and Audrey. Thelma took up singing as a profession with some limited success and Audrey married someone, but no news of either for years and years.

Next to the font was Olive, who married a martinet Stanley and had three sons, Stanley, Laurie and Denis. Aunt Olive died of TB; and it was one of those things that stick in the mind - the day she died she asked for a dozen oysters and, in one of them was a pearl which Stanley had made into a tie-pin. This did not stop him marrying the maid some three months later, resulting in his sons disintegrating as a family.

The next living child (a still-born intervening) was my mother Edith, born in 1884. She had a normal schooling under the eyes of her father and graduated to the oddly-named New Home and Colonial Training College in Dulwich. She passed out with full honours with a teaching career in mind. But somewhere along the line she met my father - and that was that.

The last of the Bowles dynasty was my Uncle Frank. Again, a fabulous voice as a boy resulted in him being selected as a Chapel Royal Chorister. Free tuition, attendance at most of the State functions, et al. He never married; and, after someone stole his music-case on East Croydon station, he never sang again. He lived and died in the Croydon Borough Accounts Department.”

Postscript

The children had mainly left home by 1910 and grandfather Bowles retired in 1911; although he remained active in social functions as a Forester and Freemason. In my album, there is a charming photograph of him and his wife in formal attire late in their lives - he standing in a dinner jacket, white bow-tie, and a watch-and-chain dangling from his waistcoat, she to his left sitting in black evening dress, frilly bodice, and white silk gloves.

Uncle Geoff recalled a very special moment in 1917.

"Grandma’s portrait has a very nostalgic appeal for me. It was a gift from all the then Bowles family and their respective husbands, wives, and children (I remember that my contribution was two weeks pocket money - sixpence). It was painted by Harry Mileham, the artist who did all the pictures in St. Thomas’s Church in Hove.

The presentation was made on grandparents’ Golden Wedding anniversary when a big party was held at Ditchling Rise. I can only just remember it. Grandma died two years later; and Grandpa outlived her for only another two years and he left the portrait to my mother in his will.”

The portrait now hangs in my living room.

Bowles Family History