Robert Bowes

Back to the past at this Hogmanayish time of year – in search of the first Scottish president of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association (International) – Robert Bowes, who became president in 1914.

Bowes was born near Stewarton in rural Ayrshire on the 22nd August 1835, the son of another Robert Bowes, a man described on the 1841 Census as an agricultural labourer (although elsewhere as a gardener).  Not perhaps the most advantageous start in life for someone with a life to make in the world of books, except that his mother, born Margaret Macmillan on the Isle of Arran in 1801, happened to be the somewhat older sister of the brothers Daniel and Alexander Macmillan who, starting from no more promising beginnings, were already set out on careers which saw them found the publishing house of Macmillan & Co., an imprint soon to become one of the most famous in the world. 

Robert Bowes was probably no more than ten years of age when he was sent south to Cambridge to join the fledgling Macmillan firm, then an amalgam of bookselling, publishing, printing and the supply of stationery.  The 1851 Census picks him up as a fifteen-year-old apprentice, living with his uncle Alexander in the famous old bookshop at No. 1 Trinity Street, Cambridge – a site in continuous occupation as a bookshop since the sixteenth century (the oldest in the country they say) and which was to be his workplace for almost all of his career.  The hours were long: he later recalled that “we closed nominally at 8 o’clock in term time, and were frequently at work till much later”.  

Daniel Macmillan 1813-1857

Daniel Macmillan 1813-1857

An initially somewhat sober list of publications began to be enlivened by occasional forays into fiction, with some immediate and lasting successes such as Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho! (1855).  The death of Daniel Macmillan in 1857 offered no pause and perhaps even accelerated the expansion.  In 1858 Robert Bowes was placed in charge of the new London branch of the firm at 23 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden.   It was at this period that Alexander Macmillan began coming to London every Thursday to host his celebrated “tobacco parliaments”.   Leading writers across many diverse fields – Alfred Tennyson, Herbert Spencer, T. H. Huxley, Francis Turner Palgrave, Coventry Patmore, Charles Kingsley, Thomas Hughes (another major early success for the firm in 1857 with Tom Brown’s School Days) and others would gather for evening feasts of “talk, tobacco and tipple”.  These were the brains behind the enduring Victorian success of Macmillan’s Magazine which commenced in 1859. 

Alexander Macmillan 1818-1896

Alexander Macmillan 1818-1896

By 1863 the growth of the publishing side of the business necessitated Alexander Macmillan coming to London full time, while Robert Bowes returned to Cambridge to run the original bookshop on Trinity Street.  On 15th April 1868, at St. Andrew the Great in Cambridge, he cemented his ties to the Macmillan family still further, marrying Fanny Brimley (1831-1903), younger sister of Alexander’s wife, Caroline.  The two women were daughters of  Augustine Gutteridge Brimley, a Cambridge grocer and provision merchant, alderman and sometime mayor of Cambridge.  Their elder brother, George Brimley, had been appointed librarian at Trinity College in 1845.  Ill-health and a life cut short at the age of thirty-seven in 1857 prevented his name becoming more widely known, but his essays and reviews of contemporary writers, including Tennyson, Carlyle, Thackeray and Dickens, led to a contemporary reputation as “one of the finest critics of the present day”. 

Park Terrace, Cambridge

Park Terrace, Cambridge
© Cambridge2000.com

Now brothers-in-law as well as uncle and nephew, Alexander Macmillan and Robert Bowes retained an interest and acted as partners in the Brimley, Whibley & Co. family grocery business until 1877.  Robert Bowes also acquired the Brimley family house at 13 Park Terrace, Cambridge, facing Parker’s Piece, which remained his home until the end of his life, the household in 1881 comprising Bowes, his wife, their three children – Margaret Ethel Bowes (1869-1957), Janet Mabel Bowes (1871-1944) and George Edmund Brimley Bowes (1874-1946) – together with a cook and two housemaids.   

In that year, if not earlier, Robert Bowes became a full partner in the Cambridge bookshop, which became known as Macmillan & Bowes until 1907.  The firm continued to publish as well as sell books both old and new.  As a publisher, Bowes could claim a number of successes, not least J. K. Stephen’s Lapsus Calami 1891 (“When the Rudyards cease from Kipling / And the Haggards ride no more”), but it is as a scholar that he chiefly claims his place in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.  A stalwart of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, his investigations into the first Cambridge printer, John Siberch, led to Biographical Notes on the University Printers from the Commencement of Printing in Cambridge to the Present Time 1886, based on his original research.  This was followed by A Catalogue of Books Printed at or relating to the University, Town & County of Cambridge, from 1521 to 1893 : with Bibliographical and Biographical Notes 1891-1894 – an illustrated catalogue of over 3,000 items and exact collations – a work “monumental and still unsuperseded” in David McKitterick’s phrase.  And all the more remarkable in that this was “a bookseller’s catalogue, not a bibliography, and it therefore contains only the books we [Macmillan & Bowes] actually possess”.  

Bowes had, moreover, become an authority on his early acquaintance Alfred Tennyson and in particular the evolution of the poems through successive revisions.  His own annotated collection of Tennyson is now in Trinity College Library.  He was also instrumental in preventing the original manuscript of Poems by Two Brothers being sold abroad – that too is now at Trinity. 

He was prominent in Cambridge life from his early years, working with Alexander Macmillan and members of the university to found the Cambridge Working Men’s College in the 1850s. Later he joined Frederick  Denison Maurice, Henry Sidgwick, and others to promote the higher education of women – Newnham College was founded in 1875 partly as a result.  He served as a town councillor, a governor of the Perse School and of the Old Schools, and as chairman of the Free Library Committee. 

Bowes and Bowes LabelIn 1897 his son,  George Edmund Brimley Bowes, having taken a degree at Emmanuel and spent some time in Glasgow learning the book trade, joined the Macmillan & Bowes firm, becoming a partner in 1899.  The business was subsequently renamed Bowes & Bowes in 1907, a style it retained until 1986, although it had passed out of the family’s hands in 1953, when bought by W. H. Smith.  It then became Sherratt & Hughes until 1992, when the famous old site became the home of the Cambridge University Press bookshop. 

By now a widower, Robert Bowes served as president of the ABA in 1914, a position his son was also to fill in 1923.  In a final honour to a distinguished life, Cambridge University conferred on him an honorary degree of Master of Arts in 1918.  He died after a brief illness at the age of eighty-three at Park Terrace on 9th February 1919.  Probate was granted to his daughter Margaret Ethel Hamilton, wife of Henry Smail Hamilton, his son George Brimley Bowes, and Walter Eaden Lilley, warehouseman – his effects stated at £16,582.7s.2d.  The Bowes & Bowes archive, comprising early cash books, journals and letter-books, and a run of printed catalogues is preserved at the University of Reading.

About Laurence Worms - Ash Rare Books

Laurence Worms has owned and run Ash Rare Books since 1971. He represented the antiquarian book trade on the (British) National Book Committee from 1993 to 2002 and has been six times an elected member of the Council of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association. He was largely responsible for drafting the Association’s Code of Good Practice first introduced in 1997 (and its recent update), served as Honorary Secretary of the Association from 1998 to 2001 and as President from 2011 to 2013. He is a former member of the Council of the Bibliographical Society and continues to serve on the Council of the London Topographical Society. He writes and lectures on various aspects of the history of the book and map trades, and has lectured at the universities of Cambridge, London, Reading and Sheffield, as well as at the Bibliographical Society, the Royal Geographical Society, the Warburg Institute, the National Library of Scotland and at Gresham College and Stationers' Hall. Published work includes the compilation of fourteen ‘lives’ for the “Oxford Dictionary of National Biography”, a number of articles for “The Oxford Companion to the Book” and the chapter on early English maps and atlases for the fourth volume of “The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain”. Essays on the British map trade are also appearing in “The History of Cartography” published by the University of Chicago Press. His long-awaited “British Map Engravers”, co-written with Ashley Baynton-Williams, was published to critical acclaim in 2011. He also contributed the numerous biographical notes to Peter Barber’s hugely successful “London : A History in Maps”, co-published by the British Library and the London Topographical Society in 2012.
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