William Clowes and Sons

active London, 1800 - 1870

BiographyLC name authority rec.: nr97020442
LC Heading: William Clowes and Sons
Brown, P. A. H. London publishers and printers, c. 1800-1870, c1982 (Clowes (William) & Sons; limited from 1880)

Clowes, William (1779–1847), printer, was born on 1 January 1779 at Chichester, Sussex, the elder of the two children of William Clowes (1738–c.1782), schoolmaster in Chichester, and his wife, Elizabeth Harraden (d. 1816), schoolmistress. At the age of ten William was apprenticed to Joseph Seagrave, printer, in Chichester and in 1802 he went to London as a journeyman.

While working as a compositor for Henry Teape at George Street, Tower Hill, Clowes met William Winchester, a cousin of his mother, who took an interest in him. Winchester was a stationer in the Strand who had become one of the principal contractors to the government for the supply of stationery and printing of all kinds. Clowes borrowed money from his mother and from Winchester to start up his own business and on 21 October 1803 he began to trade on his own in 22 Villiers Street, Strand, employing just one man. His first book appears to have been A full and genuine history of the inhuman and unparalleled murders of Mr. William Galley, a custom-house officer, and Mr Daniel Chater, a shoemaker, by fourteen notorious smugglers, printed by Clowes for J. Seagrave and Longman and Rees. Through Winchester, he gained a share of government printing work. In December 1804 Clowes married Winchester's niece, Mary Winchester (1774/5–1836); they were to have four daughters and four sons. Her dowry enabled him to take more rooms in Villiers Street and to employ three more men and buy more equipment. Three years later the firm moved to larger premises in Northumberland Court, Charing Cross, which allowed him to bind books on site and to take on twenty more staff.

Clowes's early ventures proved successful. By 1813 he was dealing directly with a number of government departments, printing the casualty lists of the Peninsular War, stationery for the militia, and the Navy List, as well as work for the Religious Tract Society, British and Foreign Bible Society, and Royal Academy of Arts. At the time of Waterloo he opened a military bookshop at 14 Charing Cross and issued Cannon's Historical Records of the British Army. His financial position was so secure that when that same year he suffered a fire at his Northumberland Court premises and was forced to rebuild he was in a position to buy the freehold of the property.

In 1823 Clowes installed a powered press specially designed by Applegarth and Cowper on the site, digging a well and installing a steam engine in the building. His neighbour the duke of Northumberland brought an action for nuisance caused by his machinery. Although the duke lost the action, he bought out William who, having lost an estimated £25,000 after the failure of Archibald Constable had rocked the industry in 1826, was then able to move in the following year to take over Applegarth's business premises in Duke Street, Blackfriars, where he formed what became the largest printing works in the world. By 1839 the London Union of Compositors reported 186 compositors working for Clowes, 86 more than Hansard, the second largest employer. (A description of the works, including the unique on-site type and stereotype foundries, was published in the Quarterly Magazine in December 1839.) Although Clowes suffered another financial set-back in 1840, the firm recovered its financial footing and by 1843 he employed twenty-four Applegath and Cowper perfectors and twenty-four hand-presses to print 1500 reams a week.

Clowes was constantly looking for technical improvements and innovative working practices which would improve his business. For instance in 1820 he was one of the first employers to start a benevolent fund for his workforce and he also was probably the first to use double sheets in bookwork, which became common after 1828. He experimented with the printing, in 1840, of the Mulready envelopes for the Post Office and he also produced the works of all the major book and magazine publishers of the day including George Henry Bohn, John Murray, Rivington, Routledge, and Longman and Rees. However, perhaps his most famous technical achievement was the printing, with Thomas De La Rue, of the gold coronation edition of The Sun published on 28 June 1837.

Clowes believed that steam-powered presses opened the way to cheapen the production of books and expand the market for the printed product. Working closely with Charles Knight, one of the leading figures concerned with the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK), he printed from 1832 the Penny Magazine and the Penny Cyclopaedia, among other publications. They held similar beliefs in the importance of the new developments:
What the printing press did for the instruction of the masses in the fifteenth century, the printing machine is doing for the nineteenth. Each represents an æra in the diffusion of knowledge; and each may be taken as a symbol of the intellectual character of the age of its employment,
stated Knight in the first number of the Printing Machine (1834), printed by Clowes. The great contribution of Clowes was the unprecedented level of accuracy, speed, and output from his presses; it was this that gained the admiration of Samuel Smiles, who held him up as an icon of energy and enterprise in his biographical sketches Men of Invention and Industry (1884).

In 1824 Clowes was honoured by his native town when he became a freeman of Chichester, although until the year before his death he lived in Parliament Street, Westminster, London. He died in London on 26 January 1847 at his home, 68 Wimpole Street, Marylebone, and was buried in Norwood cemetery. In 1839 he had changed the name of the firm to William Clowes & Sons, and at his death he left his three sons, William Clowes (1807–1883), Winchester (1808–1862), and George (1814–1886), to run the business.

Alexis Weedon
Sources W. B. Clowes, Family business, 1803–1953 (1953) · S. Smiles, Men of invention and industry (1884), 208–19 · private information (2004) · ‘A visit to Mr. Clowes's printing office, 1833’, Penny Magazine (30 Dec 1833), suppl.; repr. in B. S. L. Pamphlets, 2 · F. B. Head, review, QR, 65 (1839–40), 1–30 · E. Howe and H. E. Waite, The London Society of Compositors: a centenary history (1948) · GM, 2nd ser., 28 (1847) · Sussex Agricultural Express (30 Jan 1847) · The Times (28 Jan 1847), 7b · The Athenaeum (9 June 1883), 733 [obit. of William Clowes, the younger] · The Times (14 June 1824), 2e · The Bookseller (1 June 1870) [J. W. Parker] · G. Pollard, ‘Notes on the size of the sheet’, The Library, 4th ser., 22 (1941–2), 105–37 · G. Dodd, Days at the factories (1843), 326–60 · DNB · d. cert.
Archives Museum and Archive, Beccles, Suffolk · St Bride Institute, London, St Bride Printing Library · UCL, MSS · UCL, own and son's business letters to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge
Likenesses portrait, repro. in Clowes, Family business, frontispiece · portrait, William Clowes Museum of Print, Beccles, Suffolk [see illus.]
Wealth at death left business to sons: The Athenaeum (9 June 1883), 733
© Oxford University Press 2004–15
All rights reserved: see legal notice Oxford University Press

Alexis Weedon, ‘Clowes, William (1779–1847)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/5718, accessed 29 Sept 2015]

Person TypeInstitution

Last Updated8/7/24

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