Serendipity: a personal tale of two biographies,William Richard Gowers (1845–1915) and his son Ernest (1880–1966)

Introduction

In 2012, Oliver Sacks praised William Richard Gowers 1845–1915: Exploring the Victorian Brain ¹ for telling not only Gowers’ own story with ‘an intensity and interest that never flagged’ but also for the portrait it painted of Victorian medicine, Victorian attitudes and Victorian London. He also praised the ‘huge research’ that must have gone into it. ² Stephen Casper described the book as a ‘simply astonishing labor and a major contribution to the history of late-Victorian and Edwardian medicine’. ³ In order to explain the basis of these welcome comments, this article describes the research methods used for the biographies of William Richard Gowers and his son Ernest Arthur Gowers. ⁴

In 1949, William Richard Gowers' first biographer, Macdonald Critchley (1900–1997), described his subject as ‘one of the greatest clinicians and teachers of clinical medicine in the 19th century’. ⁵ Critchley's biography was written 50 years before technology began to transform archival research. By 2004 when I first embarked on the biography of my grandfather, Ernest Gowers, new forms of digital cataloguing were rapidly being developed, facilitating online searches of archives and databases on the internet accessible to researchers from across the world.

Beginnings

Ernest Gowers was one of a small cohort of highly influential 20th century British civil servants. When he died in 1966, I was aged 28. As his granddaughter, I had known him well in his later years but, apart from his ‘retirement’ work, writing his best-seller, Plain Words ⁶ and his revision of Fowler's Modern English Usage, ⁷ I knew virtually nothing about his career as a civil servant – not even that he had run London’s Civil Defence in the Second World War, operated a secret propaganda unit in the First World War and, in between, had played a major role in managing Britain's troubled coal industry.

Now a resident of Australia with descendants of my own, I wanted to hand down to them a little of their English family history. I knew there was a private collection of papers held by my Gowers relatives in London. I photocopied them all on a visit to England, considerably exceeding my baggage allowance when I flew home.

After examining them, I decided there might be enough material for a biography. I sought professional advice about what search tools were available and was given two crucial starting points: the new Times Online Archive and the ARCHON directory, developed by the National Archives, that linked many United Kingdom online archives. I remember sitting in front of a computer in my university library, feeling rather daunted by the risk of failure. Armed with a copy of Gowers' obituary from The Times, ⁸ I tentatively began my search. Once the results started appearing on the screen, the fascination of following the trails, some strong, some faint and some dead ends, took over. Similarly, the ARCHON site was continually expanding its reach as material was added to the online catalogues. I found far more than I had dreamed possible and so the first biography took shape; I had a trip to England, visited many archives I had tracked down – especially the National Archives at Kew, wrote a draft, found a publisher and that, I thought, was that.

Embarking on William Richard Gowers' biography

I discovered that during the war Ernest Gowers had volunteered his services to the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases at Queen Square, the hospital where his father had worked for 40 years. Ernest joined the Queen Square Board and then for several years served as its Chairman. One of my research visits to London led to the gradual discovery of archival treasures at Queen Square. The Queen Square Library had just taken over the hospital archives, stored in cupboards outside one of the wards, the contents uncatalogued. The Librarian, the late Louise Shepherd, was interested to find out what she had inherited, but we found little useful material about Ernest.

However, we made the first of several important finds relating to his father: an album containing some of his holiday sketches (Figure 1). Gowers was an accomplished artist who drew most of the illustrations in his famous single-author, two-volume Manual of Diseases of the Nervous System. ⁹ The album contained the best of his holiday sketches (one of which, to his great delight, had been exhibited at the Royal Academy). OPEN IN VIEWER

Shortly after Ernest Gowers: Plain Words and Forgotten Deeds was published in 2009, neurologist Professor Mervyn Eadie, a fellow Brisbane resident and author of biographical sketches of a number of William Richard Gowers' contemporaries suggested I might write an article about him, focussing on these drawings and records. Some drawings were annotated with the names of colleagues and friends, including Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) (Figure 2). It appeared they were to be reproduced as greetings cards. OPEN IN VIEWER

The project grew from an article to a book. Andrew Lees, Professor of Neurology at the National Hospital in Queen Square, was also interested in Gowers and so we put a three-author proposal to Oxford University Press (OUP), which was accepted. Macdonald Critchley’s 1949 biography of Gowers provided an invaluable starting point: a chronology of Gowers' life and a bibliography listing almost all of his numerous publications. The two eminent neurologists were well qualified to write about Gowers' contribution to medicine. The question for me, therefore, the author responsible for the biographical component of our book, was whether I could contribute anything new about Gowers' life.

Coggeshall apprenticeship and the shorthand diaries

Critchley, also a neurologist, had relatively limited sources to draw upon in 1949. However, Ernest Gowers wrote a personal reminiscence of his father to help Critchley with the family background. Critchley used on a few excerpts from this. Fortunately Ernest's complete original paper had survived among the family papers. Amongst other insights into his father and their domestic life, it included a brief summary of the shorthand diary the 16-year-old William Gowers had kept in 1862–1863 when a medical apprentice in Coggeshall, a small town in Essex. From Critchley, the abbreviated ‘mixing potions, botanising, and driving the gig’ had become the standard summary in later condensed accounts of Gowers' life. The original shorthand diary still existed amongst our family papers (Figure 3). The first task for me was to make a complete transcription of the diary (a partial transcription already existed). In my own youth I had learned Pitman's shorthand, but it had changed considerably over the century since Gowers had learned it, so I had to master the original system he had used. Second-hand bookshop catalogues were just beginning to appear online in 2005, and by extraordinary good fortune I found two invaluable aids: an early Pitman's Shorthand Instructor and Beaumont's History of Coggeshall, in Essex ¹⁰ (1890) that provided the basic decoding tools for the task. OPEN IN VIEWER

Beaumont's history of Coggeshall was a crucial yet serendipitous discovery. Written in 1890 by someone William Gowers himself had known, the history had been reprinted in 2007, so had only just become available when I searched ‘Coggeshall’ on the internet. The book contained two crucial indexes: the first listing local place names and the second the names of local inhabitants in the 19th century. Both proved invaluable because shorthand is phonetic and so decoding unfamiliar names can easily lead to wildly inaccurate guesses and misspellings. The history, the Shorthand Instructor, and a magnifying glass were the tools that enabled me to transcribe the approximately 60,000 words written in minute, faded yet meticulous early Pitman’s shorthand, in the tiny diary. The task took several months.

As I transcribed the diary, I searched the internet for people and topics to which the young William Gowers referred. These included details of the subjects he was studying by correspondence for the London University Matriculation Examination. He matriculated early in 1863. Between January and September 1863 (when he moved to London) he prepared for the new Preliminary Scientific Examination that had just been introduced into the medical curriculum. A search of the new online BMJ Archive revealed an article published in 1858 explaining changes to the medical curriculum, including the new emphasis on botany. Preparing for this second exam turned out to be the reason why Gowers spent so much time describing in his 1863 diary entries his ‘botanising’ walks and excited discoveries of rare plants.

Searching Ancestry.com revealed that William Gowers’ grandmother lived in Coggeshall. This site allowed me to piece together a great deal about the family that had been a mystery to Gowers’ descendants and sometimes also to Gowers himself. Being able to locate an individual, then work through the inhabitants of their street, house by house, also helped understand their social circumstances (particularly later on, discovering details about the Gowers household and neighbours, after he had set up house in Queen Anne Street, London, in the 1870s).

It emerged from the diary that William Gowers had a lonely childhood. William's father, a ladies’ boot-maker who lived over his shop in Hackney, then just outside London, died when the boy was 11. Gowers’ three siblings had all died before their father, and his widowed mother returned to her native Doncaster. The boy spent unhappy early teenage years living with relatives in Oxford while attending Christ Church School as a day scholar before joining his mother in Doncaster to see whether he might be suited to life as a farmer, working on the farm of a family friend. His son recalled that he could think of few things his father would be less suited to.

He had been born into a Congregationalist family, and was a devout young man. Fortunately his life abruptly changed course when his mother took him to stay with his paternal grandmother in Coggeshall. Reluctantly, on the urging of an aunt, he agreed to become a medical apprentice to the local doctor Thomas Simpson. Dr Simpson gave him rather scant supervision. But two Coggeshall Congregationalist ministers recognised the young man’s potential and guided him towards his eventual career. The first, Reverend Brian Dale, was himself a graduate of the University of London and an amateur historian who wrote The Annals of Coggeshall, otherwise Sunnedon, in the County of Essex, 30 years before Beaumont’s history, occasionally enlisting Gowers’ help. ¹¹ Dale’s Annals contained an etching of Coggeshall as it was when Gowers lived there in 1862-1863 (Figure 4). Early in 1863 Dale left Coggeshall. His successor, Alfred Philps, as impressed as Dale had been about the boy's dedication and potential, took him up to London to introduce him to William Jenner. OPEN IN VIEWER

I made two visits to Coggeshall while engaged in the research. The centre of the small town has been carefully preserved, so has changed comparatively little since the 1860s. It was an extraordinary feeling to walk the streets my great-grandfather had described and even to visit the house, once Dr Simpson’s home and surgery, where Gowers had lived for the two years of his apprenticeship. The Coggeshall Museum had a collection of early postcards, books and other memorabilia that provided several illustrations that helped bring the excerpts from the diary to life.

William Gowers stopped keeping a shorthand diary when he moved to London. Its primary purpose was to practice writing shorthand. He now put his shorthand to its intended use: taking university lecture notes. He left no personal record of his years as a student. He sat for his MD in 1870 and received the University Medal.

The Queen Square archives

William Gowers joined the staff of the National Hospital, Queen Square, in 1870. Between 1870 and 1890 he made his major contributions to research, teaching and writing about neurology. Apart from his case notes, most of the holdings in the Queen Square archives were related to his Manual.

On my second visit to the Queen Square library I found that the archivists had been making great progress with their cataloguing. They showed me several boxes of highly fragile documents, amongst which were both papers and medical drawings (Figure 5). OPEN IN VIEWER

The library had organised to scan all the medical drawings, as well as the album of holiday sketches, so they are now available online. ¹² I photographed the remaining papers, not digitised at that stage, with my latest technological tool, an iPhone. This time I could return to Australia unencumbered by photocopies.

The Children’s Diaries

On Gowers' own admission he had little time for friendships over the 20 years from1870 to 1890, the years when made his major contributions to research, teaching and writing about neurology. Although his extraordinary productivity was achieved at considerable physical cost, he always seemed to have time for his children (Figure 6). OPEN IN VIEWER

He had married in 1875, and soon had four children, two boys and two girls. This prompted him to start keeping a new kind of diary, referred to in the family as the ‘Children's Diaries’, in which he recorded holiday expeditions, special events and outings. He was a man who loved gadgets, and in 1885 he bought a camera and photographed some family expeditions, which were glued into the diaries. These photographs are now very faded, but Gowers never lost his love of sketching, and the diaries are also illustrated with his drawings (Figures 7 and 8). He bought a typewriter soon after typewriters came on the market, so the diaries are in typescript (though, again, not always very clear). He made his children learn shorthand, and some of the diaries appear to be their attempts at transcribing his shorthand notes. OPEN IN VIEWER

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Figure 8.

‘Japanese wire-walking’, Children’s Diary, 12 March 1884.

The diaries described in detail taking his elder son to visit the printers to see the Manual in production. The 1885 diary included a studio photograph to mark the birthday of Gowers himself, his wife (Mary, née Baines) and each of his four children – William Frederick (1875–1954), Edith Mary (1877–1939), Ernest Arthur (1880–1966) and Evelyn (1884–1945). The fragile paper and tightly-stitched binding meant that these could not be scanned or photocopied without breaking the back of the original. So again I resorted to my iPhone and photographed all 800 pages of the five volumes, holding them open with one hand and holding my camera in the other. These diaries provide great detail on a diversity of topics including outings to the Inventions Exhibition and the Imperial Exhibition. They also record family holidays in Southwold, Wales and Bournemouth. I edited the photographs and joined them as PDF files to create digital representations of the originals. There are also several separate sketchbooks that relate to the holidays Gowers described.

William Gowers’ friendships in his later years

A number of letters addressed to Gowers and his son Ernest were held in the family archives. Finding any letters they wrote to other people was a challenge. But a cache of remarkable letters written by Ernest Gowers to a man with whom he worked over the 10 years revising Fowler had been returned to the family by the recipient with the explanation that ‘they might be useful to a future biographer’. Fortunately, I was that biographer. I was doubtful that I would find an equivalent for his father.

However, I had equally lucky finds. When William Gowers’ health began to break down in the 1890s he became an increasingly difficult colleague but he did make new, often younger friends with whom he corresponded in his later years, including Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) (whose letters to Gowers were almost as difficult to decipher as Victorian shorthand). The faint trail that paid the most unexpected dividends was the result of exploring the life of the medically-trained Australian adventurer, and then advisor to the Chinese government, George Ernest Morrison (1862–1920), later known as ‘Peking’ Morrison. Critchley identified Morrison as one of these friends. I easily found a book of Morrison’s edited correspondence but this only mentioned Gowers once. ¹³ However, an online search revealed that not only had Morrison been a hoarder but that his papers were now housed in the Mitchell Library in Sydney. ¹⁴ The archivist there told me there were references to Gowers in the Morrison Collection catalogue. I decided it was worth travelling from Brisbane on the off-chance that there might be something interesting. But the trip and the inconvenience were well rewarded. In an earlier era the letters had been copied onto user-unfriendly microfiche film. By now microfiche could be converted to a digital record and I returned home with 50 pages on a data stick. The letters included highly personal, descriptive letters from Gowers in London to the distant Morrison (who was by then, thanks to an intervention by Gowers, The Times correspondent in Peking).

Gowers had been advised to have a complete rest, and on Kipling's advice took a return sea voyage to South Africa, taking his elder son, William Frederick (1875–1954) with him (as I discovered from the shipping lists). The letters to Morrison talked about his worries about this rather wayward son – who had succumbed to the attractions of Africa. ¹⁵ By contrast Gowers referred to the younger son, Ernest, as ‘all I could desire in goodness and diligence’ (Figure 9). The letters also included descriptions of Gowers’ home life and family as well as slightly aggrieved letters when Morrison became a celebrity and lost interest in his old friends. OPEN IN VIEWER

The Phonographic Record of Clinical Teaching and Medical Research

William Gowers developed a reputation, particularly amongst his students, for being fanatical about shorthand. He knew how invaluable it had been to him when he was a student and then later as an invaluable research tool. He formed the Society of Medical Phonographers, was its first President, and also edited the Phonographic Record of Clinical Teaching and Medical Research (all printed in shorthand) (Figure 10). The British Library has a near-complete set of the journals. There was some hope that these might contain some new treasures, ¹⁶ but when I examined them I gained the impression that they had been published more to provide transcription practice for medical students learning shorthand than to publish important new articles. We included a catalogue of the articles (these had not been digitised) in our bibliography. Gowers published all his lectures in The Lancet and the British Medical Journal. If anyone examines the bibliography they can assess the potential interest of the articles, but the titles are often opaque, and shorthand is a legacy technology. It may be too late to find anyone who can transcribe them. OPEN IN VIEWER

Reassessing the finds at Queen Square

Not long before our biography of Gowers was due to be submitted to the publisher, we managed to put some final pieces of our Queen Square archival jig-saw together.

There were two unpublished clinical lectures William Gowers gave in the late 1890s; ¹⁷ miscellaneous pages from the second edition of Volume 2 of his famous Manual of Diseases of the Nervous System marked with amendments for a third edition that was never published, although a third edition of Volume 1 was published in 1899). ¹⁸

I had been puzzled that the pencil numbers marked on the drawings did not correlate with the illustration numbers in the second edition of the Manual, which was all I had access to. When the book was almost complete, I finally tracked down, after endless online searches, a rare first edition. The illustration numbers in the first edition matched those on the drawings at Queen Square, so they could confidently be dated to 1886 and 1888.

Conclusion

Adjusting to changing technology and the appearance of searchable databases was a constant challenge. However, old-fashioned research methods have not been replaced: technology just made some materials easier to find. There are still countless uncatalogued treasures that the sophisticated online searches cannot identify. In addition, in both hard copy and digital research one is still dependent on the quality and logic of the catalogues and indexes – which often contain articles with inconsistent or vague titles. Chance and serendipity are as important as ever.

William Gowers would have relished the experience of working with 21st century technology. He always sought ways to make his work more efficient. Originally he taught himself shorthand because, if he matriculated, it would be helpful for taking lecture notes. However, shorthand offers a means of taking notes fast, and provides the ability to make almost verbatim records. Gowers used shorthand throughout his career as a vital research tool, enabling him to record and catalogue all his cases. This year marks the centenary of Gowers' death. It was many years before powerful computers became widely available to researchers but Gowers was acutely aware of what improved methods of record keeping and analysis might offer researchers. In on of his unpublished lectures in 1895, he said:

We sadly need an organization for enabling men to communicate facts which come under their notice, but which seem to them not worth the trouble and not worth the labour of getting from their scanty leisure enough time to put in order and send to be published to rank with the all too-numerous facts which crowd our papers. But we do need an organization by which facts might be sent, perhaps processed and classified and compared with other facts which may come in the future in order that the great mass of knowledge and information now lost may be saved. ¹⁹