THE GOWAN FAMILY

Charles Gowan helped finance American infrastructure such as railways. He lived in Bell House with his wife, five children and a large retinue of staff.

Charles Cecil Gowan was born in 1833, grew up in Dulwich and lived there almost all his life. On 25 January 1833 he was baptised in Dulwich College chapel and he grew up at Wood Lawn in Dulwich Village. His family lived there for many years and it was said that the 300ft lawn was laid with special turf from Epsom Downs which may be why the house was called Wood Lawn.

He was the youngest of ten children, six boys and three girls, of Philip and Cecilia Gowan, who were both from Ireland. Philip was descended from Scots who had colonised Ireland in the 17th century and Cecilia, born D’Olier, was descended from French Huguenots. Philip’s uncle, John Hunter Gowan, was an Irish loyalist and infamous for his brutality. In 1798 his men were responsible for a reign of terror against Catholic peasants. Men were flogged to death, homes were burned, and suspects tortured with caps of burning tar. Gowan was said to celebrate the atrocities by stirring his punch with the amputated finger of an elderly man who had admonished him for his crimes by wagging his finger.

Philip had sold his property in Tipperary and moved to London to make a new life as an ‘American’ merchant, becoming a member of the London Stock Exchange and co-founding the City firm Gowan & Marx. The firm specialised in American bonds and Thomas Jefferson traded with them in the 1820s. Joseph Romilly, a Cambridge registrar who often stayed with his family in Dulwich, mentions the Gowans in his diary during the 1830s, for example: called on the Gowans and old Mrs Bustard, she is a wonderful old dame of 86. I dined with the Gowans and met a Mr Marx and a Mr Holloway, the former a good-looking Jew who has lived a good deal in America.

Gowan & Marx financed Moncure Robinson, who designed a revolutionary locomotive which caused a sensation when it was launched in America; he named the engine Gowan & Marx after his backers. When the Russian ambassador heard about the engine he tried to persuade Robinson to go to Moscow and build locomotives for the Czar. Gowan & Marx were a successful firm and also behaved with honour in adverse times. In 1845 they offered a bond investing in the Republic of St Domingo which defaulted but they reimbursed their subscribers in full. They also donated to charity including Guy’s Hospital. In 1878 they gave money to the Abercarne colliery disaster fund after 268 men lost their lives in a mine explosion. 

Charles Cecil Gowan was the youngest of a family of ten; he had six brothers and three sisters, many of whom like him continued to live in Dulwich after they grew up. Coincidentally, while he had been growing up at Wood Lawn, the Withington boys were growing up in Bell House. Charles’s brother, William Gowan married Arthur Withington’s sister-in-law, Louise, and moved to America to farm.

On 26 January 1860 Charles Gowan married Elizabeth Anne Cutcliffe who was from South Molton in Devon. They lived briefly in Sydenham before moving to The Chestnuts on Dulwich Common.

They had five daughters and one son. Charles Gowan started his working life as a clerk to a wine merchant in the City but around the time of his marriage he joined the family firm, which by now had become the City’s principal dealer in US securities. In 1865 when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated the news caused Gowan and Marx to cease trading even though it was known to be ‘extremely rich and had assets far beyond its liabilities’. It opened again a few days later, ‘paying 20s on the pound’ (ie full value) despite the difficult economic environment.

As the British empire stretched across the globe from Canada to India, Gowan & Marx were well placed to take advantage of the opportunities opening up and business was so good that in March 1873 the Gowans moved into Bell House, just along the road from Charles Gowan’s childhood home. Charles and Elizabeth now had four daughters, Mary, Francis, Alice and Annie and a son, Frederick, their daughter Isobel had died aged three. They were very much involved in the local Dulwich community, funding coal, blankets and Christmas dinner for the poor. After Charles Gowan recovered from a serious illness, he presented a white altar cloth to the chapel ‘as a thank-offering for recovering from a dangerous illness’. At the same time, their daughter Annie presented some paintings to the Reading Room in the Village.

In 1885 thirteen acres were taken from the Bell House garden to help create Dulwich Park. The garden had extended to roughly where the lake and stream are in the park but the Gowans were still left with three and a half acres for their garden. There was some concern over establishing a park in Dulwich, with local residents worried it might ‘lessen exclusiveness’ and even become a ‘playground of the poorest classes’.  When his lease was called in to be adjusted for the loss of land to the Park, Charles Gowan took the opportunity to ask for annual leases in case he was unhappy with the effect of the park and wanted to move quickly. The Estate Governors were sympathetic and negotiated his lease on a year-by-year for the next few years. Charles Gowan must have been reassured as the family continued to live at Bell House for another decade. The smaller, though still substantial, garden was a source of pride: in 1890 and 1891 their gardener William Farley won prizes for his begonias, gloxinias and sweet peas at the Surrey Floricultural Show.

The servant problem

The Gowans had a large domestic staff to care for them. Their cook Mary Parry came from Devon, like Mrs Gowan, while their four other female servants came from London and the home counties. They were all young girls in their teens or twenties and their jobs as parlourmaids, housemaids and kitchenmaids were likely to be very hard, especially looking after the Gowan girls, who were around the same age as them. Many young female servants at this time were transferring to factories and department stores as these jobs were easier and offered more leisure time and independence. Given the growth of the middle-class this meant the demand for maids began to outstrip supply. In the four censuses covering the time Charles Gowan had a house of his own in Dulwich, the four female servants were different people each time and this would not have been unusual, girls would have left for other jobs or to get married (a married woman could not continue to work as a maid in a respectable household). Women like Elizabeth Gowan would have spent a large part of their day managing servants and recruitment was a perennial topic of conversation. Mrs Gowan often advertised for maids and she always asked for experienced staff, she had no time or inclination to train inexperienced girls. In 1887 she placed an advert for a parlourmaid, specifying that she must be a ‘good waitress, clean plate well and thoroughly understand her duties’. Good cooks in particular were highly prized as it was hot, heavy work and skilled cooks were sometimes bribed to leave a friend or family’s establishment to work for an unscrupulous or desperate mistress. The Bell House gardener, William Farley, did not live in either the coach house or Pickwick Cottage as previous gardeners did but instead lived in Landells Road.

The Gowan’s son, Frederick, grew up at Bell House. In 1886 he was on holiday on the Isle of Wight and playing cricket on the beach when two swimmers got into difficulties in the water. Frederick and a friend took a boat and rowed out to find a boy keeping above water the head of a man who had suffered an epileptic fit. Both were rescued but sadly the man died within a few hours. Frederick went on to become a stockbroker like his father and grandfather. In 1909 in Wandsworth he married Sophie Meyer who was from Germany and the following year they emigrated to Canada where he became a stockbroker in Vancouver. In 1911 Census he was living at 1636 Barclay Street in Vancouver and was a railway clerk with the Canadian Pacific Railway. On 23 April 1918 he enlisted with the Canadian Expeditionary Force even though he was 54 years old (on his army forms he gave his date of birth as 1871 instead of 1864 and is described as 5ft 4 in with grey hair). He was discharged as medically unfit in November of the same year and returned to England to live in Kensington. Of the Gowan daughters: Mary married William Forbes Gooding, a coffee planter, and moved to Somerset where she had one son, Cecil. Frances and Annie never married but lived with their mother while in 1915, aged 47, Alice married Edward Ellison Sutton Schuyler, an army captain and governor of HM Prison, Portland. They lived in Hampshire.

On 16 December 1895 Charles died at Knowle Hall in Bridgwater, Somerset, a large country mansion he had been renting. He was described as ‘formerly of Copthall Court [where his firm was based] and Bell House Dulwich’. He left £64,000 and his wife, together with his brothers-in-law James Fraser Hore of Drinagh, College Road, and Edward Madge Hore were his executors. His wife inherited the furniture and effects in Bell House and in his house on the Isle of Wight and the right to occupy it and Bell House for her life. The other executors got £100 apiece. The bulk of his estate was left to his wife and children.

The leases for the time the Gowans lived at Bell House no longer exist so we do not know why, when Charles left his widow the contents of Bell House and the right to live in it for her lifetime, Dulwich Estate documents say the house is empty from February to September 1894. In March 1894 Mr C Hall asks if he can rent the house as an asylum for £200 per year, an offer the Estate declined. In May Mr Douglas (of Stella House, just along College Road opposite the Picture Gallery), asks for permission to practise archery in the garden of Bell House. The Dulwich Estate agree but say only he and no one else may do this. In September 1894 Samuel Morrison, a ship broker of Bull Ring Wharf, North Shields and Tynemouth, offers to rent Bell House for £150 pa but asks for new drainage to be laid and for the lease to start at Christmas not Michaelmas. The Dulwich Estate agree to all his demands as ‘it is difficult to find satisfactory tenants for the large old houses on the Estate’. Despite their acquiescence to his demands he decides not to rent. Possibly the widowed Mrs Gowan resumed the lease on Bell House as in 1897 she transferred it to Harman Tidy, and with her three unmarried daughters she moved first to Winchester then to Bournemouth.