 |
Home
Wolverhampton History images
|
|
|
|
Wolverhampton History images
Location: City of Wolverhampton
 Henry Fowler was born in the north of England, but as a boy used to visit Wolverhampton to stay with his relatives by marriage, the Thorneycrofts - one of the town's wealthiest industrial families. Though hardly of equal status – his father was a Methodist minister - he at that early age made up his mind that he would marry one of the Thorneycroft daughters, Ellen, with whom he had fallen in love, and would one day be MP for Wolverhampton. According to his daughter Edith: "From those ambitions nothing ever moved him, and with patient perseverance he set out towards the accomplishment of those purposes, and was content to wait till he was nearly 30 years of age before he fulfilled the one, and until he was 50 years old before he represented the Borough of Wolverhampton...he always knew his own mind, and nothing could change his designs".
 The high point of Sir Henry Fowler's political career was his appointment as Secretary of State for India in the Liberal government, 1893-95. In recognition of his distinguished performance in the office he was created Grand Commander of the Star of India, whose uniform he wears here.
  Henry Fowler was the son of a Methodist Minister, and he became a leading Methodist layman both locally and nationally. For example in Wolverhampton he laid the foundation stone of the new Darlington Street Methodist Church in February 1900. His daughter Edith wrote: "In Wesleyan Methodism his position is, and ever will be, unique. He was the first Wesleyan to enter the Government and the Cabinet, to be a Secretary of State, and to be created a peer. And in spite of all the upward progress of his political and social life he never outgrew the faith of his fathers, or disowned the church in which he had been born".
 In 1867 Henry Fowler had a new home built for his growing family: Woodthorne, in countryside just west of Wolverhampton (it is now demolished). His daughter Edith later wrote: “Although my father derived deep interest and much enjoyment both from public and from social life, though he loved his Church and gloried in her service, yet I think it was in his domestic life that he found his truest happiness. His devotion to Woodthorne amounted almost to a passion, though it was a house which he had built in his earlier days, and one perhaps hardly suited to the position which he made for himself later. It would have shown no snobbishness on his part, had he felt that he had outgrown the home of his thirties, and that he wanted a larger and more imposing dwelling-place. But he never did. He loved every stick and stone in the place; and always returned to it with renewed delight”.
 On the surface Henry Fowler was dominant, not to say domineering, in his household. His daughter Ellen wrote: “He was the mainspring and the centre of everything, and every arrangement was made with reference to his wishes and convenience. My mother certainly had no life, and no interests, apart from his”. Yet that was not the whole story; for Edith also recalled: “My mother was not only a very good woman, but she was a very wise one, and her judgments were a great lever to all her husband’s public and private actions. Very few people outside his own immediate home circle realized how great was her influence over him, and how strong. Everything he did he talked over first with her, and he never, to my knowledge, acted contrary to her counsel”.
  It is not surprising that Henry Fowler’s two daughters became talented writers; for he had encouraged them from infancy to develop their powers of language and self-expression. Edith recalled: “With regard to his own children, he was constantly plucking them up by the roots to see how they were growing; and then trying to stimulate them to grow more quickly. He used to say: ’Now talk to me, and amuse me’. And we were trained to talk to him and amuse him all our lives. Even when we were quite little we were ordered to talk, as most other children are ordered to be quiet…”
The family context which nurtured the daughters’ talents emerges from Edith’s humorous, yet affectionate account of her father’s response to her sister Ellen’s first novel, Concerning Isabel Carnaby: “My sister’s literary success was, I believe, dearer to his heart than any success of his own…When my sister wrote this, her first novel, she read the manuscript aloud to her family before delivering it into her publisher’s hands: and my father’s immediate enthusiasm over it knew no bounds. She was immensely surprised at this; partly because she did not think much of her literary effort herself, and partly because it was contrary to my father’s custom to praise his children before their faces. He predicted from that moment that Isabel Carnaby would be a great success; and the subsequent career of the book, though a surprise to its author, was none to its author’s father. Her subsequent novels were to him sources of consuming interest. He distracted her with the most detrimental advice, he hindered her with the most hampering help, he erased her best bits and suggested artistic impossibilities; and then, when the book was at last in print and past reform, he took it to his heart, and crowed over it, and crooned over it, as a mother over her babe”.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
