Welcome to Phil's Family History Website!
We start (see “General Family Tree” top right) from two John Archers of Oxford who were 19th century brewers, and whose siblings were carriers, coal merchants, and an itinerant excise officer (inter alia), and some of whose descendants, from the mid-1920s to the latter 1950s, found a sort of 'promised land or golden country' at William Archer’s inherited ‘country seat’ at Somerville, 130 Banbury Road, Oxford. Related families include the Gilders of Oxford who were 19th century tailors, the Reeds of Somerset and Devon, who were 19th century millers and entrepreneurs, the Penfolds and Wells of Surrey, who were 19th century, gardeners and Chrysanthemum-growers, auctioneers and latterly estate agents, and many other families of course. This 'work-in-hand’ site will never be ‘complete’.
The intention is to make available, completely non-commercially, and on a ‘private study’ basis, to those half-a-dozen or so family members to whom, if anyone, it may be of interest, this 'colourful tapestry' or, you may say 'scrap-book', of life in Oxford and South-London, and many other places, over the last two-hundred or so years. Possibly it may link the members of this disparate family group, in a way not previously attempted. In my dreams I see the tapestry as forging an identity for the group, and becoming, in a way, its talisman. Wiring together lives in Oxford’s Jericho and London’s Southwark, or Surrey’s Merstham and Lancashire’s Middleton almost as effortlessly as the genes have done, is my delight. Not just a fantasy, I hope. But equally I'm not claiming rigour in my research. There will be many shortcomings, errors, inaccuracies, and inconsistencies. I know. Email me, please, if you have time, about important errors or omissions or new information that I should be aware of. I will do my best to attend to them as soon as possible. Over time they will be corrected. The basis for comparision is that this information, or some of it anyway, has not hitherto been readily available at all. For example, my grandpa William Archer, splendid man that he was, wrote the history of Archer Cowley & Co on the back of a small envelope (which envelope I am very pleased to say I have in my records), and the wonderful (I believe, though I never saw it) illustrated history scrapbook of the firm was passed to Cantays who took over the business in the 1960s, without copying (as far as I can tell) any of it for the Archer family, and they have lost it. End of story. Until now. So much to do!
Instances of achievement in the family include GJ Churchward, the locomotive engineer of the Great Western Railway from 1900 to 1922, though he is not a blood relative, but only a relation by marriage. Another is Gwenda Morgan, my mother Gwen Archer's first cousin, who became well-known as a wood-engraver and whose very characteristic work is widely available through the internet under her name. Ann Archer Archer, probably completely unknown outside the family, who lived for many years with her brother Thomas in Adelaide Street, Jericho has left us a wonderful sample of her appliqué skill - a bedspread beautifully decorated with images including at least one current event of the time namely hot-air ballooning. Lizzie Gilder, wife of William Archer, is another family artist, whose “At Oxford’,a view of Oxford castle (signed “LG”, for Lizzie Gilder) is seen below on this page. Another achiever was William Wells the chrysanthemum-grower-and-international exhibitor and founder of the firm Wells of Merstham, Surrey. And several others - not least, Gwen Penfold, my mother, herself, whose piano-playing brought such joy to all who heard her, and in particular her three sons who grew up knowing every note and phrase and nuance of such challenging piano works as Chopin's Ballade No.1 in G minor and his posthumous Fantasie impromptu, the Debussy Arabesques, and Ibert’s 'Little White Donkey’, to name but a few. Gwen’s younger brother Raymond Penfold, wartime radar boffin, radio amateur and hero of my youthful days is another whose story needs to be told. And of course there is James Archer, who founded in 1857 at the age of 21 (and probably borrowing his father John Archer’s brewery horse and cart for the purpose) the transport business which became “Arher Cowley & Co” whose early twentieth century letter-head is shown as the banner (above) for the pages of this website.
Ernest Archer, elder brother of William Archer, the owner of Somerville, is another member of the family whose life lends colour to this chronicle. In 1912 he became an aviator, constructing a bamboo-based aircraft frame, powered by a motor-cyle engine and gained his pilot’s licence from the then-dominant French aviation authority and flew his aircraft in his adopted home-country, Holland, at Twello, well before the outbreak of The Great War of 1914-1918. Ernest made a career in the sales side of the automotive industry, abandoning his apparently intended metier of paper-making with his (by then) successful Uncle Albert Edwin Reed at Raamsdonksveer in Holland, as indeed did his brother William who had likewise spent some years learning that business and the language in the Netherlands. William’s eldest son Arthur (my ‘Uncle Arthur’) perhaps adopted his Uncle Ernest as a childhood hero, as Arthur’s initially-chosen career path was likewise ‘automotive-based’ in that he worked for the Oxford firm of Morris Motors in the test department and drove a ‘works-entered’ supercharged MG in the Monte Carlo Rally at least once and achieving very creditable results. Oxford itself, the home of my youth, the brewery in St Aldates, Oxford run by my 19th century ancestors, Port Meadow, Oxford, where the ‘golden afternoons’ of my youth were spent fishign and swimming, the paper-making factory at Raamsdonksveer where my ‘Reed’ forebear Albert Edwin established one of his many businesses, and his nephews Ernest and William came to learn about it, rowing on the Isis, railways around Oxford and elsewhere - these are all chosen highlights from the mixture of the mundane and routine events in many lives, which I will try to illustrate in due course.
Look esewhere for a celebration of wealth, conventional status and influence, and a hierarchical society, though there are one or two examples in the family. This site rejoices in life itself and its 'ceaseless round' and variety, and the colourful tapestry it weaves around us all. A mute inglorious Milton perhaps this family has. Gwenda Morgan, herself very much of a retiring disposition, certainly did justice to him in her beautiful Golden Cockerell Press edition of Grey's Elegy. Possibly we have a guiltless Cromwell, who knows? Some involvement, certainly, in administration at a local Rutland level in the first decade of the 21st Century. At least some instances, I trust and believe, of Dorothea Brooke's example of a life whose effect was "incalculably diffusive: the growing good of the world being partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs". But perhaps this website may do a little to shine some virtual light on those lives and into those peaceful tombs. If so, one of my life's lattermost great tasks will be accomplished.
picture here please really
Lizzie Gilder (wife of William George Reed Archer)’s “At Oxford”, with the castle, now the Malmaison Hotel, visible in the background. What date, I wonder? At a guess, she would not have had time to pull-off a work like this after she was married, so if that’s right, it’s before 1902. Perhaps it was during the years that William Archer was in Holland (about 1894 - 1900) when she was living in Mr George Blake(the house-furnisher of Little Clarendon Street)’s household, as his adopted daughter, after her mother (sister of Mr Blake’s wife) died when Lizzie was about 7 in (about: pba to check, doesn’t seem right) 1884.