Mr Cowley.

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So this really is the eponymous Mr Cowley.  That name makes the firm’s name so much more distinctive for searching purposes. And the quoted dates are his dates at James Archer’s firm. But  why did James Archer, born 1836, and who had started his transport business at age 21 in 1857, go into partnership with someone about 21 years his junior? (who was born in 1856 or 7). Presumably because he had no son of his own, to come into the business. James Archer married in 18xx (will paste-below information about his marriage, from his cv):

Marriage: 

  1. James married Fanny Porter on Tuesday 31st March 1874; 
  2. The wedding was at St Peter-le-Bailey church, (now the chapel of St Peter’s Hall college) Oxford;
  3. The wedding was conducted by the Rev Canon Linton; 
  4. The wedding was followed by a wedding breakfast at 35 Hythe Bridge Street, at 9 am;
  5. Searches show that the church of St Peter le Bailey, the third of that name on the site, is now (2008) the chapel of St Peter’s College (known in Oxford in my (pba’s) day as ‘St Peter’s Hall’, which was founded 55 years later in 1929) was actually built in 1874 (presumably meaning completed), so, in early 1874, the wedding must have been in a brand-new church, just along New Inn Hall Street, from where Wesley Memorial Church now stands (completed later in 1878), where the Methodist branch of the family later went for Sunday services – see map of the area  (now scanned-in);
  6. Fanny/Frances is noted as the only daughter of the late Mr Thomas Porter;
  7. Fanny Porter’s baptism certificate shows she was born on November 13th 1839, and baptized on 25th December 1858 at the age of 19 years and one month - 16 years before she was married at the age of 35;
  8. Fanny Porter died on18th April 1908, aged 69 (about 14 years before James), and is interred at Osney cemetery. According to ‘WGRA.notes.1’: ‘Fanny Archer, wife of James Archer died at 320 Banbury Road, Oxford, 18th April 1908 age 69 years’. So, perhaps James and Fanny were living at 320 Banbury Road in 1908, and had moved there from Kidlington, where they were in 1901 – see census results below.
  9. So she was married for 34 years from about the age of 35;


From the above, it is clear that James Archer married in 1874, when he was age 38 (17 years after he founded the business) and his wife Fanny was age 35, and it must have been evident within about 5 years, or less, that they were not going to have children. But James Archer had taken-on Mack Cowley in 1876, two years after he married. It appears (from the details in James Archer’s cv - click here to go to it) that Mark Cowley was taken-on as a clerk at Archer & Co, having been born 12th June 1856 at New Osney, the son of Thomas Cowley, carpenter, and having been a railway clerk in 1871, and being a “clerk” with James Archer, in the census of 1881, 5 years after joining him. As for the date at which Mark Cowley became a partner with James Archer, I do not at the moment have a note of the date. Presumably, what happened was that James Archer took Cowley (and perhaps Rippington likewise, later) into partnership when he felt confident enough of their qualities after working with them for a number of  years. The terms of their partnerships will probably never be known and may have been generous or not. That would have affected very much the cost to WGRA to buy them out, after inheriting James Archer’s share of the business in 1919. But by then James Archer was 83 years old and was passing-on, effectively, his entire share of the business, to the only member of the family who seemed apt to continue it. I assume that James Archer must have needed a clerk for his business, long before Mack Cowley joined it in 1876, so Mack Cowley must presumably have been more successful than the other clerks that James Archer hired. (this paragraph added 05.12.16). We have much to be thankful-for from James Archer, in the sense that his providence effectively financed this branch (the WGRA branch) of the Archer family for a long time after James  Archer’s death, by providing a successful business which generated reliable income for a 4 or 5 further decades for WGRA and his 5 children and their families).

Summarising from the above, on the life of Mack Cowley. He was born in Osney, west Oxford, in 1856, five years after the Great Exhibition of 1851, at a time of great enterprise and industrial (especially railway) development in Britain. He left school, probably at age 14 or 15 and became a railway clerk, possibly working in the Grandpont area where James Archer’s business (in Pembroke Street) and his stabling for the horses used to haul his vans, were located. Perhaps he met James Archer there during his lunchtime breaks (if any, in Victorian times)! And Mack Cowley was taken-on in 1876 as James Archer’s clerk, two years before the birth (to James Archer’s brother Alfred George Archer, and his wife Olive Emma Reed.Archer) of their sixth child, William George Reed Archer (“WGRA”), at Shillingford, some miles downstream of Oxford on the Thames, not far from Wallingford, where Alfred George was an officer of Her Majesty’s Revenue Service. He was still with the firm in about 1894 when James Archer’s nephew, WGRA was taken-on as an office boy for about a year, or less, before WGRA went off to Holland to work for his (maternal) other uncle Ernest Albert Reed in his paper mill in Kaisersveer, where his brother Ernest was apparently doing well. And apparently Mark/Mack Cowley got on well with James Archer and in due course became his partner in the business. I can only assume that Mack Cowley had made himself so useful to James Archer by that time, that he was able to ask that his name be included in a re-branded name of the firm as “Archer Cowley & Co” instead of “Archer & Co”. Perhaps that reduced his capital-input requirement (if any), at the time of his partnership. Certainly, Mack Cowley’s photograph suggests to me that he was a determined individual, and a force to be reckoned-with. He served the firm for 24 years in the 19th century and 33 years in the 20th, totalling 57 years - an extraordinary record by today’s standards. (**) Presumably he was involved in the management of the business. More on that topic may emerge when I enter on this site the data from the record books. He was still with the firm, of course, in 1926, when WGRA’s son FGBA, my father, joined his father in the business. Mack Cowley had been in that business since two years before FGBA’s father was born!  That 57-year-record of service was only exceeded by ‘Uncle James’ Archer, himself, who served the firm from its founding in 1857 (age 21), to his retirement in 1922 (or was it 1919?)  i.e. 43 years in the 19th century and 22 years in the 20th, totalling 65 years (or 62?). FGBA served from 1926 to 1969 i.e. 43 years in all. His father, WGRA, was with the firm from 1919 to about 1969 (the year of his death) i.e. 50 years. Of course we do not know how much serious work was done in the latter years by those very old men: the long lunches perhaps, the afternoon nap, and so on. Equally, not giving up until so late tells its own story of having no other consuming interests - unless there were some compelling reason to work so long. (**) But Mack Cowley was by no means a rich man (as James Archer was) when he died, judging from his will. I will add some details about that when I can. 


qaa© Philip B Archer 2014