Hungerford Arcade’s wonderful friend and author, Stuart Miller-Osborne has written this wonderful article entitled an American Friend. Please sit back with a nice cup of tea and enjoy reading it. I did and it was wonderful!
It has been one of early April days that after the long dark nights of winter showed Hungerford to its greatest advantage even if the wind was still a little cool.
I had been due to travel to Melksham to visit my mother but the visit had been cancelled the previous day so I had a weekend to myself.
After reading the papers and watching my favourite football team win by four goals to nil I decided to wander into town. Caron was painting the fence (a job that I could not do due to an allergy) in the hazy sunshine and I promised to bring my wife back something special. I should have guessed that it was going to be an interesting day and to a great extent it was.
I entered Hungerford Arcade with no great plans, just to look around and purchase anything that took my fancy. As normal, I gravitated towards the book section near the café and it was not long before I spotted a small blue book which had managed to find itself buried under a pile of travel books. The book was called Recollections and had been written by a certain George W Childs. I had vaguely heard of the author as he once generously lent five hundred dollars to the poet Walt Whitman so that he might purchase his Camden house. The book was only a pound so I decided to buy it along with a rather tired Victorian copy of The Pilgrims Progress by John Bunyan. My idea was that I might peruse through the books as I watched the football and rugger scores come in later in the afternoon.
By the time I returned Caron had more or less finished the fence and a lovely cup of tea awaited me. It was as I was enjoying my refreshment that I noticed the small blue American book that I had purchased had been signed. A fact that I had missed at the Arcade earlier. The dedication was as follows;
H Solome
With the kind regards of his friend
George W Childs
Philadelphia
April 7 1893
It was then I thought about the enormity of my random find. I had purchased a book for reasons aside from the dedication which I had missed. Here in my cottage in Hungerford I was holding a book which had been signed by a man who in his time had known Walt Whitman. He had also been a close friend of President Ulysses S Grant . But who was George W Childs? As I have noted I had heard of him in connection with Walt Whitman but knew very little else about him. So I decided to research his life.
George was one of those people that only the nineteenth century could throw up.
He was a man who literally rose from obscurity to become one of the leading names in America in the second half of the nineteenth century. He was born illegitimate on the 12th of May 1829 in Baltimore, Maryland and had been raised by an aunt. When he was twelve began work in a bookstore. A year later he joined the Navy leaving the service in 1843 to work as a clerk in a bookshop in Philadelphia. All this packed into his life before he was fifteen. His employer noted how trustworthy George was and soon he was helping by buying books at auction.
At the age of eighteen he ploughed his own savings in to leasing a space in the offices of the Public Ledger(a daily newspaper in Philadelphia from 1836 to 1942). He was starting his own firm. George was quite often noted as saying that he would like to own the newspaper one day. At the age of twenty-one his firm was joined in partnership by the publishing firm of R.E.Peterson & Co and with this Childs & Peterson was born.
It was a successful partnership and soon the firm grew greatly in size and value.
George who was a born businessman and also a leader in the disciplines of effective marketing. But there was another side to George which I found admirable. He was a very generous man and his philanthropy brought him a wide circle of long lasting friends. A favourite quote of his was; “Meanness is not necessary to success in business, but economy is”.
In 1864 with Anthony J Drexel he purchased the Philadelphia Public Ledger which was then a loss making newspaper. In a short space of time he turned the ailing newspaper around and it became one of the leading journals in the country. He later became involved in the (with Drexel) in the financing and planning of small communities (Wayne in Pennsylvania is an early example of these planned communities). Although I have not researched this in any depth it shares similarities with Port Sunlight and others in the United Kingdom. He was a benefactor to many and he erected memorial windows to William Cowper and George Herbert in Westminster Abbey and John Milton at St Margaret’s Westminster. He also financed a memorial to Leigh Hunt at Kensal Green and a Shakespeare fountain in Stratford-on-Avon. Along with an Edgar Allan Poe monument in Baltimore he also contributed towards a home for printers in Colorado Springs.
These are just a few of his many contributions in both America and the United Kingdom.
Sadly, George died on the 3rd of February 1894 a few months before his sixty-fifth birthday and a resolution from his employees at the Public Ledger I think says it all;
“The employees of the Public Ledger, having lost by the death of George W. Childs one who has stood to them in the relation of a kind and considerate father, find it impossible to express in formal resolutions the due sense of their great loss, but nevertheless seek to record in this minute their high appreciation of his character as it has been revealed to them in daily intercourse. He was the embodiment of kindness and benevolence; his broad sympathies made him a citizen of the world, and not merely those associated with him socially and in business, but humanity itself, lost a generous friend and noble exemplar by his death.
The book, which in a way I found almost by accident, will after I have read it find a place in my bookcase with some my other signed (or dedicated) copies. It amuses me a little to think how this small book found its way from Philadelphia to our lovely little town here in Berkshire. I could have easily have missed the book as it was at the bottom of a pile and as I have noted, I was dozy enough to initially miss the dedication.
It just confirms to me how important it is to look everywhere. Whether it be in an antiques shop or an Arcade or just generally at boot or jumble sale. Always look for the busy piles or the boxes full of almost everything. These are the locations where you might find something special. I had not intended to meet George W Childs on that bright Saturday afternoon but fate intervened and I found the book. It is often the things that you are not actively seeking that you find just by accident and this confirms to me why I find the roaming of the footpath’s of the past so interesting.
I entered Hungerford Arcade with no great plans, just to look around and purchase anything that took my fancy. As normal, I gravitated towards the book section near the café and it was not long before I spotted a small blue book which had managed to find itself buried under a pile of travel books. The book was called Recollections and had been written by a certain George W Childs. I had vaguely heard of the author as he once generously lent five hundred dollars to the poet Walt Whitman so that he might purchase his Camden house. The book was only a pound so I decided to buy it along with a rather tired Victorian copy of The Pilgrims Progress by John Bunyan. My idea was that I might peruse through the books as I watched the football and rugger scores come in later in the afternoon.
By the time I returned Caron had more or less finished the fence and a lovely cup of tea awaited me. It was as I was enjoying my refreshment that I noticed the small blue American book that I had purchased had been signed. A fact that I had missed at the Arcade earlier. The dedication was as follows;
George was one of those people that only the nineteenth century could throw up.
At the age of eighteen he ploughed his own savings in to leasing a space in the offices of the Public Ledger (a daily newspaper in Philadelphia from 1836 to 1942). He was starting his own firm. George was quite often noted as saying that he would like to own the newspaper one day. At the age of twenty-one his firm was joined in partnership by the publishing firm of R.E.Peterson & Co and with this Childs & Peterson was born.
“The employees of the Public Ledger, having lost by the death of George W. Childs one who has stood to them in the relation of a kind and considerate father, find it impossible to express in formal resolutions the due sense of their great loss, but nevertheless seek to record in this minute their high appreciation of his character as it has been revealed to them in daily intercourse. He was the embodiment of kindness and benevolence; his broad sympathies made him a citizen of the world, and not merely those associated with him socially and in business, but humanity itself, lost a generous friend and noble exemplar by his death.