CAHS Snapshots July 26: A Missing Link Restored – Peter Ellis Harmer, Printer in Cirencester

With contributions from Cirencester Archaeological & Historical Society, Cirencester Civic Society, members & friends

Reverential and concise, tombstone inscriptions as we know them must omit much more than they state. One means by which the researcher may give voice to these silences is to supply a place of birth, a datum which proves particularly significant in the case of Peter Ellis Harmer (1804-1870) whose grave is tucked away in the back corner of St John Baptist churchyard, Cirencester.

Unfussy but dignified, the headstone’s ogive design frames the core Christian credo from 1 Corinthians 13, suggesting a family of piety and a certain standing in the community. The inscription itself, of course, affords no inkling of the temper and fortunes of the deceased.

The key in this case lies in the bond of ‘Harmer’ with the Wilts & Gloucestershire Standard. In her 1996 history of the Bailey family of Dursley, for many years owners of the Standard – the title of which, Family in Print, could readily apply to the bloodline at issue here – Anne Hayes, Standard editor from 1985 to 1994, notes that the Harmer family, printers and publishers of Stroud, also came to play a leading role in periodicals at Cirencester, notably in the persons of George Henry and William Scotford Harmer (uncle and nephew).

What her account omits is the twists of fate by which Stroud and Cirencester branches of Harmers come to be intertwined. At this point, Peter Ellis steps from the shadows. Quite how Ellis, born at Stroud in 1804, and his bride-to-be Ann Jones, a native of Cirencester, came for a season to be resident at South Hamlet, then a detached portion of Hempsted parish to the south of Gloucester, cannot now be known, though the inference is that they were led thither by the vagaries of employment.

They certainly could not have supposed that their marrying at the church of St Swithun in the dying days of 1829 would give rise to one of the most eminent newspaper houses in the region.

Peter Ellis, as scion of a family of printers at Stroud, would at this point have been at the second stage of the customary apprentice-journeyman-master trajectory. The couple next appear at Monmouth, where their first child George Henry was baptised on 24 October 1830; but of greater significance is the birth in 1832 of a daughter, Maria, at Cirencester, announcing the fledgling family’s decisive gravitating to Ann’s place of birth. The family lived in Gloucester Street and later in Dollar Street.

The final determinant in the making of this newspaper dynasty, however, was yet to appear. Founded in 1837 at Malmesbury, the Wilts & Gloucestershire Standard did not migrate to Cirencester until 1840, by which point Peter Ellis had worked here as a printer for the better part of a decade. His three sons were to follow his calling, tacitly at the Standard, if only as an initiation to the world of work.

In the event, William Bishop (1834-1911) and Alfred Thomas (1837-1904) elected to pursue other vocations while remaining rooted in the town. Only George Henry (1830-1911) stuck doggedly to the calling, rising to editor then proprietor of the Standard. William Bishop’s career shift in middle years into local government was further overshadowed in the publishing business by two of his sons: the stature, as local press moguls, of William Scotford (1856-1836) and Harry (sic – baptised thus, 1865-1943) Harmer was to mark the apogee of this family in print.

This fuller story is something for another day, and only the first glimmers of such pre-eminence would have been apparent that winter’s day in 1870 when Peter Ellis Harmer was committed to earth. Yet the future attainments of the clan he had founded at Cirencester prompt us to view his memorial in a new light. Notations literally set in stone take on a figurative fluidity when the attainments of descendants are taken into account. Historian as ventriloquist. Renown reflected backwards.

Andrew Bathe

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