Opposite: Photograph of Horace J. Knowles, appended to The Family Of Knowles, by Horace J. Knowles, 1951. Above From Clockwise: “He’s Sharpening The Fiddle” , pen and ink drawing by Horace Knowles of his father, 1912 (Item 202). Photograph of Reginald L. Knowles, dated June 1951 and appended to The Family Of Knowles, by Horace J. Knowles, 1951.
ace notes that he played piano and concertina and “at one particular concert he was presented to the Emperor Napoleon III.” In the autumn of 1875 he married Emma Dece Scutt, about whom little is recorded beyond her com- ing to London from Wareham in Dorset with her sister Sarah. Emma, whose middle name Horace would later give his daughter, taught at the local in- fant’s school and, later, worked as a housekeeper for a local gentleman. The family settled in Poplar, East London. Horace had three elder brothers; a sister, Marion Charlotte, had died in infancy two years before his birth. Charles Francis, the eldest, was born in 1876 and, having attended the Hove School of Art, was the first of the Knowles boys to become an artist. Impaired by disability - for which his mother resigned her teaching job in order to aid his care - he nonethe- less had success, joining his brother Reginald at the Carlton Studio during the First World War and writing a number of self-illustrated short stories. A keen Dickensian, his style varied from that of his brothers, showing the influence of Hogarth and Cruikshank in his period sketches. In spite of aes- thetic differences, Charles had clearly inherited his father’s taste for verse, and contributed some lines for Horace’s early drafts of Peeps Into Fairyland. Reginald was born three years later. After school, he spent some time in his mother’s native Dorset with an aunt and uncle before returning to London to take his first job as an artist. It was at the publishing house of J. M. Dent, where he honed his skills as a designer and illustrator. Horace recalls how Reginald made “countless drawings for the firm and met many
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