of the famous artists and writers of the day”. The most lasting of these con- tributions were his distinctive conceptions of cover designs, endpapers, cal- ligraphy and title sections for the Everyman’s Library, the first fifty volumes of which Dent published in February 1906, and were used for thirty years until the duo of Eric Ravilious and Eric Gill updated the series. A third brother, Hubert Knowles, was born in October 1882 and little is recorded of his life. While he did not follow his brothers into artistic careers, he did share Horace’s love of the theatre, starring alongside him in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream around 1903. Hubert played Nic Bottom and Horace played Peter Quince, and an illustration by Horace of Nic Bottom, dating from around this time, is present in the archive. Like Horace, his first job after school was for a engineering firm, though while his brother was a draughtsman for the firm, Hubert’s work was clerical and he later went on to work at the Labour Exchange. Horace was born two years later on the 22nd July, by which time the family had moved to 57 Bow Lane, a dwelling converted from Esther Hawes’s seventeenth century almshouses and adjacent to Collier’s, the lo- cal furniture maker. In the evenings after school, along with Charles and Reginald, he took classes at the Craft School in Aldgate at a time when Gilbert Cooke, a disciple of Ruskin, was its principal. During his schooldays, no doubt influenced by his father’s brief foray into playwriting, Horace and his brother Hubert joined a local dramatic society started by Sir Hu- bert Llewellyn Smith, playing first Peter Quince in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and then Doctor Caius in The Merry Wives Of Windsor. As Horace later wrote these performances “fostered a love of acting which was there already, and many times since the artist became actor and portrayed many roles on stage”. This early love of the theatre is recalled in his archive by his costume designs and illustrations for Alice Buckton’s play Eager Heart. After leaving school he was apprenticed as an engineering draughts- man with a Millwall firm called Samuel Cutler and Sons. Remembering this time, Knowles wrote “the least said about this period the better for it was a most unhappy time for the miserable wretch who wanted, most desperately, to draw (but NOT IRON and STEEL THINGS) all the day and not just in the evenings when he was tired.”
Above: Nic Bottom , pen and ink drawing by Horace J. Knowles, 1903 (Item 197). Below: Reginald Knowles’s designs for J.M. Dent’s Everyman’s Library.
14 HORACE J. KNOWLES
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