This post concerns the profitable life and mysterious death of a publisher. The story was unearthed by Kay Symons during her work on the Polstead Road History Project (PRHP).
Samuel Mowbray was a bookseller and publisher, managing the successful business founded by his father in 1858—E R Mowbray Ltd—with branches in Oxford and London, which persisted well into the twentieth century.
Its early mission was closely connected to the Anglo-Catholic revival within the Church of England initiated by the Oxford Movement, led by John Keble, John Henry Newman, and Edward Pusey, which had gained national prominence by then.
The company collaborated with influential Anglican writers and contributed to shaping religious thought and practice in England. Some of the titles published under that imprint still appear on Bloomsbury Publishing’s backlist, which acquired the list from Continuum in 2011.
They also developed into an ecclesiastical supplier, providing church furnishings and ornaments and thereby influencing church aesthetics. It is not a surprise that Samuel had been a churchwarden at St Barnabas’, north Oxford’s Anglo-Catholic church.
Samuel Mowbray was living at 19 Polstead Road with his much younger wife and three-year-old daughter when, one Saturday morning in 1897, he was found dead on the floor of his bathroom at the age of forty-seven, asphyxiated by the gas from the geyser that heated the bathwater. Was it merely an accident, or was the story more complicated than that?
At about 10.30 on the morning of Saturday, 23rd October 1897, his twenty-five-year-old wife, Hortense, went out, leaving Samuel in bed. He had been suffering from poor health recently and had not come down as usual that morning.
At around 1 pm, when she returned home, she was surprised not to find him still in bed. She discovered that the bathroom door was locked and could not get a reply from inside. She ran to Chalfont Road to a neighbour, Mr Pinnock, who managed to find a builder, Mr Horne of 90 Kingston Road, who forced the bathroom door open, finding Samuel lying dead on the floor in only his nightshirt, with gas escaping from the geyser that heated the bathwater.
The doctor said he had died of suffocation by coal gas.
The question for the coroner’s jury then was whether Samuel had taken his own life or whether it was a tragic accident.
The gas was on but not lit; there were matches on a chest of drawers in the bathroom, but, strangely, no sign of an attempt to strike one. There was no water in the bath. The key was in the door, and the window closed and fastened, just as one might expect if the gassing had been deliberate.
His wife said he had not been in good health for some time past and had been very anxious about business matters but had been bright and cheerful when she left him that morning.
His doctor said that he had attended Samuel quite recently and that he had been depressed in spirits and in a general low condition of health. Apparently, he had suffered from influenza in the spring. In the middle of the previous week, Samuel had summoned the doctor to see his daughter, little Hortense, who had suffered an accident. He did not prescribe anything to the father, as he saw no need.
That very morning, Samuel had told his wife that the burners in the geyser were not working properly and needed cleaning. The geyser was apparently constructed to light itself if the pilot light door were fully pulled back. The coroner had seen the balance sheet of the business, which showed that “pecuniarily everything was pre-eminently satisfactory”.
The jury returned a verdict of accidental death, but is that really the entire story? Suicide was a crime in England until 1961 and was considered shameful to the family. As recently as 1822, someone’s possessions could be forfeited to the Crown if they were found guilty of “self-murder”.
Therefore, “accidental death” was often chosen as the verdict, even when suicide appeared likely. However, suicide was also regarded as a sin by Christians, and the Anglican church did not officially lift the ban on full Christian funerals for suicides until 2017. Samuel was a man of faith, so how desperate would he have had to be to take his own life?
We shall never know if the jury got to the truth of the matter.
An accidental death?
