Samuel Bowling
Bowling's father: corn and seed merchant of 57 High Street, Lower Binfield. An honest, obliging, permanently busy little man who was ruined over fifteen years by a chain seedsman and never worked out what was happening to him.
To go on trading honestly and have things look up presently. To the end he believed that with thrift, hard work and fair dealing a man cannot go wrong.
The book
At a glance
- Bowling's father; corn and seed merchant
- 57 High Street, Lower Binfield
- Small, grey, spectacled, mealy; a bushy moustache
- Bowling's Mixture, a cage-bird seed — Uncle Ezekiel's theory
- Sarazins', a chain seedsman that opened in the market-place around 1909
- Beginning of 1915; influenza turned to pneumonia
- Part II, chapters 2 to 8
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeSamuel Bowling inherited the shop from his own father, a cobbler who had bettered himself late in life by marrying a seedsman's widow. He had been educated at Walton Grammar School, where the farmers and better-off tradesmen sent their sons, and he knew the business inside out. His son remembers him as a small, grey, quiet man in shirtsleeves and a white apron, always dusty with meal — meal on the backs of his hands, in the lines of his face, and in what was left of his butter-coloured hair.
The shop did a petty trade: poultry food and fodder for the tradesmen's horses, rather than the farm business, because he had no delivery van and could not afford to give long credit. He was, in his son's account, a very honest man and a very obliging one, anxious to supply good stuff and swindle nobody, which even then was not the way to get on. He had neither the nerve to borrow and expand nor the imagination to invent new lines. The one exception was Bowling's Mixture, a cage-bird seed made from about twenty kinds of weed grown under wire netting in the back yard, famous over a radius of nearly five miles — and that had been Uncle Ezekiel's idea.
What killed the shop was Sarazins', a big retail seedsman with branches all over the home counties, which took a lease in the market-place around 1909 and fitted it out in bright green paint and gilt lettering with red and green garden tools in the window. Within six months they had the petty gentry, and Samuel Bowling's profits, which had climbed ten or twenty pounds a year for decades, went down with a bump. He decided it was probably these here motors. He never understood that a firm was systematically undercutting him, and would not have believed a business could be run that way, because things had not happened like that when he was young.
He ruptured himself lifting sacks in 1911 and spent weeks in hospital, which ate another hole in his capital. He mortgaged his life-insurance policy in 1913. His son, who was by then a grocer's assistant with correspondence-course opinions about modern salesmanship, was privately a little impatient with him for not managing better, and says he did not see, and neither did anyone else, that his father was being slowly eaten alive.
How the book draws them
- The face behind the counterA small, grey, quiet little man, nearly forty when his son first remembers him and about fifty by 1909. A round head, a blunt nose, a rather bushy moustache and spectacles. What hair he had left was butter-coloured, the same shade as his son's, and most of it was gone. He ate with a preoccupied, sidelong working of the moustache, having few back teeth.
- How he changed after 1911From the year Joe walked out, the moustache is much greyer and he seems to his son to have grown a lot smaller. Bowling thinks the picture he actually carries — a little grey man with a round, lined, anxious face behind dusty spectacles — dates from then rather than from the prosperous years.
- Always covered in mealExcept on Sundays and the odd weekday evening his son never remembers him without meal on him. The picture that stays is the bald head with the mealy patch, the spectacles, the grey moustache, and a stump of pencil moistened between the lips as he adds up figures in a notebook in the cubby-hole behind the counter.
- The Sunday afternoon readIn slippers by the parlour fire he worked slowly through The People — Bowling's mother preferred the News of the World, which she thought had more murders — and at tea would talk it over: fires, shipwrecks, scandals, the new flying machines, and the man swallowed by a whale in the Red Sea and taken out three days later bleached white. He was sceptical about the whale and the flying machines and believed everything else.
- Arguing with his half-brotherDuring the Boer War he came back at Uncle Ezekiel's pro-Boer opinions with the white man's burden and our duty to the poor blacks, in a quiet, worried, conscientious voice, and got laughed in the face for it. They were barely on speaking terms for a week.
- The threats he never carried outHe quoted "Spare the rod and spoil the child" and told stories, which his son later thought were lies, about the thrashings his own father gave him with a leather strap. When he finally fetched a strap for Joe, Joe struggled and yelled and he managed a couple of whacks.
- The talk about the shopAs trade fell away he kept repeating the same words — times were bad, trade seemed very slack, very slow, but things would look up presently. He said them while working a crumb out of what was left of his back teeth.
- Under the sackAfter the errand boy went, his son's clearest picture of him is crossing the yard bent double under a sack weighing a hundred and fifty pounds, like a snail under its shell, with the anxious spectacled face looking up from underneath it.
- The name burned offHe died at the beginning of 1915, of influenza that turned to pneumonia, without ever going bankrupt. Sarazins' bought up the stock and paid a little for the goodwill. Riding past the shop after his mother's funeral, Bowling saw it shut and dusty with the "S. Bowling" burned off the signboard with a plumber's blowflame.