Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 1.djvu/160

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Bemrose
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Bemrose

to the end of his life. Four years later he again visited Tolstoi while making plans on behalf of a committee of Friends for the transportation to Cyprus and Canada of the Dukhobortsi. In May 1901 he visited New England, where his friends were numerous, and he received from Harvard University in June the honorary degree of M.A.

He died at his house on the Cotteswold Hills on 5 May 1902, and was buried at Painswick. Bellows wore to the end the quaker dress, and used the simple language in vogue in his youth. He was a teetotaller, and a vegetarian from 1890. He married in January 1869, at Clitheroe, Lancashire, Elizabeth, daughter of Mark Earnshaw, surgeon, of that place. His wife, four sons, and five daughters survived him.

Besides works already mentioned and papers in antiquarian periodicals, Bellows published: 1. ‘A Winter Journey from Gloucester to Norway in 1863,’ 1867. 2. ‘Two Days' Excursion to Llanthony Abbey and the Black Mountains,’ 1868. 3. ‘Ritualism or Quakerism? and Who sent thee to baptise?’ 1870. 4. ‘A Week's Holiday in the Forest of Dean,’ 1881, many times reprinted. 5. ‘Chapters of Irish History,’ 1886. 6. ‘William Lucy and his Friends of the Cotteswold Club Thirty-five Years Ago,’ 1894. 7. ‘Evolution in the Monastic Orders, and Survivals of Roman Architecture in Britain’ (‘Proc. Cotteswold Naturalists' Field Club’), 1898. 8. ‘The Truth about the Transvaal War and the Truth about War,’ 1900, translated into French and German.

He was the inventor of a cylindrical calculator for rapid and accurate reckoning of workmen's wages, and compiled a series of concentric calculators for converting the metric system into English equivalents and vice versa.

[Life and Letters, by his wife, 1904; Morse's Life of O. W. Holmes, 1896; Life of Max Müller, 1902, vol. i.; Hoar's Autobiography, ii. 449; Nature, 1902, lxvi. 113; Elkinton's Doukhobors in Russia, 1903; The Times, 6 May 1902; Boase and Courtney, Bibliotheca Cornubiensis, i. 20; Smith's Catalogue of Friends' Books.]

C. F. S.

BEMROSE, WILLIAM (1831–1908), writer on wood-carving, born at Derby on 30 Dec. 1831, was second son in a family of three sons and one daughter of William Bemrose of Derby, founder in 1827 of the printing and publishing firm of William Bemrose & Sons of Derby and London. His mother was Elizabeth Ride of Lichfield. His elder brother, Henry Howe Bemrose (1827-1912), was conservative member of parliament for Derby from 1895 to 1900 and was knighted in 1897.

After education at King William's College in the Isle of Man, Bemrose, like his brother Henry, joined his father's business. The business, which passed to the management of the two brothers on their father's retirement in 1857, grew rapidly in all directions. A publishing house was established in London, with branch offices at Leeds and Manchester, and the printing works were repeatedly extended, Bemrose, although always active in the printing business, pursued many other interests. In middle life he became a director of the Royal Crown Derby Porcelain Works, and thus helped to revive an important local industry.

Bemrose chiefly devoted his leisure to travel and to a study of varied forms of art, on which he wrote with much success. Practising in early life artistic pastimes like wood-carving, fret-cutting, and modelling in clay, he compiled useful manuals concerning them for the instruction of amateurs which were well illustrated and circulated widely. The chief of these was his 'Manual of Wood-carving' (1862), the first work of its kind in England, which attained standard rank, reaching a twenty-second edition in 1906. There followed 'Fret-cutting and Perforated Carving ' (Derby, 1868) ; 'Buhl Work and Marquetry' (1872); 'Paper Rosette Work and how to Make it' (1873) ; 'Instructions in Fret-cutting with Designs' (1875) ; and 'Mosaicon : or Paper Mosaic and how to Make it' (1875).

Meanwhile Bemrose's association with the local pottery led him to publish three authoritative works on china. The first, 'The Pottery and Porcelain of Derbyshire' (1870), he wrote in collaboration with A. Wallis. But 'Bow, Chelsea and Derby Porcelain' (1898) and 'Longton Hall Porcelain' (1906) were solely his own. Bemrose was also a clever amateur painter in oils and water-colours and collected pictures, china, and articles of 'vertu,' especially rare specimens of Egyptian art, which he acquired on visits to the East. In 1885 he published a sumptuously illustrated and finely printed 'Life and Work of Joseph Wright, A.R.A., commonly called Wright of Derby.' He also wrote on technical education and archæological and ceramic subjects. Bemrose, who was elected a F.S.A. in 1905, played an active part in local affairs of Derby. He was chairman of the Derby Art Gallery Committee, a member of