Bowen, Alfred T. (1857-1948)
Bowen, Alfred Thomas
London; cabinet maker (b.1857 – d.1948)
Alfred Thomas Bowen was born in Bethnal Green in 1857, the son of a ‘Hearth Rug Maker’ and a ‘Narrow Weaver’. He has not been traced in the 1871 and 1881 Censuses, but married in 1875 aged 19 to Louisa Ellen Stone at St Thomas’s Church, Bethnal Green. In 1891 his address was 7 Sale Street, the same road in Bethnal Green where William Hall was based in 1861. On 10 October 1897 a son, William Stephen Bowen, was christened at St Thomas’s Church, by which time the family was living at 271 Cambridge Road. Entries in the London Post Office directories in 1898 and 1900 give the same address. By 1901 Bowen was in Russia Lane, described as an employer working at home, and in 1911 his address was 40 Derbyshire Street, Bethnal Green. At this time he had seven children living. Derbyshire Street was a mixed area according to Booth’s Poverty Map of 1886–1903 and a step up from Russia Lane. It seems that Bowen died in Essex in 1948 and there may be living descendants who can fill out the story.
Bowen appears in several Census returns as ‘Cabinet Maker’, though the fact that he was described as an employer rather than employed may suggest that further searches are needed to pin him to Kenton & Co. He was based in Bethnal Green, however, and could have been one of the many East End cabinet makers working from home and able to be flexible about employment. The difficult working lives of these often skilled but impecunious cabinet makers were described in Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, vol. III, 1861-2.
Several pieces of Kenton & Co. furniture are known with the stamp of ‘Bowen’ as maker, but contemporary Arts & Craft Society exhibition catalogues confuse the issue by giving the initials A [1890, cat. 316] and J [1893, cat. 70]. Both of these items were made for W. R. Lethaby, one of the partners in Kenton & Co., so they are likely to be by the same maker. A further complication is that the 1890 piece was shown by Marsh, Jones & Cribb, a firm based in Leeds, Yorkshire. It would be logical to suggest that Lethaby had recruited a known maker to Kenton & Co., but the only Bowen found so far in London in the relevant period had no Leeds connection.
Pieces by Bowen include the inlaid cabinet designed by Gimson and the set of six chairs also designed by Gimson now shared between the V&A, Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum and the Crafts Study Centre, Farnham.

Mahogany cabinet on stand with marquetry of various woods, designed by Ernest Gimson. Made by Bowen, 1891 [CIRC.404:1 to 4-1964]. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Mahogany rush seat chair designed by Ernest Gimson. Made by Alfred Bowen, 1891 [W.5:1 to 2-1989]. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Annette Carruthers
Sources: Comino, Gimson and the Barnsleys (1980); Rubens, William Richard Lethaby (1986); Cooper, Victorian and Edwardian Furniture and Interiors (1987); Kirkham, Mace & Porter, Furnishing the World: The East London Furniture Trade 1830 – 1980 (1987); Gere & Whiteway, Nineteenth-Century Design: From Pugin to Mackintosh (1993); Collard, ‘Kenton & Co’, The Decorative Arts Society 1850 to the Present (1996); Carruthers, Greensted, Roscoe, Ernest Gimson. Arts & Crafts Designer and Architect (2019); ancestry.co.uk (2020).
Occupation
Object
Ornamentation/Design
Style