Chambers brothers honoured with oak trees

William and Robert Chambers were honoured today, Friday November 6, by the planting of two oak trees.

A plaque was also erected to commemorate their efforts in Peebles.

Councillor Graham Garvie, chair of the Peebles Common Good Fund, and Beltane Queen, Rosie Bowick, planted the trees to mark the 150th anniversary of the opening of the Chambers Institution in 1859.

The brothers, both from Peebles, founded one of the great 19th-century publishing firms, W. & R. Chambers and its descendant, Chambers Harrap.

The trees are planted a short distance to the right of the main gates to Hay Lodge Park, opposite the entrance to the cemetery.

William and Robert were born into a rich, mill-owning family in 1800 and 1802 respectively, at the height of the Napoleonic Wars with France.

In fact it was war with the French which brought about a drastic change in the family fortunes, and turned the Chambers brothers from middle-class lads receiving a grammar-school education, into poverty-stricken boys who had to leave school and work to support their family.

Their father feeling pity for the many French prisoners-of-war garrisoned in Peebles, gave them cloth to make clothes on credit. On their departure, the French prisoners promised that they would repay their debts as soon as they returned home, but never did.

The Chambers family was ruined, and in 1813 the family left Peebles for Edinburgh.

Robert remained to finish his education, but William was forced to find work to help support the family.

In Edinburgh, William was apprenticed to a bookseller, at a sum of 4 shillings a week.

This made him self-supporting, but far from wealthy; a keen reader, he would rise at 5am to read by the early-morning light as he did not have enough money for candles.

Robert was an avid reader too. A deformity in his feet left him lame and unable to join in games at school and he would swap his 'jeelie pieces' (jam sandwiches) for books.

He was a clever boy, but his family could not afford to send him to university, so he too moved to Edinburgh, rented a one-roomed shop in Leith Walk, and set himself up as a bookseller.

He had his own library and what was left of his father's library (acquired in more prosperous times) for stock. He was just 16 years old.

William's apprenticeship came to an end when he turned 18 and he joined Robert in the shop in Leith Walk.

Although their beginnings were modest, they began to do well. At the age of 19, William helped unpack the books for an Edinburgh book fair and was rewarded with £10's worth of stock, the money to be repaid when he had sold the books in his shop.

This gave them more, and much-needed, stock to sell, which in turn encouraged more customers to visit the shop.

More stock and more customers led to more sales and a larger profit, and they invested some of the profits in the purchase of a small hand press.

With no training in printing or binding, William and Robert printed, bound and published 750 copies of The Songs of Robert Burns in about 1819. This was the nearest thing to a guaranteed best-seller in 19th-century Edinburgh, and brought further profits and some fame.

They took work printing bills and notices and other successes followed, including Traditions of Edinburgh, written by Robert and published by the brothers in 1824.

Their fame continued to grow, attracting many visitors to their shop including Sir Walter Scott, who became a great friend of Robert's.

Education, and making information available to as many people as possible, were always priorities for the brothers.

And so in 1832 they began to publish The Chambers's Journal. This was a weekly, 16-page journal containing articles - many of them written by Robert - on subjects such as history, religion, language and science.

It was an immediate success and within a few years the weekly circulation had risen to 84,000 copies.

The Chambers's Journal was followed in 1834 by Chambers's Information for the People. This was a series of sheets on subjects such as science, maths, history, geography and literature, bound in sets. Eventually around 170,000 sets were sold, amounting to over 2 million individual sheets.

This publication also saw some success abroad; a US edition was published, and it was translated into French (under the title Information pour le peuple) and - more surprisingly perhaps - into Welsh.

In 1835, the brothers started work on Chambers's Educational Course, a series of short works and school books. There were eventually more than 100 titles in this series on almost every subject.

1859 saw the publication of the first part of Chambers's Encyclopedia, which was published in 520 parts between 1859 and 1868, and, in 1867, they published their first dictionary, Chambers's Etymological Dictionary, by James Donald.

A larger version of this dictionary, Chambers's English Dictionary, was published in 1872, (with a second edition in 1898); Chambers's Biographical Dictionary was published in 1897; and a compact edition of the English dictionary, Chambers's Twentieth Century Dictionary, in 1901.

It was this educational publishing which made William and Robert famous.

Robert was a learned man in his own right, and as well as contributing many of the articles for the Journal, and writing books for his brother to publish, he was also a leading evolutionist.

His Vestiges of Creation, published anonymously in London in 1844 and credited as a precursor of Darwin's Origins of the Species, caused considerable controversy in the United Kingdom.

Both brothers were also renowned philanthropists: they gave money to restore St Giles' Cathedral in Edinburgh; William was Lord provost of Edinburgh twice; and they both received honorary law degrees (William from the University of Edinburgh, Robert from the University of St Andrews).

In 1859 the Chambers Institution, on the High Street in Peebles, was gifted to the townspeople by William Chambers for their 'social, moral and intellectual improvement'.

By the end of the 19th century, W & R Chambers's was one of the largest English-language publishers in the world.

However last week it emerged that Chambers, now properly Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd following the acquisition of the Harrap bilingual dictionary list in the early 1990s, will close its Edinburgh headquarters on Hogmanay.

All 27 staff at the publishers have been given redundancy notices, and from January 1, Chambers titles will be managed by London-based Hodder Education, while Harrap will move to Larousse in Paris.

Negotiations are still ongoing with the National Union of Journalists claiming the operation could yet be saved and a buyer found for the Chambers side of the business.

This would be warmly welcomed by Peebles Civic Society who only recently celebrated the Chambers brothers' achievements in a three-month exhibition to mark the institution's 150th birthday this summer - attracting 3,000 visitors in the process.

Chairman Ronald Ireland said: "We regret the fact they are severing the link between Chambers and Edinburgh, and as a result Peebles.

"Both men were extremely important to publishing in Edinburgh in the middle of the 19th century and at one point they were the biggest publishers in the world.

"Their publishing company may relocate elsewhere but through these trees and the Chambers Institution which has stood the test for over 150 years and continues to do so - they will forever be linked to Peebles.

"This planting is a fitting tribute and a great idea."