Edward William Cole was a bookseller, author, editor, and publisher. Also known as E. W. Cole of the Book Arcade, he was the founder of "Cole's Book Arcade", Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, which contained more than a million books in its 16 departments over three floors, as well as benches for people to sit and read, a lolly shop, toy shop, educational monkey exhibit, fernery with talking parrots, photography studio, printing works, funhouse, Tea Salon, live band, mechanical chicken, and an exhortation to "Read For As Long As You Like – No One Asked To Buy". Whether or not it actually held the "two million" books he claimed, the Book Arcade was most certainly the largest book shop in the world at the time.
Edward William Cole was born on the 4th January 1832, in Woodchurch (near Tenterden), Kent, England, the son of Harriet Wall Gilbert and an unknown father, and baptised on the 26th February the same year at Woodchurch.[1]
When he was four years old his mother gave him a stepfather (despite no recorded divorce from her first husband, who was to be transported to Van Diemen's Land that same year) when she married Thomas Watson.
On the 6th June 1841, the 9-year-old Edward was living in with his family at Lam, in the parish of Rolvenden, Kent. Home at the time were his stepfather: Thomas Watson (25–29), an agricultural labourer; his mother: Harriet (35–39); their son: 1-year-old John Watson; and his brother: 11-year-old Richard Cole.[2]
He firstly moved to London when aged 17 or 18 years, after which he emigrated to the Cape Colony (in 1850, aboard the Dalhousie), where he enjoyed some success with farming, and explorations. In 1852 he left the Colony and headed farther south, landing at Yarra in the Colony of Victoria, Australia that same year. After settling in, he spent some time in the gold diggings, working at various occupations.
Cole's Book Arcade |
in 1867 he wrote a book on Jesus and St Paul, a discussion on miracles, meant to be followed by another, although nobody would publish it. Later he was to become a publisher of books on many subjects, of which his Cole's Funny Picture Book series, and Cole's Fun Doctor, were probably the most popular.
After first advertising for a wife in the newspaper and meeting with a promising prospect, he married Eliza Frances Jordan on the 9th August 1875, in All Saints, St. Kilda,[3] (she predeceased him), subsequently having six children: four daughters, and two sons:
Having seen firsthand the treatment meted out to black Africans while he'd been in the Cape Colony, and also witnessing the discrimination against the Chinese immigrants in Australia, he was a firm and passionate opponent of the "Immigration Restriction Act of 1901" (later known as the "White Australia policy"), which limited migration to Australia between 1901 and 1958, something about which he was even more vocal after meeting the commander of a Japanese naval squadron visiting Australia in 1902. As a result of that meeting, he was invited to be a special guest at the Osaka Trade Exhibition — on which trip he and Eliza were accompanied by daughters Ivy and Linda — where they were given red carpet treatment. Wherever he went while in Japan, he would explain why he had a problem with "White Australia" saying: "My passionate view is that all men are created equal, and that the only difference is that the closer they live to the equator, the blacker their skins, and the further away the whiter their skins, but they are all the same underneath."[4] The family brought back with them a new family member, a Japanese poodle named Wai – short for White Australia Impossible.
He passed away on the 16th December 1918, in Essendon, Victoria, aged 86 years,[5] and was interred alongside his wife in the Boroondara General Cemetery, Kew, where four of their children also lie.[6]
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