Celebrating Hampshire Historians

Gates, William George

1856 - 1946

A prime example of the journalist historian, who clearly had a strong interest in the past, but was also a populariser who saw local history as a useful page filler. He started as a junior reporter with Portsmouth Evening News shortly after its foundation by James Graham Niven in 1877. In the foreword to his Illustrated History of Portsmouth published a year late in 1900 to mark the centenary of the Hampshire Telegraph, he wrote that he was encouraged to write about the past by the example of the J.C. Mottley, who in 1799 had founded the paper – albeit with another title, the Portsmouth Telegraph or Mottley’s Naval and Military Journal  –  and ‘varied his journalistic work by writing a brief history of Portsmouth’ (referring, no doubt, to Mottley’s  The History of Portsmouth. with an Account of the Towns of Portsea, Gosport…and the Isle of Wight, published in 1801).

Always known as ‘WG’, Gates was born in Gosport and orphaned at an early age. He came to journalism after a short period in the Royal Navy, following schooling at the Royal Seamen and Marines Orphan School and Home, Portsea, and Greenwich Hospital School, London. He was widely regarded as someone whose views were to be taken seriously and rose to become editor-in-chief and director of the Evening News.

His first book, Free Mart Fair: Sketches of Old Portsmouth, was published in 1897 to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee and to support a new hospital (subscribers are listed). It was a pot-pourri of local stories – some from back issues of the Hampshire Telegraph – woven around the story of an ancient local fair that lasted until 1847.  It was illustrated with simple line drawings by the Portsmouth artist William Hamilton Snape (1862-1904), the younger brother of Gosport artist Martin Snape (1852-1930), both much celebrated (some of their works are held by the Hampshire Cultural Trust and Portsmouth City Museum).  Gates acknowledged help from museum curator W. H. Saunders.

His most ambitious work, Illustrated History of Portsmouth, with a short overview of the town’s past by the Portsmouth-born novelist and social reformer, Sir Walter Besant (1836-1901), was published in 1900 (a year late) to mark the centenary of the Hampshire Telegraph, which since 1883 had been in joint ownership with the Evening News. It is a series of articles on events, in chronological order, with useful listings in the back: an alphabetical topography index, a chronology, and an index of subjects. He acknowledges his main sources: Lake (misspelt Luke) Taswell, 1775; J.C. Mottley, 1880; Lake Allen, 1817; Henry Slight, 1827; W.H. Saunders, 1880; Robert East, 1891; and the manuscript notes of Daniel Howard, and Frederic Madden. Clearly, he networked widely with individuals, many of whom feature in Celebrating Hampshire Historians. In particular he acknowledged A. F. Everitt, Alexander Howell and city librarian, Aston H. Long from Portsmouth, and from Winchester, T.F. Kirby and W.H. Jacob.

The Illustrated History ran to 734 pages and was printedby Charpentier & Co, a local house that specialised in lithography and engraving and printed several works on local history. Set up by William Henry Charpentier (c.1804-1872), an advertisement from 1930 bearing the Royal Arms and ‘By Appointment’, boasted of ‘all classes of printing and stationery. Publishers of Charpentier‘s Railway Timetables. Charpentier‘s Illustrated Guides. Naval, Military & Air Force Directory etc’ (Portsmouth Encyclopedia Online).

In 1926, the Illustrated History and other material from the Hampshire Telegraph was reworked and revised in a smaller book entitled Portsmouth in the Past ,,,Topographical Notes & Sketches (reprinted in 1972). Gates wrote that he produced it ‘so that those who come after us may derive some knowledge of the conditions under which their forebears lived’. In 1946 after the war and just after Gates’ death, a new version, The Portsmouth that has Passed, with Glimpses of God’s Port [ Gosport] came out, edited by F.J.H. Young, one of his reporters, He acknowledged his old boss’s ‘thorough and painstaking’ research and his ‘profound knowledge of the history and development of the city of Portsmouth’. Gates himself, with bombsites everywhere in the city, suggested that: ‘Upon the ashes of the past a new Portsmouth is about to arise and Gosport will also find joy in a new birth’.

In 1987, a new and updated edition of the same book, that its editor Nigel Peake called a ‘condensed version of the History of Portsmouth’ was published, with a foreword by Alderman F.A.J. Emery-Wallis, who played a major role in reviving interest in heritage and history after the war (only to fall from grace in 2001). He reminded readers that it was no small matter to produce anything on local history in 1946, as the books in the Central Library had been ‘sent to the country’, the museums were closed and ‘George Seaford’s splendid bookshop, with his incomparable collection of Portsmouth books totally destroyed, as was Harry Moth’s printing works in the High Street together with the Charpentier collection of illustrations’.

Starting in 1928, Gates published with Portsmouth City Council Extracts from the Records of the Corporation for 1835-1927, followed by 1928-30 and 1931-35. They were actually a succession of stories or snippets, rather than records, such as ‘The Canoe Lake opened’ in 1886 and ‘Launch of the first Dreadnought by the King’ in 1906. He acknowledged the ‘proof corrections and additions’ of schoolteacher H.T. Lilley, who made contributions to local history elsewhere. Usefully, the volumes had a general index, as well as indexes to portraits, obituaries and illustrations.

Sources

Obituary, The Evening News, 25 March 1946

Portrait

A photograph from N. Peake’s 1987 edition of The Portsmouth that has Passed (courtesy of his daughter-in-law, Mrs Dorothy Gates)

Contribution to county’s history

Like most popularisers, his writings reached a wide audience and did much to awaken interest in the history of the city.  He made no pretensions about being a professional historian, but left a canon of useful material for others, notably the authors of the Portsmouth Papers and Albert Temple Patterson.

Relevant published works

• Free Mart Fair: Sketches of Old Portsmouth, Portsmouth, Charpentier, 1897

• With an introduction by Sir Walter Besant, Illustrated History of Portsmouth, ‘Hampshire Telegraph’ Centenary Edition, Portsmouth, Charpentier, 1900 (vii, 734 pages)

• Portsmouth and the Great War, 1919, Portsmouth, Evening News & Hampshire Telegraph

• Portsmouth in the Past,,,Topographical Notes & Sketches, Portsmouth, Charpentier, 1926, reprinted 1972, Wakefield, SR Publishers

• A Naval Chronology, 1931


• Extracts from the Records of the Corporation [in several volumes, articles on various subjects within the time frames], 1835-1927, 1928-30 and 1931-35, Portsmouth City Council (with later volumes edited for 1936 by W Singleton Gates, 1937 by E.C. Bloomfield and 1946-55 by G.E. & V. Blanchard). Bound in with the 1928-30 volume: Portsmouth Through the Centuries: Historical and Topographical Notes

Critical Comments

It was never his aim to compete with professional historians, and his work lacked the approaches adopted, for example, in Temple Patterson’s Portsmouth

Other Comments

After Gates, there was little further work on Portsmouth’s local history until the Portsmouth Papers (now numbering 80, with more in production) were started in 1967 and the Portsmouth Record Series in 1971 (11 volumes published by 2008, and unlikely to be added to). Note, the papers of the 5th Earl of Portsmouth, held by Cambridge University Library, are also referred to as ‘the Portsmouth Papers’.

Contributor

Barry Shurlock, 14 October 2025

Key Words

Portsmouth

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