House of Waterlow

The House Of Waterlow – A Printer’s Tale is the true story of the rise and fall of one of the printing industry’s greatest family dynasties. Starting from humble beginnings as descendants of immigrant Huguenot silk weavers, members of the Waterlow family went on to establish a stationery and printing business which quickly expanded to become one of the biggest and most famous printing dynasties of the last 200 years. The book follows the life of the family firm, which starts out providing printing and stationery for the legal profession and the expansion of the railways in the 1850s, to numerous prestigious security jobs for governments at home and abroad, and half a century of printing the media listings magazine, the Radio Times. However, in the late 1920s, Waterlow & Sons became an unwitting victim in one of the biggest fraud and forgery cases in British legal history. The firm was never really the same again and, like so many of its contemporaries, fell victim to the industry’s upheavals of the 1970s and 80s. This fascinating story will take you through the Waterlow family’s origins, including great industrial expansion and the coming to prominence of one of the Victorian era’s great philanthropists, to ending up in the highest court in the land and eventually to the sad demise and obscurity of the company.