Enoch Fowler : Short Biography

Ship Adam Lodge - Arrived Sydney 13 July 1837

A native of Tyrone, Ireland, had established in 1837 [the same year he arrived in the country] a pottery on a lease in Parramatta Street West. Robert was educated at the near-by Christ Church School and then entered his father's business.

In June 1844 Fowler's pottery grounds were auctioned and Enoch bought an allotment 208 x 100 ft (68 x 30 metres) at £10 17s. 6d. a foot. In 1848 the pottery was moved to the Glebe, first in Queen Street and then in Bay Street, where a man and four boys were employed making ginger beer bottles and kitchenware. In 1860 he was encouraged by Arthur Holroyd to buy a machine for making four-inch drainpipes which was exhibited at the Parramatta Agricultural Society's show; the manufacture of drainpipes gradually became the mainstay of the works. In 1865 on a five-acre (2 ha) site on Parramatta Road, Camperdown, the firm's twenty-five employees were turning out half a mile (.8 km) of pipes each week. Business expanded rapidly to meet increasing demand; as well as salt-glazed drainpipes and plain bricks, the works made fire bricks, chequered and border tiles, chimney pots and all types of pottery. Robert, who had assisted his father, inherited the firm on his father's death in 1879. [G. P. Walsh, 'Fowler, Robert (1840–1906)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/fowler-robert-3563/text5511, published first in hardcopy 1972, accessed online 7 September 2020.]