Shayle Gardner

Shayle Gardner was a New Zealand born actor. His father was Cecil Gardner and his mother Evelyn Mary (George) Gardner. 

Cecil’s grandfather Edward Gardner ran the profitable London end of the Oxford University Press bible business after 1810 and later his sons Edward Bensley Gardner (b. 1812) and Cecil’s father William Wells Gardner (b. 1821) ran the bindery in Garter Court and the warehouse in Paternoster Row.

WW Gardner became a publisher in his own right, diversifying into children’s books and periodicals as well as ecclesiastical texts. (In 1879 he would publish HW Tucker’s Memoirs of the Life and Episcopate of George Augustus Selwyn, D.D.… Vols. London: William Wells Gardner & Co. 1879). He was a widower when he married Harriet Woolloton (b. 1822) in Brixton in 18502 and in 1870 gave his occupation as “bookseller & publisher, 10 Paternoster Row E.C., & book binder, 37A, Barbican E.C.”

Cecil Gardner was born in 1858 and in 1871 he (aged 12) and his brother Howard, 13, were boarding at the Temple School in Brighton. Their sisters Constance 19, Ethel 10, Mabel 6, Beatrice 5, brothers Arthur 18 and Bernard 8, along with four servants, were living at home in Stamford Hill.4 Annie Maude Gardner was their second daughter and must also have been away at school; she would marry William Boyd Carpenter
KCVO, a Church of England cleric who became Bishop of Ripon, court chaplain to Queen Victoria and Clerk of the Closet.

In June 1873 Cecil Gardner was indentured as an apprentice in the Merchant Navy for four years, serving on the John Allan and Copenhagen, promoted to 4th Officer on the Khandala6 and eventually rising (according to his obituary) to First Mate