The backstory of Bowers & Wilkins
JOHN Bowers was a music lover before he was an engineer. Born in Worthing, West Sussex in 1922, he enlisted in MI6 shortly before the outbreak of World War II, during which time he worked at Bletchley Park decoding enemy transmissions.
It was during the war that Bowers met Roy Wilkins. The two became firm friends and had a shared interest in radio, so they agreed that once the war ended they would set up a shop to sell radio parts and products. They did just that in Worthing in 1946 and the shop survived for a long time under various different owners, but was finally forced to close in 2020 due to lockdown.
By 1962, the audio industry had changed dramatically: records were hugely popular, stereo had been invented and the Bowers & Wilkins shop had started stocking new products.
In those days, when someone bought a pair of loudspeakers, the manufacturer shipped the parts to a shop, where staff would assemble them and deliver them to the customer.
This meant Bowers learned a lot about the inner workings of loudspeakers and he concluded that the products weren’t accurately reflecting the sound of live music. He decided he could do a better job, and began tweaking components in the back of the shop while Wilkins ran the storefront.
Bowers’ work resulted in him creating his ‘JB Edition’ loudspeakers, which he started selling to his friends. Word spread and eventually the Bowers & Wilkins shop had two storefronts; you could either go to the main one at the front to buy an unaltered speaker from a mainstream brand, or you could go round the back and purchase one of Bowers’ custom, and arguably better, products.
In 1966, Kathleen Knight, an opera singer and friend of Bowers who had owned one of his speakers, died and bequeathed him today’s equivalent of around £250,000. The condition was that Bowers must stop simply fiddling around with speakers in the back of his shop and actually make a full-time business out of it.
Leaving Wilkins to continue running the shop, Bowers started the Bowers & Wilkins factory. Although the pair in effect went their separate ways at this point, the split was completely amicable. They were often pictured together and Roy Wilkins’ son, Paul, became Bowers’ first-ever sales director at the factory.