Biography:
George Soper (1870-1942)
Soper was born in South Hornsey, Middlesex and educated at a boarding school in Ramsgate. Resident in Stoke Newington from 1885, he became an apprentice to printer and stationer, George Sydney Waterlow, and worked alongside Charles Robinson. After a period of two years in the 20th Middlesex Artists’ Volunteers (1894-6), he began work as a periodical illustrator with contributions to Robinson’s Golden Sunbeams. After his marriage in 1897, he and his family moved first to Enfield and then to Harmer Green, near Welwyn in Hertfordshire, where he built the house that was later known as Wildings.