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Portrait and Biological Record of Southeastern Kansas, Containing Biographical Sketches of Prominent and Representative Citizens of the Counties, Together with Biographies and Portraits of all the Presidents of the United States and The Governors of the State of Kansas. Chicago, Biographical Publishing Co. 1894.

Andrew H. Chambers, a leading citizen of Kansas since 1855, and for many years a representative general agriculturist, prosperously tilling a valuable farm located on section 31, Mound Township, Miami County, is a native of Pike County, Ind. and was born January 25, 1844. His father, born March 15, 1815, was likewise a native of Pike County, and was the son of John Chambers, who passed away near Petersburgh, having spent nearly all of his life within the borders of the state. Here he shared the privations and experiences of frontier days in the then wilderness of the territory, the scene of many terrible conflicts between the reedmen and the pioneer citizens. When the father of our subject was a boy, wild game was abundant within rifle range of the old homestead, and wagons were the only vehicles of travel crossing the broad prairies. The mother, Catherine (Grubb) Chambers, was born in North Carolina in March, 1816. Her parents, emigrating from North Carolina in a very early day, made their home in Pike County, Ind., where they later died. The father, Andrew B. Chambers, married his wife in Pike County in the year 1836, and the parents once locating upon a farm gained their living from the fertile soil of Indiana until 1855, when in the month of April they journeyed by wagon to Kansas, and in Osawatomie Township, three miles southwest of the village of Osawatomie, located a Government claim.
The hard-working and energetic father died January 8, 1858, and the devoted mother passed away February 16, 1875. The nine children who gathered in their home were Margaret, John, George, Andrew Henderson, Elizabeth, Rachael, Maria, Nathaniel and Susan. Margaret and Maria are now deceased. Our subject, accompanying his parents to Kansas, remained with his mother until twenty years of age assisting in the conduct of the farm. Upon the 1st of January, 1864, answering to the appeal of the Government, Andrew H. Chambers enlisted in Company G, Sixteenth Kansas Cavalry, and served with courage until December 16, 1865, when he was mustered out at Ft. Leavenworth. Our subject spent almost a year of service near Ft. Leavenworth and took part in the Price raids, and for almost nine months was on duty in the Black Hills country. Prior to his enlistment Mr. Chambers was in the employ of the Government as teamster and cook. When he was mustered out of service, our subject returned at once to his old home and engaged industriously in the pursuit of agriculture.
In Osawatomie Township, November 24, 1867, were united in marriage Andrew H. Chambers and Miss Sarah C. Veach, who was born in Ross County, Ohio, near Chillicothe, March 29, 1848. Her father, Harrison Veach, was a native of Virginia and was born near Petersburgh in November, 1816. Her mother, Matilda (Shafer) Veach, was likewise a native of Ross County, Ohio, and was born April 1, 1829.
The grandparents of Mrs. Chambers were among the pioneer settlers of Ross County, where the grandfather entered into rest while the mother was very young and left a large family with but extremely limited means of support. Mr. and Mrs. Veach were married in Ross County June 10, 1846. They remained for about two years in their early home then journeyed by boat to Iowa, locating in Van Buren County in 1848. In June, 1857, they removed to Kansas and settled upon a Government claim in Osawatomie Township, where the father died, lamented by all who knew him, February 15, 1879.
The five children of Mr. and Mrs. Veach were: Sarah C., Elmira, Winfield S., Annette and William R. Winfield S., a bright, promising young man, was drowned in the Indian Territory while herding cattle. Immediately after his marriage our subject settled on a farm in Osawatomie Township, and having purchased one hundred and sixty acres of wild land entered with energy into its cultivation and improvement. He remained upon this homestead until January, 1886, when he sold the property and invested in his present valuable farm in Mound Township, one hundred and twenty-one acres desirably located on section 31. The farm, now highly improved with excellent buildings, and annually yielding an abundant harvest, is one of the best in the township.
Our subject and his estimable wife have been blessed by the birth of four children: Ida M. resides in Boise City, Idaho; Irma B, is the wife of Harvey Ball, of Boise City, and was married December 1, 1892. William Scott and Clarence H., the two brothers, are intelligent youths attaining to manhood. Our subject is politically a reformer and advocates progress and needed changes for the better. Mr. and Mrs. Chambers are both

Miles, Bernard James, Baron Miles (1907–1991), actor and theatre manager, was born on 27 September 1907 at 1 Poplar Terrace, New Road, Hillingdon, Uxbridge, Middlesex, the son of Edwin James Miles, market gardener, and his wife, Barbara Hooper, nee Fletcher, a Scottish cook. Brought up in a strict Baptist household, he learned from his parents the value of thrift and hard work, as well as a wealth of ancient countryside lore which he later used in a triumphant series of music-hall monologues about life on a farm.

Educated at Uxbridge county school, Miles won a scholarship to Pembroke College, Oxford, and worked briefly as a schoolmaster in Yorkshire. He abandoned this career in 1930 when he made his stage debut as the Second Messenger in a Baliol Holloway revival of Shakespeare's Richard III. In 1931 he married the actress Josephine Wilson (d. 1990), who gave him unstinting support. They had two daughters and a son. The carpentry Miles had learned from his father came in useful during several subsequent years travelling the country with repertory companies, when his responsibilities ranged from building scenery to playing small parts. Towards the end of the 1930s he began to make a name in London, in music-halls and late-night cabaret theatres, where he perfected his comic monologues in Late Joys (1939) and three Herbert Farjeon revues.

During the war Miles found film fame in Noel Coward's In Which We Serve (1942) but also frequently toured with the Old Vic as Iago and directed John Mills in Men in Shadow (1942), later following Mills in the leading role. As the war ended he was back with the Old Vic company at the New Theatre for the 1947–8 season, playing the Inquisitor in Saint Joan and Christopher Sly in The Taming of the Shrew.

From the late 1940s Miles's energies were focused on building the first Mermaid Theatre in his own garden in St John's Wood, a wooden playhouse faithfully replicating Shakespeare's Globe long before the birth of Sam Wanamaker's similar project. In its first (1951) season he played Caliban in The Tempest and, as producer and director, persuaded Kirsten Flagstad and Maggie Teyte to sing Purcell's Dido and Aeneas. The Mermaid then found a temporary home at the Royal Exchange in the City, before Miles and his equally tireless wife finally settled it in Puddle Dock, the first theatre to have been opened in the City for 300 years. They spent six years building the new Mermaid and it eventually opened in May 1959 with a triumphant Lionel Bart musical, Lock up your Daughters, based somewhat loosely on Henry Fielding's Rape upon Rape. Though he was to suffer all the architectural and financial problems only too familiar to anyone trying to build a theatre in Britain, or merely to keep one open, Miles's years at the Mermaid saw triumphant revivals of Treasure Island (in which he was always a definitive Long John Silver) and long-running musical celebrations of the songs of Noel Coward and Cole Porter. The Mermaid also gave birth to Side by Side by Sondheim in the late 1970s, and more classically was the venue for many notable Bernard Shaw and Shakespeare revivals, some of the latter in relatively modern dress. For his services to the theatre Miles was appointed CBE in 1953, knighted in 1969, and given a life peerage as Baron Miles of Blackfriars in 1979.

Miles was an old-fashioned actor, and was often out of tune also with modern directing techniques, but his ability to keep the Mermaid going on knife-edge finance, and frequently to retrieve it from the jaws of bankruptcy, was always admirable. If he sometimes cast himself in wildly unsuitable roles (Oedipus, for instance, or John Gabriel Borkman) he was nevertheless a memorable Schweyk in Schweyk in the Second World War (1963) and a formidable Falstaff in both parts of Henry IV (1970).

Like Joan Littlewood at the Theatre Royal a little further beyond the City in Stratford East, Miles worked with very slender resources and often scant critical acclaim; sadly, what should have been a triumphant rebuilding project when the Mermaid moved a few hundred yards inland in 1981 ended in bankruptcy, and in Miles's forced resignation as artistic director of the theatre he had built and still so loved. He and his wife had invested all their own money in the rebuilding project, and were forced to sell their London home to meet their debts. Following the death of his wife in 1990, Miles was moved into a nursing home with nothing more than his state pension, though funds were raised for him by an all-star Bernard Miles Celebration at the Mermaid on 3 March 1991, at which he made his last public appearance in a wheelchair, having recently fallen and broken a leg. He died at the Thistle Hill Nursing Home, Knaresborough, Yorkshire, on 14 June 1991. He was survived by his son and one daughter, his other daughter, Sally (who had joined her parents in the management of the Mermaid Theatre), having died of motor neurone disease.

Miles can still be seen