He served as a signals officer in the Royal Flying Corps in World War I and then became a poultry farmer.
In 1930 he began training as a bookbinder at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London.
[1] He studied, but did not alter, the oldest European leather binding to survive, that of the Stonyhurst or St Cuthbert Gospel, and his two chapters on the binding in books edited by Battiscombe (1956) and Brown (1969) remain the most important literature on the subject.
[3] Fellow binder and collector Bernard Middleton described Powell as "one of the most important and influential bookbinders of the last hundred years and, arguably, of any period".
[4] In his monograph on the Book of Durrow, Bernard Meehan, Keeper of Manuscripts at Trinity College Dublin, described Powell as "the leading bookbinder of his day".