Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Bowes, Robert
BOWES, ROBERT (1835-1919), bookseller, publisher, and bibliographer, was born at Stewarton, Ayrshire, 22 August 1835, the third son of Robert Bowes, of that town, by his wife, Margaret, daughter of Duncan Macmillan. As a youth he joined his uncles, Daniel Macmillan [q.v.] and Alexander Macmillan in their bookselling and publishing business at Cambridge, and one of his earliest activities was a share in the formation of the Cambridge Working Men’s College, of which Alexander Macmillan and Francis Gerald Vesey, archdeacon of Huntingdon, were secretaries. Shortly after this the connexion of the Macmillans with Frederick Denison Maurice, Charles Kingsley, and Thomas Hughes began. Between 1858 and 1863 Bowes was in charge of the newly opened London depôt; in the latter year the publishing business was wholly transferred to London and Bowes returned to Cambridge, where he remained at the head of the bookselling business (known until 1907 as Macmillan & Bowes and afterwards as Bowes & Bowes) until his death, 9 February 1919. In 1868 he married Fanny, youngest daughter of Augustine Gutteridge Brimley, alderman and once mayor of Cambridge; he had one son, George Brimley Bowes, who succeeded him as head of the business, and two daughters.
In the civic and educational life of Cambridge Robert Bowes took a prominent part. He was a town councillor for nine years, an officer in the Volunteers, retiring with the rank of honorary major in 1889, a governor of the Old Schools and of the Perse School, a member and twice chairman of the Free Library committee, and an officer of the Local Lectures Association. He was also treasurer of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society from 1894 to 1909, and in 1870 joined in helping F. D. Maurice and others to form an association in Cambridge for promoting the higher education of women. This step ultimately led to the establishment of Newnham College.
Bowes was not merely a bookseller, but a bookman, and several well-known books appeared with his publishing imprint, such as Lapsus Calami (1891), by James Kenneth Stephen, and John Willis Clark’s Concise Guide to Cambridge (1898) as well as his edition of David Loggan’s Cantabrigia Illustrata (1905). But his greatest work was done in the field of Cambridge bibliography. In company with Henry Bradshaw [q.v.] he became an enthusiastic researcher into the work of John Siberch [q.v.], the first Cambridge printer; and his Biographical Notes on the University Printers in Cambridge (1886, originally a paper read before the Cambridge Antiquarian Society in 1884) was pioneer work based on original sources. This was followed in 1894 by A Catalogue of Books printed at or relating to the University, Town, and County of Cambridge from 1521 to 1893, a monumental work which remains the standard authority on the subject, and in 1906 he collaborated with Mr. George John Gray in a monograph on John Siberch. In 1918 the public orator of the university, Sir John Sandys, fittingly presented for the degree of M.A., honoris causa, ‘bibliopolam honestissimum, virum de Cantabrigia praeclare meritum, Robertum Bowes’.
[Memoir by G. J. Gray reprinted from The Cambridge Chronicle, 20 March 1918; private information.]