Men of the Time, eleventh edition/Bowen, George Ferguson
BOWEN, Sir George Ferguson, G.C.M.G., the eldest son of the Rev. Edward Bowen, a beneficed clergyman in the north of Ireland, born in that country in 1821, was educated at the Charterhouse and Trinity College, Oxford, where he obtained a scholarship in 1840, and graduated B.A. as first-class in classics in 1844. In the same year he was elected to a fellowship of Brasenose College,: and became a member of Lincoln's Inn. From 1847 to 1851 he held the post of President of the University of Corfu, and was Chief Secretary to the Government of the Ionian Islands from 1854 to 1859. Sir George Bowen, who married, in 1856, the Countess Roma, only surviving daughter of Count Roma, G.C.M.G., then President of the Senate of the Ionian Islands, was appointed, in 1859, Captain-General and Governor-in-Chief of the new colony of Queensland, in Australia, comprising the northeastern portion of the Australian continent. After a successful administration in Queensland, he was appointed, in Nov. 1867, to succeed Sir George Grey as Governor of New Zealand; and in May, 1873, he was gazetted Governor of Victoria in succession to Lord Canterbury, whose term of office had expired. He held that post till 1878, when he was appointed Governor of Mauritius. Sir George is the author of "A Handbook for Travellers in Greece,"—one of Murray's Handbooks; "Mount Athos, Thessaly, and Epirus: a Diary of a Journey from Constantinople to Corfu," 1852; and "Ithaca in 1850," 2nd. edit., 1851, 3rd edit., 1854, translated into Greek, Athens, 1859.