Charles Synge Christopher Bowen QC, PC
Baron Bowen of Colwood
(1 Jan 1835 – 10 Apr 1894)
Lord Bowen was regarded with great affection by all who knew him either professionally or privately. He had a polished and graceful wit, of which many instances might be given, although such anecdotes lose force in print. For example, when it was suggested on the occasion of an address to Queen Victoria, to be presented by her judges, that a passage in it, "conscious as we are of our shortcomings," suggested too great humility, he proposed the emendation "conscious as we are of one another's shortcomings"; and on another occasion he defined a jurist as "a person who knows a little about the laws of every country except his own". Lord Bowen's judicial reputation will rest upon the series of judgments delivered by him in the court of appeal, which are remarkable for their lucid interpretation of legal principles as applied to the facts and business of life.
He also composed the following exegesis on Matthew 5:45 (as I now learn it to be) "... That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust."
The rain it raineth on the just
And also on the unjust fella;
But chiefly on the just, because
The unjust hath the just's umbrella.
Though my father-in-law Ron Kaulback always quoted this (with great gusto) as
The rain it raineth every day
Upon the just and unjust fella
But chiefly on the just because
The unjust hath the just's umbrella.
And it's as good a retort to the allegation of God's injustice to the faithful as ever I've heard.
Was there no-one from the RSPCA
In Darien that auspicious day
When Cortez, far the stoutest of his men,
Stood silent on a peke in Darien?
a parody, of course, of Keats’ Chapman’s Homer, which IMHO is a clumsy effort just begging for ridicule anyway.
Oliver Wise, writing in Wooster Sauce, No 8, Dec 1998, p6 quoted a slightly different spoof he’d encountered in Punch when studying Keats' oeuvre at Eton – goodness knows how far back that could have been. His version was
There can’t have been an RSPCA
In Panama, on that auspicious day
When Cortez, quite the stoutest of his men,
Stood silent – upon a Peke – in Darien.
Bowen was renowned for his courtesy in the courtroom, and came to be known as "the polite Judge". But his health seems always to have been fragile, and was fatally undermined by his fast-tracked responsibilities in the notorious Tichbourne case, the truth of which remains controversial to this very day, and he died most prematurely.