g those years the
English universities have sent into the great schools a large
proportion of their most capable graduates as assistant teachers; and
some of the strongest men among these graduates have never, from
various causes, and often because they preferred to remain laymen,
been raised to the headships of the schools. Every one knows that a
school depends for its wellbeing and success more largely on the
assistants taken together than it does on the headmaster. Most people
also know that individual assistant masters are not unfrequently
better scholars, better teachers, and more influential with the boys
than is their official superior. Yet the assistant masters have
remained unhonoured and unsung in the general chorus of praise of the
great schools which has been resounding over England for nearly two
generations.

Edward Bowen was all his life an assistant master, and never cared to
be anything else. As he had determined not to take orders in the
Church of England, he was virtually debarred from many of the chief
headmasterships, which are, some few of them by law, many more by
custom, confined to Anglican clergymen. But even when other headships
to which this condition was not attached were known to be practically
open to his acceptance, were, indeed, in one or two instances almost
tendered to him, he refused to become a candidate, preferring his own
simple and easy way of life to the pomp and circumstance which
convention requires a headmaster to maintain. This abstention,
however, did not prevent his eminence from becoming known to those who
had opportunities of judging. In his later years he would, I think,
have been generally recognised by the teaching profession as the most
brilliant, and in his own peculiar line the most successful, man among
the schoolmasters of Britain.

He was born on 30th March 1836, of an Irish family (originally from
Wales) holding property in the county of Mayo. His father was a
clergyman of the Church of England; his mother, who survived him a
few months (dying at the age of ninety-four) and whom he tended with
watchful care during her years of widowhood, was partly of Irish,
partly of French extraction. Like his more famous but perhaps not
more remarkable elder brother, Charles Bowen, who became Lord Bowen,
and is remembered as one of the most acute and subtle judges as well
as one of the most winning personalities of our time, he had a gaiety,
wit, and versatility which sugg