Welsh Journals

EMERITUS PROFESSOR E.G. BOWEN: A TRIBUTE. HAROLD CARTER Carter, Harold 1986: Emeritus Professor E.G. Bowen: A Tribute. Cambria 13 (1) pp. 181 to pp. 184. Part III of: Davies, W.K.D. (ed) Human Geography from Wales: Proceedings of the E.G. Bowen Memorial Conference. ISSN 0306-9796. A tribute to E.G. Bowen's work and career delivered at the Memorial Service held in Aberystwyth on 27th February 1984. Harold Carter, Dept. of Geography, Llandinam Building, University College of Wales, Penglais, Aberystwyth, Dyfed, Wales, U.K. SY23 3DB. Emeritus Professor E.G. Bowen was born at Carmarthen in the 1900 and died at Aberystwyth on 8th November, 1983. But if I can use the words of John Williams Brynsiencyn one of the most renowned of Welsh preachers: Nid blynyddoedd sydd yn gwneud dyn, ond gwelediad; nid hyd dy ddyddiau yw mesur dy ddynoliaeth, ond ehangder dy orwelion (It is not the years of his life which make a man but his vision; his humanity is not measured by the length of his days but by the breadth of his horizons). Emrys Bowen was educated at Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, Carmarthen and at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth where he gained a First Class Honours degree in geography in 1923. The following year he took the teacher's diploma and, after a year's research at Aberystwyth, became the first Cecil Prosser Research Fellow at the Welsh National School of Medicine. During 1928-29 he was an assistant editor with the Encyclopedia Britanica before being appointed as an assistant lecturer in the Department of Geography and Anthropology, as it then was, at Aberystwyth, where he remained for the rest of his academic career, becoming Gregynog Professor in 1946 and retiring in 1968. E.G.B., as he was widely known (he disliked his middle name and never used it), was one of that group which has been called 'second generation geographers', the first to enter academic life with degrees in Geography. The first generation of geographers had moved into the field from other disciplines, Fleure, for example, from Zoology. This 'second generation' was, therefore, to play a significant role in the establishment of Geography as an academic discipline and Bowen was to do this in Wales by his energy, his example and above all by his conviction. It was no easy task to insert a new and suspect