About us

Donald Bowes was born in Brighton, Adelaide, South Australia. He studied geology at Adelaide University under the renowned Professor Sir Douglas Mawson FRS of Antarctic fame.  Don gained his BSc (1946) and MSc (1948), plus a Tate Medal and one of only two ‘1851’ awards from Australia to study for a PhD at Imperial College (1948 – 50) under H. H. Read FRS, because it was impossible to obtain a PhD in Australia at that time.  Don’s leg-pulling puzzled Read; Don would put his geological map upside down ‘as we always put the South Pole at the top’.

Donald Bowes was born in Brighton, Adelaide, South Australia, the third of four boys, all of whom were sports addicts and whose father was a typesetter. He studied geology at Adelaide University under the renowned Professor Sir Douglas Mawson FRS of Antarctic fame.

Don gained his BSc (1946) and MSc (1948) plus a Tate Medal and one of only two ‘1851’ awards from Australia to study for a PhD at Imperial College (1948 – 1950) under Professor H. H. Read FRS, because it was impossible to obtain a PhD then in Australia. He mapped the Sturtian tillite of the Mount Fitton area of the Flinders Ranges, South Australia, and studied the chemistry of its migmatisation, after reviving the renowned Imperial College geochemical laboratory, which closed during the war. Leg-pulling a puzzled Read, Don initially put his geological map upside down ‘as we always put the South Pole at the top’. Convinced from 1948 of continental movement and break-up, then controversial, he brought a breath of fresh air to academia.

After two years lecturing at Adelaide and three at Swansea, Don became Senior Lecturer in Glasgow University in 1956 and Professor in 1975. He taught Precambrian geology, igneous and metamorphic petrology and especially mapping, in the Scottish Highlands, Ballachulish and Lewisian areas, with great enthusiasm and energy. His annual field class in the Lewisian complex was widely known and extremely taxing, and attended by many international visitors. The class fired up many to undertake fieldwork studying basement complexes in several continents, including 28 PhD students that he personally guided to success.

Over 65 years, Don published ~300 articles (single and jointly authored) detailing research that ranged over five continents, usually with energetic field involvement. Don gained a DSc in 1968 and published his last paper in 2017, when aged 91. Through international collaborations, but often with A.M. Hopgood, he published multiple accounts of the Precambrian complexes of the Baltic Shield of Finland, Beartooth Mountains of Montana-Wyoming, Peninsula India, southern and western Australia, Lake Baikal region of Siberia and China. However, it was the Scottish Lewisian that he did most research on. Controversy over whether there was one or more sets of dykes between the Archean of Scourie and the Paleoproterozoic of Laxford went on for years, but dating vindicated Bowes’ mapping of more than one phase. Years of work went into the Bohemian massif, the appinites and explosion breccias of Appin and Kentallen in Scotland, studies in Norway, Czech Republic and Utah, as well as the major igneous Bushveld and Stillwater complexes, and even a little on the Dalradian regional metamorphism. Much of his Precambrian dating involved the East Kilbride Isotope Centre.

As a Fulbright Scholar and with his family, Don spent 1966 in New York at Columbia University studying the Manhattan Formation. While there he also contacted Art Langer at the Mount Sinai Hospital Environmental Mineralogy Unit and began decades of combined studies on the medical problems of dust mineralogy, especially asbestos and talc, which led to 23 years as a Contributing Editor of the American Journal of Industrial Medicine (1980 – 2003). Also through Rhodes Fairbridge at Columbia University, Don became involved in the Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences, editing the Igneous and Metamorphic Petrology volume and writing scores of articles.

Another long standing commitment of over 20 years was collaboration and exchanges between Glasgow University and Charles University (Prague), which resulted in ~40 papers with joint studies of the Bohemian massif and British localities that the communist authorities during the cold war unusually allowed including PhD students. This resulted in Charles University awarding Don a Gold Medal in 1998 and the Emanuel Borickuy Medal in 2003. Don became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1976 and later Vice President, but his chief service to that Society was to revitalize the nearly moribund Transactions for Earth Sciences, being Executive Editor (1978 – 1985).

Above all Don was a lively, most energetic man in international demand as a visitor. He was a keen gardener tending not only his own garden but also that of the Geology Department at Glasgow University, and, with his wife, the church garden.

Much of the above, especially the multiple international co-operations, relied upon the 67 years of steadfast cooperation and support of his wife Mary (who died in 2020). Together they enjoyed regular attendance at the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the Scottish Opera and their Methodist church, which involved enthusiastic hymn singing. Don leaves two sons, a daughter, six grandchildren and a great grandchild.

By Bernard Elgey Leake