Charles Synge Christopher Bowen, Baron Bowen, (1 January 1835 – 10 April 1894) was an English judge. Early life Bowen was born at Woolaston in Gloucestershire – his father, Rev. Christopher Bowen, originally of Hollymount, County Mayo, being then curate of the parish and his mother, Catherine Steele (1807/8–1902); his younger brother was Edward Ernest Bowen, a long-serving Harrow schoolmaster. He was educated at Lille in France, Blackheath and Rugby schools, leaving the latter in 1853 having won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford. There he made good his earlier academic promise, winning the principal classical scholarships and prizes of his time. He was elected a Fellow of Balliol in 1857 while an undergraduate and became President of the Oxford Union in 1858. Career From Oxford, Bowen went to London, where he was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn in 1861, and while studying law he wrote regularly for the Saturday Review, and also later for The Spectator. In 1861, he also played a single first-class match for Hampshire against the Marylebone Cricket Club: in Hampshire's first innings he was dismissed for a duck by Caleb Robinson and in their second innings he scored 30*. His brother, Edward Ernest Bowen also played first-class cricket for Hampshire County Cricket Club. For a time he had little success at the bar, and came near to exchanging it for the career of a college tutor, but he was persuaded by his friends to persevere. Soon after he had begun to make his mark he was briefed against the claimant in the famous Tichborne Case. Bowen's services to his leader, Sir John Coleridge, helped to procure for him the appointment of junior counsel to the Treasury when Sir John had died, as he did while the trial proceeded, from the office of Solicitor General to that of Attorney-General; and from this time his practice became a very large one. The strain, however, of the Tichborne trials was great, and his physical health became unequal to the tasks which his zeal for work imposed upon it. In 1879 his acceptance of a position as a High Court judge in the Queen's Bench division, on the retirement of Mr Justice John Mellor, gave him the opportunity of comparative rest. He was knighted in June 1879. The character of Charles Bowen's intellect hardly qualified him for some of the duties of a puisne judge; but it