Flying Officer, RAF
Born: Staff
Died: July 24th 1943
Age at Death: 28
Killed, July 24th 1943
Anthony John Lee Bowes, known as ‘Johnnie’, was born on 8 October 1913 into a family of GPs in Herne Bay, Kent, and was the son of Tom Bowes MD and his wife Gertrude (née Lee). Anthony won the top scholarship to Charterhouse School, where he eventually became a Head of House. He then won a scholarship to read Classics at Christ Church, Oxford, where he sang in the Bach Choir.
Bowes decided to become a schoolmaster, taking his first job after graduation at Brighton College. Despite his brief time at the College, Bowes made his mark, according to Vaughan Harris, an Oxford contemporary who joined the staff of the College at the same time. He played Bach’s cantata ‘Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring’ at a concert in the Great Hall, and engendered, according to Harris, ‘affection and enthusiasm in the boys who came under his care’.
During this time he made a name for himself as an entomologist, amassing a collection of more than 10,000 moths and butterflies, which is now at the Natural History Museum. He had just received a firm job offer to teach at Eton when in 1940, at the age of 27, he was called up to the RAF and commissioned into 149 Squadron, which flew night bombers.
On 13 July 1942 Bowes was posted to 149 Squadron, based at RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk. On 24 July, he took off in a Stirling bomber to participate in a raid on Duisburg in Germany. The plane was shot down by a German night-fighter over the Netherlands, probably on its way home after the raid. In a short but eloquent letter to his parents, written days before his death and imbued with his Christian faith, Bowes quoted the poet Shelley and finished with the sentence:
And thank you for so full a life: you have been far too good for me, and far too good to me.
He is buried in Uden War Cemetery, in the Netherlands.
In a touching postscript to Bowes’ life, 18 years after his death the entomologist Paul Whalley described a new kind of moth on examining Bowes’ collection in the British Museum. The species, Oidematophorus bowesi Whalley, was named after him.