Brian Bowman

Brian Bowman was a harper during the mid 19th century. So far I have only one reference to him, and it is not very satisfactory. This post is to discuss the reference, and the context, and to see what we can usefully say about Brian Bowman.

header photo © Anthere CC-BY

In March 1856, a newspaper advert was placed by J. Cunningham, the owner of the Ship Hotel on Lower Abbey Street, Dublin. The Ship was a regular advertiser in the Dublin papers and also in provincial papers, often running the same advert in multiple papers week after week. But, so far, this one seems to be a one-off.

LISADILL OYSTERS
SHIP HOTEL, 5, LOWER ABBEY-Street,
J. CUNNINGHAM, Proprietor.
J. C. wishes to inform his Friends and the Public generally that he has just arrived from Lisadill, where he entered into a contract with the owner of the Lisadill Oyster Beds to supply him, and him only, with the above Oysters, fresh every day, the only house where the real Lisadill is to be got, as all other Houses in Town are only puffing. The Agent here, Paddy Br[?]lligan, has assured that on the 1st of September next he will be able to supply me with the real Lisadill as large as a plate. Pat says that he is the first inventor of the Lobster Sandwich.
N.B. – Brian Bowman, the celebrated Irish Harper, having just arrived from a long tour in the South of Ireland, intends to give the Public an opportunity of hearing him perform every evening in the Coffee Room of the Ship Hotel, 5, LOWER ABBEY-STREET, commencing at Seven o’Clock.
J. CUNNINGHAM.
10th March, 1856.

Freemans Journal, 11 Mar 1856 p1

No other advert that I have seen mentions Brian Bowman, and I have not found his name in any other source so far. This is all we have at the moment. So what can we say about him, based on this one reference?

The first thing is that I would hope at some point to come across another reference, because if we had another piece of information about him, that would help us to be more sure what was going on here. But for the meantime this is all we have and so we should start by outlining this context, and see what we can say.

The biggest question, as usual, is whether Brian Bowman was a traditional Irish harper playing on a wire-strung Irish harp in the inherited tradition; or whether he was a classical harpist playing a pedal harp and marketing himself with the Irish label.

The Ship Hotel and Tavern

The Ship Hotel and Tavern was at 5, Lower Abbey Street, Dublin, just along from O’Connell Street. There is a nice little line drawing, showing the buildings on the north side of Lower Abbey Street in 1850, six years before Brian Bowman was playing the harp there. I have highlighted the Ship, at no.5. You can see its wooden pub-style frontage with doors and windows, and in between the first floor windows you can see the hanging sign which would have had a picture of a ship painted on it.

The Ship ran from the 1820s all the way through until 1916, when it was destroyed by British artillery fire during the Easter Rising. As part of my Long 19th Century project, I have been collecting newspaper advertisements for the Ship, since they very often mention that a harp player performed every evening.

Other harpers who played at the Ship

There is a tab on my timeline spreadsheet which lines up all of the Ship’s newspaper adverts I have collected so far, with a chart to show when different harp players are named. At different times there were traditional Irish harpers playing wire-strung Irish harp; traditional Welsh harpers playing Welsh triple harp (telyn deires), and classical harpists playing classical pedal harp.

I have already written up the traditional Irish harpers, John MacLoughlin, P. Fitzpatrick, Joseph Craven, and Hugh O’Hagan, and in those posts I discuss the history and running of the Ship Tavern and Hotel in some detail. These four had all learned to play the traditional wire-strung Irish harp in the inherited tradition.

The two Welsh harpers who played in the Ship were Henry Green, and Edward Jones of Liverpool. Perhaps I should try to write up what I have about each of them, because they were both interesting characters. Henry Green was in China in the early 1840s and had Chinese strings fitted to his harp. Edward Jones took a break from working in the Ship to enter the Abergavenny Eisteddford in 1848; he returned to Dublin in 1849 with the prize harp. This harp was most recently owned by my friend Huw Roberts the Welsh harper, who used it for recording his CD Telyn Cefn Mably. I wrote a post about his exhibition which featured this harp. Both of these two Welsh harpers played triple harps (telyn deires) which they had learned in the inherited Welsh tradition.

The two classical harpists were Mr Quinn, and Owen Lloyd. Both of them had learned the harp in the classical pedal harp tradition. I have not studied Quinn, or Quin as his name is sometimes spelled; perhaps I should write him up fully, just to pin him down a bit more. He is advertised from 1834 playing in the Ship, described as “The Celebrated harper” (e.g. Dublin Evening Packet and Correspondent Tue 25 Nov 1834), and then as “the celebrated Irish harper” (e.g. Dublin Evening Packet and Correspondent Tue 7 Jun 1836). In the winter of 1841-2, a Mr Quinn who I assume was the same man was playing in the Phoenix Tavern, described as a “pupil of the inimitable Bochsa” (Dublin Evening Packet and Correspondent Thu 16 Dec 1841, Freemans Journal Sat 8 Jan 1842). So it seems clear to me that Mr Quin was a classical pedal harpist, marketing himself as an “Irish” harper. He had a twin brother who was a classical violinist. The last advert I have seen so far for Mr Quinn playing at the Ship is from the end of September 1852; he was replaced at the Ship at the beginning of October by Joseph Craven.

I have written quite a lot about Owen Lloyd; my first post about him in 2017 was a bit naive, and more recent discoveries about his work are included in my posts on Paul Smith, and on the blind girl in the south of Ireland. Owen Lloyd learned in a classical pedal harp lineage that goes back to Bochsa. Lloyd’s main instrument was an Erard Grecian double-action pedal harp, though he occasionally dabbled in other instruments later in his career, after the turn of the 20th century. I think all his harps are in the National Museum of Ireland and I think the harp shown above is his pedal harp that he usually played, though I need to chase up the documentation for this. Owen Lloyd, playing on this harp, often marketed himself as an “Irish harper”. He seems to have started playing at the Ship in 1872.

Fitting Brian Bowman into the sequence of Ship harpers

Brian Bowman is named in the advert which Cunningham submitted to the newspaper on 10 March 1856. We can look at the Ship adverts before and after to see what the context is for this, but it is not clear and straightforward.

At a superficial level we can think that Joseph Craven was the resident Irish harper, playing at the Ship every evening from about 1852 (when his name first appears in the Ship adverts) through until his death in September 1869, since his obituaries tell us that he worked there for “twenty years”.

If we check my Ship Harpers spreadsheet and chart, we can see that from October 1852 through to April 1855 the harper at the Ship is named as Craven. Then until January 1856, the adverts say that an Irish harper would play, but they don’t name the harper.

Brian Bowman is named in March 1856; and then from May 1856 to November 1868 the adverts say that an Irish harper will play, but do not name the harper right through. In 1861, Craven is incidentally named as “the Irish harper from an Abbey Street tavern”; and when he died in September 1869, his obituaries mention that he had played at the Ship for the past 20 years. Hugh O’Hagan took over as the Ship’s harper for a few months in early 1870.

There are gaps when I have not found adverts. Partly I have not looked intensively for the entire 90 years or so that the Ship was running. I’m sure that more work could fill in some of these gaps.

I would imagine that a resident harper would not literally have had to play every single night that the hotel was open, for years and years without a break. We see this during the time that the Welsh harper Edward Jones was away competing for the prize harp, and for at least some of that time Fitzpatrick worked at the Ship playing Irish harp.

So it seems plausible to me that Craven had to stop working at the Ship for a while, and Brian Bowman may have been hired as his replacement. But whether that was for one week, or one month, or one year, we are not told. We need more information to say more I think.

Another possibility is that there may have sometimes been more than one harper working at the Ship at a time. I can imagine that they could alternate nights, or play at the same time in different rooms. But I have no actual evidence of this.

Was Brian Bowman classical or traditional?

As much as I would like to claim Brian Bowman as one of our traditional players of the wire-strung Irish harp, I think we have to be very careful. We see clearly that the proprietors of the Ship do not seem to have been especially bothered whether they employed a classical harpist, or a Welsh harper, or an Irish harper, as long as they had someone in every evening playing some kind of harp as background music in the coffee room.

We also see that during the 19th century, there were classical harpists playing the pedal harp, marketing themselves as “Irish” harpers, and calling their pedal harps “Irish” harps. We can only pin them down if they have some statement as to their lineage. We do have this lineage information for both Quinn and Lloyd. We are told that Quinn was a pupil of Bochsa, which seems pretty straightforward. Owen Lloyd had two teachers, first Thomas Aptommas and later Adolf Sjödén. Thomas Aptommas had a fascinating education, going to London with his brother John Thomas (Pencerdd Gwalia). John Thomas studied pedal harp all day every day at the Royal Academy of Music under John Balsir Chatterton, and then every evening he came home and regurgitated the day’s lesson to his brother Thomas (Scranton Tribune Fri 9 Oct 1896 p6). Chatterton had learned pedal harp from Bochsa.

Similarly for traditional harpers that we otherwise know very little about, if we are told where they learned we can pin them down, like Fitzpatrick who was “from the Harp Institution, Belfast” and therefore must have learned at the Cromac Street harp school under Edward McBride or Valentine Rennie or Alex Jackson.

But so far I have not found such a statement for Brian Bowman. At the moment we can’t tell if he was a genuine traditional Irish harper, or a classical harpist trying it on.

Brian Bowman is described in the advert in March 1856 as “having just arrived from a long tour in the South of Ireland”. I have not found any newspaper reviews of Bowman performing in Cork, Waterford, or other counties on the south coast where other harpers (such as Mr. O’Connor) were touring around that time. We can check the new clippings I have already indexed for 1854-5 and there are not any anonymous harpers performing in the south. But not every harper has left a paper trail in the newspapers. Perhaps Bowman was working for private patrons.

Can we say any more?

If Brian Bowman was a professional performer in 1856, he could have learned the traditional wire-strung Irish harp in Belfast around 1850, in Drogheda in the 1840s, or in Belfast in the 1820s and 1830s. I have discussed before how we are missing the names of perhaps as many as 20 or more harpers who were educated in Belfast from the late 1820s and through the 1830s, and we are also missing the names of about eight people who were learning in Drogheda in the early 1840s.

People who went to these harp schools to learn to become professionals were usually aged between about 10 and 20 when they started, and they spent two to four years of full time study there. So we can vaguely guess that, if he was a traditional harper, Brian Bowman may have been born between about 1810 and 1840.

One final thought is whether Brian Bowman could be a stage name or a pseudonym for one of the harpers we already know about.

Let us hope that some other reference turns up. This long post is just to get his name out there on my big list.