Bowser, George

BOWSER, George (c1824–1907) was born at London, England, said to have been son of a member of the Royal Navy and educated at Greenwich Naval School before serving two apprenticeships, one in paper staining, the other in floorcloth printing. Of these claims, possibly only the last is correct. After being twice convicted and sentenced, George ‘Bouser’ as a floorcloth maker was again convicted in June 1846 for larceny and sentenced to ten years. After being held in Newgate and Millbank prisons he was moved in December 1846 to the prison Hulk York at Portsmouth prior to an unpopular and short-lived renewal of transportation when instead of being called convicts, they were exiles. After the Bangalore arrived on 30^th April 1850 at Moreton Bay, Bowser was assigned to Capt Griffin on the Pine River. Despite being granted a ticket of leave in September 1850, he was imprisoned for 3 months in November 1850 for disobeying Griffin, and for breaching regulations by being in town in March 1851 without a pass, he was imprisoned for 48 hours in solitary confinement. Like others when Bowser left Moreton Bay, his ticket of leave was cancelled. It was said that he moved to Ipswich where he learnt to make bricks, then an itinerant occupation with bricks made on or close to the building site. By 1854 after Bowser returned to Brisbane, he pioneered brickmaking independent of a specific building. In business in York’s Hollow, later Victoria Park, Bowser was in a short-lived partnership with William Stanley Hall (c1844–1927) as Hall & Bowser but from 1855, they made bricks separately. Bowser prospered and was able to buy land in Spring and Green Hills and further afield. As a major supplier of bricks to the new Parliament House, he received preferential treatment when brickmakers were required to vacate York’s Hollow by the end of 1865. He also supplied bricks for other developments often on credit which threatened his liquidity when some of his clients were bankrupted after a financial crisis in mid-1866, leading Bowser to sell some of his property and forego brickmaking and instead grow arrowroot, tobacco and make cheese in the Logan district. To grind the arrowroot he designed and constructed the first undershot waterwheel built in the colony. At the end of 1878, Bowser returned to Brisbane where he became a major civil engineering contractor.