Obituary: Rev Norman Bowman, minister.

Published on 21/09/2012 00:00

Born: 19 September 1912, in Saltcoats. Died: 15 September, 2012, in Ardrossan, aged 99.

Rev Norman Bowman, who died four days before his 100th birthday, was a greatly respected minister, a fine teacher and an accomplished musician and poet.

He was born in Saltcoats, the youngest of six children. He was educated at Saltcoats Primary School and then at Ardrossan Academy. In his teens, he was an accomplished trumpet player and played in a local dance band. He had asked for a trumpet for his 100th birthday.

When he left school in 1928 he went to work in a cousin’s printing works in Kilmarnock, but it was not long before, on the train to work, he experienced the powerful sense that he needed to do something far more challenging.

He studied to achieve the qualifications for university and graduated Master of Arts in 1935 and Bachelor of Divinity in 1938. There were almost 60 candidates for the ministry who left Trinity College that year.

For the next two years Norman Bowman was assistant minister in Richmond Craigmillar Church in Edinburgh, which had been transported into Niddrie and had only just occupied a newly built church and halls.

In 1940, he was ordained and inducted to his first parish, Kilsyth Burns. However, in 1943 he volunteered for war service as an army chaplain, and served with the Black Watch in Belgium and Germany.

He was wounded in the crossing of the Rhine in March 1945. Three months later, having returned home, he married Jean.

Within a year, Bowman had applied for a posting with the then Foreign Mission Committee of the Church of Scotland. Originally he hoped to be sent to Jamaica, but, in fact, was appointed a missionary in Calabar in Nigeria, where the Scottish Presbyterianism had been active since the days of Mary Slessor, who founded the Hope Waddell Training Institute, which provided vocational training for Africans.

Norman Bowman taught in the college, as well as managing 52 schools, making sure, he liked to say, that all the teachers were paid.

He spent five years in Nigeria, returning to Scotland in 1950 to spend a year as locum minister at the Ayr Auld Kirk before being inducted to Bonhill Old Parish.

Dr Iain Galbraith, who was brought up in Bonhill Old during Norman Bowman’s ministry, has written that he was “a man of many gifts – scholar, theologian, preacher, teacher, musician and craftsman”.

He was a challenging preacher, who wrote plays and composed music for the Sunday School, and displayed his gifts as a teacher with the bible class.

He acted with the dramatic club and, Dr Galbraith adds, “his mechanical knowledge repaired the clock in the church tower as soundly as he repaired his cars”.

In 1957, he moved to St Mary’s Church in Edinburgh’s New Town, where he was to have just as active a ministry, undertaking all sorts of tasks outwith the normal ministerial duties.In particular, his gifts as a writer made him keen to edit the parish magazine.

Although he left St Mary’s in 1964 after a seven-year ministry, he is still remembered there with considerable affection. But he wanted a change, and Napier College (as it then was) was looking for staff.

When he was interviewed for a post teaching liberal studies, one of the interviewing panel expressed some concern at his lack of teaching experience, but the Councillor for the Bellevue area (which housed St Mary’s Church) said: “He has been teaching all his life.”

Melville Dinwiddie, who had made the transition from parish minister to the secular world as director general of the BBC, and was at the time a councillor in Edinburgh, advised him that he might find it difficult to adjust to no longer “running his own show”.

Norman Bowman’s ministry had reflected the proper role of minister as servant. But he would have insisted that he may have been a congregation’s servant, but that did not make the congregation his master!

The rest of his working life was to be spent in teaching – at Napier College and then at George Watson’s Ladies College, where he was chaplain and also taught Latin.

In 1976, he spent some time in Moorsville, North Carolina, where he formed a close relationship with the minister there, Ed Lewis.

A plaque presented to him, recording the congregation’s appreciation of his ministry, took pride of place in his home. The following year – 1977 – he retired. He became Secretary of the Order of St John.

In recent years, Norman Bowman returned to Saltcoats, where he was a greatly loved member of St Cuthbert’s Parish Church, and associated with its Kirk Session.

Until he became less mobile he was in demand as a preacher, and several congregations expected no other minister to deputise if their own minister was absent for any reason. He wrote several books of poems, and composed a number of hymn tunes.

Norman Bowman is survived by his three sons, Norrie, John and Alastair and his daughter Jane and their families.

JOHNSTON MCKAY