Bowden Frank Philip

(Bearbeiten)

Biografie:
geboren in Tasmanien

Frank Philip Bowden (1903-68)
Frank Philip Bowden was born and brought up in Tasmania. In 1927 he came to Cambridge to work in the Department of Colloid Science and for the rest of his life, apart from the war years spent in Australia, Cambridge was his home. He was a brilliant physicist, dedicated to research, who became a C.B.E. and a Fellow of the Royal Society. He loved Cambridge and many highly attractive inducements failed to lure him away from the Cavendish, and Finella, his Cambridge home. In 1956 he was partly rewarded by the establishment for him of a new chair in the Cavendish in Surface Physics. It was in this particular field that he made a remarkable contribution to the science of ski-ing. In 1935 he spent some time on the Jungfraujoch with Seligman, where he was doing work on glacier movement, and carried out a basic series of experiments in the mechanism of sliding on ice and snow. The results of this research were first published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, 1939. This and his subsequent research formed a basis for revolutionary developments in the use of plastic and other coatings for skis.
I first met Philip Bowden in 1929 when he joined a C. U.M.C. meet in Austria. My brother Claud and I shared a rope with him and spent a highly enjoyable ten days traversing the peaks of the Stubaital and ZillertaI. At this time Philip was experienced in the exploration of comparatively unexploited mountain country in Tasmania, but his conventional summer mountaineering was limited to a few expeditions made in the previous year in the Oberland with Max Brünner, the physical chemist from Zürich whom he had met in Cambridge and who remained his life-long friend. Their best peak had been the Schreckhorn. Philip was a natural mountaineer and a wonderful companion, who brought a feeling of respectable maturity to our undergraduate expeditions. Although he went on that year to Saas, with Brünner again, where amongst other climbs they did the Lenzspitze-Nadelhorn traverse, I think he had decided that the sort of climbing which normally qualifies for the Alpine Club was not for him, for the rest of his mountaineering was largely done on skis or was carried out in unfamiliar districts like Corsica and the Julian Alps.
He rapidly become an enthusiastic and expert skier. In 1946 he was elected to the Club on a qualification which included little more conventional alpine mountaineering than I have mentioned but which was rich in ski mountaineering and expeditions in districts as far apart as the Sierra Nevada of Spain and California. Every year from 1927 until his death, except during the war, he visited the mountains at least once. His introduction to mountain travel in Tasmania always coloured his ski-ing. It was a matter of exploration and adventure rather than an exercise in technique. Even a mountain walk in Wales with Philip seemed to take on a pioneering character. In 1931 he married Margot Hutchison and one of his greatest pleasures was sharing with her and their four children his love of the mountains and his enjoyment of ski-ing.
Philip Bowden's three great enthusiasms were his family, scientific research and mountains. They all three brought out his particular gifts of wise and sympathetic companionship and it was characteristic of his full and active life that he was able to combine the three so successfully.
Peter Bicknell
Quelle: Alpine Journal Volume 74, 1969, Seite 391-392



Geboren am:
1903
Gestorben am:
1968