Southampton City Libraries
Bowen Collection
The Frank Bowen Collection of maritime press cuttings is a collection of national importance. Compiled between 1900 and 1950, it spans the golden age of British merchant shipping. It covers all aspects of commercial and naval shipping, including a day by day account of World War Two at sea.
Formerly held at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, the collection has now been acquired by Southampton Maritime Library. It has been microfilmed and is now available to the general public. The collection comprises approximately 1000 volumes of press cuttings, a series of 1300 notebooks, and an alphabetical card index, now on microfiche. There is also a printed subject index to the notebooks and a series of schemas outlining the content of each of the cuttings volumes. Frank Bowen Spent much of his life collecting and preserving information about ships and sailors. In so doing he preserved much of the history of British merchant shipping in the first half of the twentieth century. He collected information on all aspects of commercial and naval shipping including news items on individual ships and shipping lines, engineering developments, port developments and biography. The collection is unique and will prove invaluable for research into the history of ships and shipping lines. It will also provide important material for the study of shipping in general.
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