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The great majority of our land’s guitar builders, both amateurs and professionals, have ever visited his shop or his workshop, a lot of them already did so in their early steps of their musical career. GEORGE M. BOWDEN was born in New York on October 26, 1920 and died on January 26, 2003 in Palma de Majorca. His father GEORGE CHARLES BOWDEN was a musician and philosopher. He studied in Cambridge and was member of its Chapel Choir. As a professor specialized in voice improvement and correction of diction mistakes based on the Alexander Technique, he worked in England and in New York among other places. He wrote some summaries on the Alexander Technique, with a deeper and more spiritual approach. His most complete work is a book titled “Mathias Alexander and the Creative Advance Individual” copies that unfortunately we can not find nowadays. Anyway there is plentiful correspondence with the recognition of important personalities of his time. His mother, (born Annie Frances Moore) DINA MOORE BOWDEN daughter of a rich Californian family, was always very interested in the founder of the California missions: Fray Junípero Serra. She was appointed representative of the City and County of San Francisco in Majorca. This way she contributed to the restoration and later recovery of the house where Fray Junípero Serra was born. She took major part in organising Fray Junípero’s Museum in Petra. In San Diego, the place where Fray Junípero landed as he arrived to California, there is a Museum of History where Mrs Bowden has a room dedicated to the photography, newspapers’ cuttings of the time and many other objects associated with Majorca and Petra particularly. He wrote a wonderful book, limited edition, titled “Junípero Serra in his native isle (1713-1749)”. It was printed in Palma de Majorca by Gráficas Miramar in 1976. It was a rich edition with wonderful photographs, poetry of well-known Majorcan writers in original version and English translated version by Mrs Bowden. She was very sophisticated and had a great love of arts. She received singing and violin lessons in Vienna. The influence of the atmosphere he lived in formed Goerge’s liking for arts in general and music in particular. He studied violoncello in New York and he would be taken him to major concerts. But when G.M. Bowden was just 11, his parents decided to travel around Europe and the north of Africa. That’s the way the memories of the visited places at such a receptive age marked him deeply. At the end of their wanderings they arrived to Majorca. They were so captivated by the beauty of the islands at that time, the thirties, that they ended settling there permanently. George lived in Majorca until he was 18 and received guitar lessons by Don Bartolomé Clatayud. He then moved to England in order to study at Cambridge until World War broke out. He joined voluntarily the English navy and became officer. Before the end of the war, he was sent to India, where he stayed for a while. During the post-war years he decided to emigrate to British Columbia, Canada. George Bowden’s guitar building workshop in Majorca started in 1964 and it was called Los guitarreros de Mallorca (Majorcan guitar builders) and it was the origin of today’s Escuela George Bowden (George Bowden’s School). This school had a curious beginning, because due to his good knowledge of Spanish and his contacts with Spain, George Bowden was asked to organise Spanish Pavilion at the World Fair celebrated in Seattle in 1962, having an enormous success among visitors. When the fair finished he realised that the guitar players he had hired were losing their guitars, because they were selling them to the visitors, who were fighting for them. That gave him the idea of opening a shop in Vancouver (Canada), near the University, called Mediterranean Shop. He came back to Majorca and opened his first workshop. After different locations he ended up at the Calle Huerto de Torrellas, where at the same time and together with his wife, he opened the shop called Bowden Musical, which is nowadays ran by his successor Antonio Morales. But going back to its origins, to start the first workshop he went to Valencia and hired the master José Ortí, grandson and son of guitar builders who had worked at the popular factory Telesforo Julve. Afterwards he hired the son and grandson, both called José, of the prestigious guitar builder from Granada, Eduardo Ferrer. Them and some more employees formed the base of the workshop which would export Majorcan guitars to the whole world. Currently the most representative guitar builders coming out of George Bowden’s workshop or school are Michael Dunn, one of the most prestigious Canadian guitar builders and Antonio Morales, his successor, in Palma de Majorca. So we could say that George Bowden spent the half of his life trapped by the guitar’s spell and fascinated by its magic and the enchantment of its mysteries.
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