Author: Bowen, Melesina
Biography:
BOWEN, Melesina, formerly CLAY (1777-1860: ancestry.co.uk)
She was born on 27 Nov. 1777 and baptised on 21 Jan. 1778 at St. Michael’s, Coventry, Warwickshire, one of at least six children of Thomas Clay and Frances Handcase, who had married in 1769. The family later lived at Kenilworth. She married Captain Lewis Bowen, an army surgeon in the dragoons, on 27 Jan. 1801 at St. Michael’s, Coventry. They went on to have at least three sons and two daughters, all of whom predeceased her. Her husband inherited the Cfentrenfa estate and farm at Cil-y-Cwm, Carmarthenshire, Wales, in 1804. After army service he became a magistrate and died at Tarrington, Herefordshire, on 28 Feb. 1838. Her topographical poem, Ystradffin (1839) may commemorate her leaving Wales. In 1849 she went out to Brazil with her son Henry, a doctor, intending to settle with her other sons. However, her son Guernsey St. George was lost at sea in 1849 and she decided to settle in Natal, South Africa. In August 1849, she and her son Henry arrived in Durban on the Rosebud. Her other son, Lewis, died at Cocaes, Brazil, on 9 Oct. 1849. She acquired a few acres of dense bush of the Berea above Congella (in an area now known as Glenmore). They named it Kefentrenfa (after their former Welsh residence) and established a beautiful garden, with paw paw trees and other exotic produce which they had cultivated from seeds and plants they had collected in South America. Henry died in June 1850 and her tombstone noted that it had left her “a childless widow in a foreign land” at the age of 72. In Nov. 1855 she resolved to leave the Natal and return to Wales to live with her sister-in-law, Mary Jones, in Carmarthenshire, but she had difficulty selling her property and died there on 13 Nov. 1860, aged 83, leaving an estate valued at £2000. There is an account of her life in Natal by her friend and neighbour Eliza Whigham Feilden, who left Natal in 1857 but continued to correspond with her until Bowen’s death. (Shelagh O’Byrne Spencer, British Settlers in Natal 1824-1857: A Biographical register [1986], 3: 17-18; ancestry.co.uk 14 June 2023; findmypast.co.uk 14 June 2023; Hereford Times 3 Mar. 1838; Eliza Whigham Feilden, My African Home; Or, Bush Life in Natal When A Young Colony [1852-1857] [1887]; NPC Will 1860) AA
Other Names:
- Mrs. Lewis Bowen