Author: BOWSER, J.
Biography:
BOWSER, John (1745-1826: Halifax Books)
His birth, baptism, and parentage cannot be established with any certainty; there are many possibilities. There are also many possibilities for a marriage (if indeed there was one). The earliest geographical location for him is Sunderland, Durham, in his early thirties. The probability is that he was born in the north of England but this is by no means certain. Nothing is known of his education and he is not recorded as having attended a dissenting academy. He was initially ordained or, more accurately, invited to be Baptist minister at Sunderland on 1 Aug. 1777. He later moved briefly to Bolton, near Manchester, before becoming minister at the Bethel Chapel, Shipley, near Bradford, in 1782 where he served for thirty years until his retirement in 1812. He died on 7 Feb. 1826, aged 82. The Halifax scholar J. Horsfall Turner seems to have seen a copy of Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1807), but the only known copies now are at Cornell and Princeton Theological Library. (Halifax Books and Authors [1906], 123; Isaac Mann, Memoirs of the late Rev. Wm. Crabtree [1815], 55; Leeds Intelligencer 16 Feb. 1826; Dissenting Academies Online, QMC) AA