22 Facts About Jeremiah Owen

Jeremiah Owen was a mathematician, naval architect and Chief Metallurgist to the Admiralty during the first half of the nineteenth century.

Jeremiah Owen was the eldest son of the architect and engineer Jacob Owen and his wife Mary Underhill, through whom he was related to the mystic and pacifist Evelyn Underhill, Bishop Francis Underhill, the Professor of Anatomy and President of the Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh Charles Edward Underhill, and the jurist and author, Sir Arthur Underhill.

Jeremiah Owen was born in London in 1802, and spent his formative years in Portsmouth, where his father held several positions in the Royal Engineers before becoming principal architect and engineer, under John Fox Burgoyne's leadership of the board of public works in Ireland.

Unlike many of his brothers who became prominent architects in England and Ireland, Jeremiah Owen chose to follow a career in the navy and Admiralty.

Almost from the beginning of his time at the School of Naval Architecture, Jeremiah Owen was drawn into the political struggle over the role of educational training as a pathway to the officer class.

Whig reforms of the Royal Navy which would bring about the dismissal of the eminent naval architect Robert Seppings as Surveyor of the Navy formed the immediate context for Jeremiah Owen's first known intervention in the wider debate in 1832.

At a presentation on naval architecture at the third meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in June 1833, Jeremiah Owen continued to represent the case for academic discipline and funding of naval architecture.

Jeremiah Owen was likely a contributor to a popular pamphlet, circulated a month earlier and widely believed to be authored by teachers and recent graduates of the School.

Jeremiah Owen's vicious attack on the class background of many of the students conveniently excluded Owen, whose father was a leading architect in Ireland.

Ironically, his biographer, Mike Chrimes, has argued that family contacts, rather than meritocracy, were responsible for Jeremiah Owen gaining an important post in the Admiralty.

Newspaper accounts sympathetic to Jeremiah Owen recalled that he and other 'gentlemen of the late School of Naval Architecture' suffered as other less qualified officers were 'unjustly promoted' ahead of them.

Jeremiah Owen's turn to metallurgy was assisted by his former mentor at the School of Naval Architecture.

Jeremiah Owen remained in his specialist role for eighteen years, contributing to the Navy's scientific knowledge of the use of metals during that period.

Jeremiah Owen was a life member of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and presented at the association during its third conference in 1833.

Jeremiah Owen was in the same intake of members to the Institution of Civil Engineers as Isambard Brunel, Britain's most famed civil engineer of the nineteenth century.

Jeremiah Owen resigned in 1831, upon taking up his commission with the Admiralty at Somerset House.

That year, Jeremiah Owen numbered among a few Englishmen and women in Portsmouth whose 'noble feelings' were said to have led them to support the cause of Polish liberation.

Jeremiah Owen soon formed a relief committee for the Polish refugees.

Polish historian Zurawski vel Grajewski has suggested that Jeremiah Owen was suspected as an accomplice to the 1844 escape of eleven Polish soldiers from the Irtysz while it docked at Portsmouth.

Captain Franciszek Stawiarski's published letters suggests Jeremiah Owen had no knowledge of the soldiers escape plans although he himself had orchestrated their passage to London under the protection of Lord Stuart.

Jeremiah Owen contacted his friend and leader in the Portsmouth community Captain Stawiarski and quickly accepted his principled silence as to the soldiers whereabouts.

However, with their departure for Ireland in the 1830s, only his brother Thomas Ellis Jeremiah Owen remained with him in Portsmouth.