Thanks to Colin Bowers
We are deeply saddened by the loss of John Bowers in September, 2024. John was a member of Club Lotus Australia, and a frequent motorsport competitor with the club. Our thoughts are with his children Karen and Colin, and his family and friends.
Colin Bowers prepared a touching vale for his father, which perfectly captures the man as he was to many of us. Please read on, with thanks to Colin.
Colin John Bowers (1946-12-28 –> 2024-09-25)
It is with great sadness that I announce the passing of my father John Bowers, on the 25th September, 2024, at the age of 77. John suffered a cardiac event at Brussels airport, Belgium, shortly after flying in to attend a motor race. He was attended by a doctor within minutes, but was unable to be revived. The doctor has indicated it was very fast, and that he would not have suffered.
I regard my father’s death as very sad, but not tragic. We were both aware his heart was weak, and thus had several very frank conversations on the topic of death earlier this year. John wanted his friends and colleagues to know that he considered himself to have led a very full and interesting life, and was content to join his wife, Margaret Bowers, who preceeded him in 2014. In that spirit, this obituary is written in celebration of a life well-lived, rather than in mourning for one that has passed.
Colin John Bowers was born on the 28th December, 1946, in Parkes, NSW, Australia. Although his father insisted on naming him Colin, from early childhood, all his friends knew him as John (his mother’s preferred name). This was likely facilitated by the passing of John’s father when he was only six years old; an event John regarded as one of only two tragedies that marred an otherwise fortunate life (the other being the passing of his wife in 2014).
The early death of John’s father left the family in a difficult financial situation, and John often spoke about the aid provided by Legacy during his early childhood (he donated consistently to Legacy through to his passing). Eventually, John’s mother re-married to a mechanic, Danny, who by all accounts shared the traits of high blood pressure and short temper with John. Despite this, they got on like a house on fire, and working with Danny in his teenage years sparked a lifelong passion and appreciation for automobiles (John’s uncle Bill also gave him his first book on Lotus around this time too…). While John often wished he could have known his father better, he felt he couldn’t have asked for a better step-father than Danny.
There is no denying John was smart. He attended the selective Newcastle Boys High School, where he excelled in the harder sciences, typically regarding any outcome other than top of his class as a failure. It was therefore no surprise when he enrolled in Newcastle University straight out of high school. However, what did surprise those who knew him was his choice of subjects: accounting and economics, rather than an engineering-related discipline. John had always found the subject of economics intriguing, but he also admitted to me that part of the equation was that the government stipend offered for accounting and economics was significantly higher, and, as mentioned, the family was not wealthy.
It is around this time that John met his future wife, Margaret, while attending a local dance hall. They married on 14th May, 1971, and were together until her passing in 2014. John would often reminisce that it was her smile that first attracted him from across the dance hall, but that in practice, the largest contributor to their success together was her intelligence and wit, rivaling his own.
After completing his undergraduate degree (Bachelor of Commerce), John took a role in the accounting department at Tubemakers, and quickly rose to become the youngest accounting manager in the firm’s history. He was instrumental in transitioning the firm’s accounting practices from by-hand calculations to the use of punch-card powered computing machines.
John also would often recount his investigations of the logic behind the accounting policies at Tubemakers. For each policy, he would invariably discover it existed because “Mr so-and-so set it up that way”. He resolved from this experience to always ask questions, and if the answers were not satisfactory, then to derive his own from first principles. An aside: John’s memory was not particularly strong, even as a young man, but he always thought this to be a strength, rather than a weakness, since it forced him to derive answers from first principles rather than simply memorize them with no real understanding of the underlying mechanics.
John returned to Newcastle University, both as an educator (a tutor and teaching assistant to begin with), and as a student completing a Masters of Commerce. This marked the beginning of a long period of involvement with universities, that continued almost to the end of his life. With excellent results and recommendations from Newcastle, John was able to make it into the Business Economics PhD program at Harvard. He was taught by some of the top finance academics of the era: John Lintner, Bill Sharpe, and Robert Merton (in a one-off course on option pricing held at Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
One of the great regrets of John’s life is that he never finished the PhD. Family circumstances motivated a return to Sydney after three years at Harvard, with promises that he would complete his dissertation while working at the Australian Graduate School of Management. However, life got in the way, and he never did manage to complete it, opting instead to graduate with a Masters of Research. (perhaps coincidentally, I was born around this time…)
John worked as a lecturer and researcher at the AGSM for a number of years, but debts were piling up, and academia in Australia has never been a particularly lucrative career. A pivotal moment for John was a paper he wrote with Philip Brown at the AGSM. Merrill Lynch paid John and Philip the sum of $5,000 to write a research report analysing some new financial instruments that had arisen in response to Australian tax legislation (the exact details escape me). Merrill Lynch made millions trading on the insights from the research report. John took the hint and moved to the private sector.
After a short stint as analyst at Towers Perrin, he was offered a managing director role at the Sydney office of Frank Russell, a role he occupied for close to a decade, with great success. While John had great strategic insight, and was often able to forecast important macro events years in advance, he would humbly attribute his success to “hiring the right people, and then getting out of their way”. An additional insight: I’ve had conversations with many people who worked with John (both at Frank Russell as well as later in his career), and one common thread from all these conversations is that John was just as interested in the growth of the people at the firm, as well as the growth of the firm itself. Importantly, he strenuously avoided prioritizing one over the other, instead regarding them as symbiotic.
His success at Frank Russell led to his appointment as CEO of Barclays Global Investors (BGI) Australia, which in turn led to his final professional role as Global Head of Fixed Income for BGI, based mostly in London with the odd stint in San Francisco. A fun anecdote from this era includes one of his first meetings at San Francisco, where he questioned why there wasn’t a daily report of counter-party exposure. He asked why, for example, no one could tell him what BGI’s current exposure to Lehman was. In response, he was told it was irrelevant since Lehman couldn’t possibly go under. With some prescience, he insisted on the establishment of such a report, a policy which no doubt proved useful some years later.
John retired from BGI in 2005, but certainly did not retire from life. After a long and successful career in finance, he returned to his early passion of automobiles, when in late 2008 he purchased Lotus 25 R4, the historic F1 car driven by Jim Clark during most of his 1963 championship winning year. Around the same time, he also worked with friends to create a hedge fund based around Industrial Organisation, BCS Capital. Unfortunately it proved a difficult period to attract funding, and that, in combination with Margaret’s cancer diagnosis in 2011, led him to step back from BCS.
He did, however, enjoy enormous success with Lotus 25 R4 all the way through to his passing. The car won numerous historic F1 events from 2009 to 2024, including multiple wins at the two most prestigious events of the season; the Monaco Historic, and the Goodwood Revival. At the same time, John also returned to his beloved Newcastle University, this time with a position on the board, overseeing the uni’s investment policy until he stepped down in 2022.
John is survived by his children, Karen and Colin, and grandchildren Henry and Hugo (Karen’s sons) and Flynn and Max (Colin’s sons). We all miss him very much and are very grateful for all the time and help he gave to us over the years. He will be remembered.
– Obituary by Colin Bowers (John’s son)