Joshua Brooking Rowe

• Born: Plymouth, 1837 (his father was a bookseller in Whimple Street)
• Died: Plympton St Maurice, 28 June 1908
• Work: solicitor in Plymouth, practising with Francis Bulteel and later W. L. Munday
• Devonshire Association: member from its founding in 1862; local secretary at the Plymouth meeting of 1863; President in 1882; joint honorary secretary from 1900 until his death
• Also: Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries (1875) and of the Linnean Society

Joshua Brooking Rowe, who signed himself J. Brooking Rowe, was a Plymouth solicitor whose spare time went into the history and natural history of Devon. He was articled to a Plymouth firm, spent a year with a conveyancing barrister in London, and then practised in Plymouth. The Devonshire Association's obituary calls him a veteran of the Association: one of its original members in 1862, local secretary when it first met at Plymouth in 1863, and its President in 1882, when it met at Crediton.

His Dartmoor link was family. His uncle, the Rev. Samuel Rowe, vicar of Crediton, wrote the Perambulation of the Antient and Royal Forest of Dartmoor, and Brooking Rowe edited the enlarged edition of 1896 (see Samuel Rowe). He sat on the Association's Barrow Committee, and his name is among the signatories of the 1895 report of the Dartmoor Exploration Committee.

His books were mostly about Plymouth and the places around it: The Mammals, Birds, Reptiles and Amphibians of Devon (read in 1862, published 1863), The Ecclesiastical History of Plymouth (four parts, 1873 to 1876), The Cistercian Houses of Devon (1878) and A History of the Borough of Plympton Erle (1906). He also wrote the mammals article for the Devon volume of the Victoria County History, edited the reports on the Plymouth Proprietary Library manuscripts, and was joint editor of Devon Notes and Queries. He helped found the Devon and Cornwall Record Society, and papers by him fill many volumes of the Transactions of the Devonshire Association.

From 1882 he lived at Plympton St Maurice, where he was churchwarden for twenty-six years and helped restore the parish church. He left his library of about 10,000 volumes, pamphlets and manuscripts to Exeter Public Library. His obituary is in the Transactions for 1908 (vol. 40, pages 40 to 42).

Sources: Wikipedia, Joshua Brooking Rowe | Obituary notice, Transactions of the Devonshire Association, vol. 40 (1908), pages 40 to 42 | Report of the Council, vol. 40 (1908) | GENUKI, Joshua Brooking Rowe (1908).