Jeremiah Owen (22 February 1802 – 2 August 1850) was a mathematician, naval architect and Chief Metallurgist to the Admiralty during the first half of the nineteenth century.

Owen took part in the debates over the professionalization of naval architecture in the Royal Navy and was active in campaigns for Polish human rights in the 1830s.

Training in advanced Euclidean Geometry (as well as the study of French, History, and Geography) earned scholars the moniker the 'Euclid Boys' from some quarters of the Navy.

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

[11][12] This attack on the college and school, which eventually led to their closures in 1837, traded on the belief that traditional models of naval apprenticeship offered the best route for training the officer class and master ship-wrights.

Competing positions about the relative merits of scientific training and established practice governed by rule of thumb emerged in Symonds’ subsequent moves against the School of Naval Architecture.

Such was the notoriety of the pamphlet, that Captain Frederick Marryat wrote a rejoinder in The Metropolitan Magazine, launching a counterattack on its authors, who he named as the students and staff of the School.

Marryat suggested that Sir Thomas Byam Martin’s descriptions of Owen and his fellow students as ‘highly gifted young men’ was preposterous.

Like his classmate, Thomas Lloyd, Owen escaped the unfortunate fate of many of the school's scholars, having recently received promotion to a scientific position within the Admiralty.

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

Newspaper accounts sympathetic to 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.

From the 1830s, it was reported that, 'seeing the discouragement which those of this class suffered in their strictly professional career, Mr. Owen turned his attention to the study of metals, and acquiring much experience in his new pursuit, was afforded the opportunity of practically applying it to the advantage of the Service.

Despite his scientific credentials and research, criticisms of the appointment of ‘shipwright’ over an ‘officer of the trade’ followed Owen in his supervision of the Navy's smitheries.

[23] Other more critical descriptions of the role in the press labelled it as 'a mere sinecure,'[33] presumably designed to keep Owen salaried while he carried out his substantive work as a scientific officer on the Committee of metals.

Opportunities for naval architects over the lean years of the 1840s meant that he was forced to take up a non-scientific role in the Navy, though he continued to be based at Somerset House and retained his former salary.

[36] The appalling conditions they had suffered in Prussian labour camps following the November uprising and their forced deportation to the United States drew Owen's attention.

His brother Thomas Ellis Owen, later mayor of Portsmouth, and James Bennett, another former student of the school, are also listed amongst the committee's members.

[40] Throughout the same period, Portsmouth's Polish community quickly became an intellectual melting pot of socialists and communists as the émigrés became embroiled in debates over private and common land ownership in a liberated Poland.

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

[44] Given his position on the relief committee there was little reason to think Owen believed the expatriate community would give the escaped prisoners up in the face of certain exile.

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