When my old school, Presentation College, Reading, was demolished a decade ago, the Labour council desperately searched for famous old boys after whom they could name streets on the housing estate that replaced it. This was a challenge. According to the local newspaper, ‘names rejected include one in recognition of Mike Oldfield, the musician behind ground-breaking prog rock album Tubular Bells’ – rejected by Oldfield, I assume, since he hated the school. They settled on Bowden Row, ‘in honour of political philosopher and Presentation alumnus Jonathan Bowden’.
I wonder if the residents of the handsome semi-detached houses know anything about Bowden. The council didn’t. He was a former cultural officer of the British National party and today has a cult following among young fascists who never met him: he died of a heart attack at the age of 49 in 2012, tormented by paranoid schizophrenia and false allegations of paedophilia.
I was shocked by his death because we’d been close friends in the sixth form. Indeed, I may have been his only friend at Presentation College. I wasn’t popular myself, but at a stretch I could pass for relatively normal – recollections may vary – while Jonathan made no attempt to forge friendships.
He was the strangest boy in the school. Short, round and stooped, with glasses that magnified his tiny eyes, he rarely spoke, and when he did it was in a nasal drawl. He left the school having failed both his science A-levels. Few people realised that he was so intellectually gifted. Certainly it seemed inconceivable that in 2025 someone would produce a biography of him.
Shaman of the Radical Right, which was published last month, is by Edward Dutton, a right-wing polemicist with a doctorate in anthropology who calls himself ‘The Jolly Heretic’ on YouTube. I suppose it depends on your definition of jolly. Dr Dutton is interested in the anatomy of different races (‘the data is clear about testicle sizes, not penises’), one of his videos is about objects retrieved from the backsides of Chinese degenerates, and he insists that ‘if my teenage son tried to persuade me to drink oat milk I would beat him with a leather belt’.
But he’s done a phenomenal job of uncovering the truth about Bowden, whose 30-odd books include Mad, Brute, Skin, Axe, Colonel Sodom Goes to Gomorrah and Locusts Devour a Carcass. He made films, too. In Venus Flytrap he plays Dr Mordred, a 1970s Hammer Horror villain who spits out aphorisms about putrefaction, morons and the morality of death. It’s so bad it’s good, except for those moments when Bowden startles us with his Nietzschean ferocity: ‘Malevolence lies with the sheep, not with the wolves.’
Not much evidence of intellectual gifts there, you might think, but the film’s monologues are a caricature of Bowden at his best. When we briefly resumed our friendship in our late twenties, before he’d gone full fascist, I was dazzled by the facility with which he juggled the ideas of Marx, Enoch Powell, Plato and Samuel Beckett.
And he was funny, too. His imitations of his Mancunian grandparents scoffing boxes of chocolates were almost worthy of Alan Bennett – though a bit rich coming from Jonathan, who once devoured a club’s entire cheeseboard in 20 minutes. I was paying, of course: he was massively stingy.
In 2011 Jonathan Bowden was picked up by police in Reading, semi-naked, holding a samurai sword
When we first reconnected, Bowden told me that after retaking his A-levels he’d acquired a First in English from Wolfson College, Cambridge, though he was moving to Birkbeck College to do his PhD on the novelist and painter Wyndham Lewis. It would have made far better reading than his own fiction, judging by a recorded talk he gave to something called the New Right movement in 2006.
Entitled ‘Bill Hopkins and the Angry Young Men’, the lecture is a survey of the influences on his mentor Hopkins (1928-2011), a far-right Welsh writer who was close to Henry Williamson, author of Tarka the Otter, and Colin Wilson, whose 1956 book The Outsider has never been out of print. Speaking from notes, Bowden flits across the chaotic intellectual landscape of 20th-century Britain, in which Williamson and Wilson rubbed shoulders with John Osborne, Kingsley Amis and Doris Lessing.
Lessing was a communist at the time, which didn’t trouble Bowden. He had a soft spot for ‘culturally independent leftists’, and he speaks admiringly of Lindsay Anderson’s Britannia Hospital, a far-left black comedy about the NHS whose cast included Leonard Rossiter and Arthur Lowe. His lecture also squeezes in the Sitwells, Theodor Adorno, John Buchan, Simone de Beauvoir and Jimmy Tarbuck. Alas, we’ll never know how it tied together because the tape recorder broke, a typical Bowden mishap.
The talk is disfigured by references to ‘syphilitic morality’ and other fascist themes – but it makes you wonder whether, if Bowden’s life had taken a different course, he could have been a maverick professor with a television contract. Alas, his problems went deeper than an attraction to dark ideology.
Bowden emerges from Dutton’s biography as a compulsive liar. He wasn’t working on a PhD; he didn’t even have a degree. He was at Cambridge, but left after a few months and no one knows why. He once told me he was divorced from a woman called Karen; Dutton can find no trace of her, or of the five children he claimed to have fathered by another woman.
Bowden was ‘a childless bachelor’ who ‘lived alone in a decrepit mobile home in a caravan park in Reading, never really worked and didn’t have the internet where he lived, so he used to research his essays at the local library’. In fact, Jonathan told me he was proud of living austerely in a caravan, refusing to spend his vast income from rental properties and a printing business. That was fantasy, too. He died penniless and his mobile home had to be towed away because it was a health hazard. He had even managed to get himself banned from the library.
Yet as his life fell apart, he was acquiring new fans thanks to the internet he couldn’t connect to. Dutton writes that videos of his virtuoso rants, mostly delivered in rooms above pubs, became the naughty little secret of semi-respectable right-wing radicals, ‘the shot of whisky enjoyed clandestinely by the overtly teetotal and godly church lady’.
He cleaned himself up for two speaking tours of America, and his success infuriated his rivals, who had earlier forced him to resign from the BNP by spreading rumours that he was a paedophile. Bowden denounced the claim as ‘lying filth’ – which it was. Dutton reports that a man of the same name had been convicted of downloading child pornography in 1999, a coincidence exploited by Bowden’s enemies.
These allegations, coupled with the disorientating acclaim from the United States, probably accelerated Bowden’s descent into paranoid schizophrenia. In 2011 he was picked up by police in Reading, semi-naked, holding a samurai sword. He was sectioned, and it’s possible that anti-psychotic drugs triggered his fatal heart attack.
Although it’s tempting to pathologise people who hold extreme views, I don’t think Bowden’s political philosophy can be attributed to mental illness. At its heart lay a yearning for a society of stable, ethnically homogenous families. I may get into trouble for this, but I think his racism was essentially theoretical: deplorable but not motivated by cold hatred. In the countless hours I spent talking to him, he never said anything nasty about black people. Nor did he bang on about Jews; indeed, he told me he was proud of being part-Jewish. That was also pure invention.
On the other hand, we can’t ignore Dutton’s discovery that Bowden’s mother Dorothy died at 48 from a heart attack after apparently suffering from mental illness. This doesn’t mean his schizophrenia was inherited, but I’m certain that Jonathan never fully recovered from her death when he was 15.
In the sixth form I used to visit the bungalow where he lived with his father Tony, an amiable bank manager who was delighted that his son had made a friend. He was hurt that Jonathan was only invited to my house once; I didn’t tell him he was banned after turning his nose up at my mother’s cooking.
It was in that bungalow that I saw his face twist with pain when he talked about his mother. He was oddly keen to sell me her Jane Austen collection for £5. I took them, but years later told him he must have them back and he agreed. Then we drifted apart and since I didn’t have his phone number that was an end to the matter. The books are still on my shelf.
I suppose I should be appalled that Bowden’s often grotesque ideas have earned him unexpected charisma. I honestly don’t know what to think. But part of me would be sorry to see his name stripped from those houses in Reading. It’s asking a lot, but I hope the residents of Bowden Row will bear in mind that my friend was a victim of diabolical false allegations and allow him to hold on to his tiny posthumous victory.
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