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.
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