John Bowen (British author)


John Griffith Bowen was a British playwright and novelist.
He was born in Calcutta, India, to Ethel and Hugh Bowen; Hugh was the manager of the Shalimar Print Works in Gobariah. John Bowen's grandfather was an Inspector of Police in Calcutta. At the age of just five and a half he was put on a boat in Bombay and sent back to Britain where he was brought up by his uncle Donald and aunt Dolly in Whitehaven. John was sent to board at Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School, Crediton, where he developed an interest in literature and drama. In 1939, Bowen’s mother had returned to England with her three younger children, Patricia and twins Daphne and David, and they rented a house near Crediton. In 1940, having read about the bombing of Britain in The Times of India, Bowen’s father sent a cable to his wife saying “Bring the children out”, though no bombs had fallen in or near Crediton. The whole family returned to India, where Bowen spent an unhappy year living in the YMCA in Calcutta and working in a semi-clerical job. Eventually he told his father that when the war was over, he wanted to go to university at either Oxford or Cambridge, and that he had better acquire some sort of qualification. So, in 1941 he left his job and went to study at the Jesuit-run North Point College in Darjeeling, where he was awarded the Intermediate Arts degree of Calcutta University.
At the age of 18, much to his chagrin, he was drafted into the army, and during the latter part of WWII, served as a captain in the Maratha Light Infantry until 1947, serving as a Railway Transport Officer in various transhipment stations in Bengal.
In 1948, he returned once more to Britain to study at the University of Oxford, where he gained an MA in modern history, and also edited the university magazine, Isis. After graduating, Bowen won a Fulbright Scholarship and spent a year teaching and hitch-hiking through the USA.
Bowen returned to Britain in 1953, moved to London and spent three years as an assistant editor on Sketch magazine. He then turned to advertising, and while working at J Walter Thompson, he was part of the team that launched the successful marketing campaign for Rowntree's - "Have a break, have a Kit-Kat", which is still in use today. It was during this period that he wrote his first three novels, two of which were published by Faber & Faber: The Truth Will Not Help Us is about a political witch-hunt; After the Rain is set in the future and following a group of people attempting to survive a flood; and The Centre of the Green focuses on a family torn apart by their son’s marital infidelity. Bowen later adapted After the Rain as a stage play, which was performed to great critical acclaim at the Duchess Theatre in London and the John Golden Theatre on Broadway in 1967, starring Alec McCowen in the lead role.
In 1960, after leaving the comfort of the full-time job, Bowen and fellow advertising copywriter Jeremy Bullmore began writing together using the joint pseudonym of Justin Blake. Their character, Garry Halliday was picked up by BBC television, who commissioned them to write a children’s adventure serial which starred Terence Longdon in the title role. Halliday was a pilot who found himself solving crimes and overcoming villains. The three TV series became immensely popular and spawned five spin-off novels.
From the early 1960s, Bowen focused mainly on writing for television, including contributions to series such as Front Page Story, The Power Game and seven episodes of the 13-part thriller The Guardians. In 1963, he met the young actor David Cook, who had been cast in a minor speaking role in one of Bowen's television plays. Bowen and Cook began a romantic relationship which lasted for 52 years - the couple splitting their time between the flat they shared in South Kensington and their cottage in rural Warwickshire. Largely thanks to Bowen's encouragement, Cook also turned to writing and became a successful novelist and screenwriter in his own right.
During the 1970s and 80s Bowen continued writing and producing for television, including ITV's Play of the Week, Armchair Thriller, ITV Playhouse and Weekend Playhouse. He also adapted Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar as Heil Caesar! in 1973 and wrote a television remake of the classic film Brief Encounter the following year, which starred Richard Burton and Sophia Loren.
Bowen was a prolific writer for the stage too. I Love You, Mrs. Patterson concerned the romantic entanglement of a student and his teacher’s wife, and Little Boxes consisted of two one-acts, the first about aging vaudevillians and the second about the attempts of a young lesbian couple to conceal their affair. The Disorderly Women was a modernization of Euripides’ Bacchae. The Corsican Brothers was based on the story by Alexandre Dumas père, and the production at the Greenwich Theatre starred Bowen's partner David Cook alongside Gerald Harper.
Bowen returned to writing novels in the 80s: Squeak written from the point of view of a pigeon Bowen and David Cook had tended from a chick; The McGuffin - a Hitchcockian thriller - was dramatised for television in 1986 by Michael Thomas; The Girls is a dark story of village life set near his rural Warwickshire home.
In the mid 1990s, the BBC commissioned Bowen and David Cook to create the TV detective drama Hetty Wainthropp Investigates, based on Cook's 1988 novel "Missing Persons". The character of Hetty Wainthropp was loosely based on Cook's mother, Beatrice, and was portrayed by Patricia Routledge alongside Derek Benfield as her long-suffering husband Robert, and a young Dominic Monaghan as her sleuthing side-kick, Geoffrey.
Following David Cook's death from pancreatic cancer in September 2015, Bowen remained in their Warwickshire home, cared for by Cook's nephew and his husband. Bowen died on 18 April 2019, aged 94.

Selected works

Novels

Bowen started writing books in the mid-1950s.
In the mid-1960s Bowen switched to writing plays for theatre and television.