Jonathan Bowden
political activist
Jonathan David Anthony Bowden (12 April 1962 – 29 March 2012) was an English right-wing political activist, orator, writer and artist. A member of the Conservative Party in the early 1990s, he later became involved in a number of far-right organisations, including the British National Party (BNP). A relatively obscure speaker during his lifetime, Bowden has since been described as a "cult figure" amongst the far-right movement, even more than a decade after his death.
Life and career
Early life and education
Bowden was born in Royal Tunbridge Wells in Kent, and attended Presentation College, a Roman Catholic boy's school, in Reading, Berkshire. He was an only child. His father was a bank manager whilst his mother, Dorothy, suffered from severe mental illness and died when Bowden was a teenager.
In 1984 he completed one year of a Bachelor of Arts history degree course at Birkbeck, University of London, as a mature student, but left without graduating. He enrolled at Wolfson College, Cambridge, in 1988, but left after a few months. He became a lifelong friend of the novelist Bill Hopkins (1928–2011), one of the angry young men, during this time. Bowden was otherwise an autodidact.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jonathan Bowden” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.