4,683 words 
Edward Dutton
Shaman of the Radical Right:
The Life and Mind of Jonathan Bowden
With a Foreword by Greg Johnson
Perth, W.A., Australia: Imperium Press, 2025
When Edward Dutton published this investigatory biography of Jonathan Bowden a few weeks ago, he promoted it with an amusing little fillip on his Substack. At the start of a loose, impromptu podcast about his new book, Dutton gives us a vocal impersonation of Bowden himself—speaking to us from beyond the grave, as it were. This “Bowden” has just learned that someone’s published a book about him, and it all sounds like an excellent idea. He hectors us to go buy this new book, because it’s all about him.
Vocally the Dutton impersonation is not exactly like Bowden, to my ears anyway (register too high, voice too strangled-sounding), but it is funny, and does catch the cadence and improvisational panache of Bowden’s speeches. For example, there’s a wonderfully misplaced quote when he’s plugging the book, very Bowdenesque: “I think it was Benjamin Disraeli, Benjamin Disraeli— he was one o’ them—Benjamin Disraeli, he said, ‘If a book is worth reading it’s worth buying!’”[1]
Our cod-Bowden then signs off with, “I regret nothing in my life and I want you awwwlll to read about it!”
So, if you knew nothing at all about Jonathan Bowden before, now you’ve at least gathered that he was a decidedly opinionated person, with a distinctly insistent style of speaking.
It is Edward Dutton’s thesis that Jonathan Bowden was and is (I mean, especially since his death) a truly charismatic figure, or “shaman,” as in the title. But he explains this by way of also telling us that Bowden was in many ways a crank, an unusually eccentric or unstable person, one with mental and behavioral problems and no visible means of support (apart from perhaps a small remittance doled out by his bank-manager father); and finally, someone who habitually lied about his background, education and personal life. A sad sack, alas; a real broken suitcase.
But the story doesn’t end there. Dutton didn’t know Bowden, or even know of him until a few years after he died. No grudges or hero-worship here, so Dutton is trapped in the objectivity of the earnest researcher, constantly backing-and-filling before coming to anything like final judgment. Along the way, he takes into account Bowden’s special attributes and pronounces him an undoubted, if highly erratic, genius. Bowden was possessed of great persuasive ability and penetrating insight when speaking to an audience. And it is these gifts, accompanied by a highly strung nature, and a vulnerability to which people responded viscerally, that have given Bowden’s reputation a mystical afterglow, an afterglow that seems to shine brighter and brighter in the years since he passed on in 2012. It’s a reputation that cannot be accounted for merely by his various odd and scattered contributions, which include many essays, speeches, works of fiction, and reportedly “hundreds” of paintings.
When he set about compiling notes for a biography around 2019, Dutton did so with some reluctance. Someone else had already taken on the task, but this other author[2] seemed to be taking forever to finish it. So now we have the present volume, which is less a critical biography or linear narrative than the story of a meandering investigation. Dutton takes us along on this journey, through interviews and rumors and false leads, as he looks up Bowden’s old school chums, political colleagues, and some unexpected fellow habitués of the perverse and demimondaine. (We come across a sort of antiquarian BDSM society, one that advertised in the back pages of The Oldie and The Spectator in the late 1990s, and was ruled by elegantly attired transvestite mistress-disciplinarians.) The successive revelations pile upon one another. We end up like the reporter in Citizen Kane, discovering over and over that the great man was never quite what he appeared to be. Indeed, Bowden keeps being revealed as more interesting than anyone could have realized at the time; and yet he’s also ever more elusive.
There’s no Rosebud sled at the end, purporting to explain everything. We do however find out that Jonathan Bowden, who portrayed himself to acquaintances and colleagues as a stalwart family man—with wife and three, or five, or maybe even seven children—never married or fathered a child. He never learned to drive, nor even had a driver’s license, nor held a steady job with regular paycheck. He lived alone in a broken-down caravan, or mobile home, in a caravan park near Reading, England. He had no internet access there. He went to the library whenever he needed to do research. At one point he caused a scene at his library and was thereafter banned. He never graduated from any university or persisted at one for more than a term or two (although he did briefly matriculate in a college at Cambridge, where he proposed to read History).
I expect that some people will be offended and annoyed by all these findings, regarding them as sensationalist, unnecessary, dirty linen. I personally was not surprised by the revelations, because when I first became aware of Jonathan Bowden (posthumously and inadvertently, much like Edward Dutton) he sounded an awful lot like an old friend of mine. So much so, in fact, that I half-suspected he was indeed that selfsame mad-genius friend, though latterly clean-shaven—Bowden himself had worn a wild beard for a long time—and sporting a coat and tie. Even their vocal timbres seemed similar. Eventually I figured they couldn’t the same person, however. My friend didn’t spend much time in England after his teens, and although he checked out on many other counts (never had a real job, never learned to drive, had a vicarious fascination with perversity), my friend was actually married once, however briefly, which gave him just enough time to father a daughter in his late thirties.
* * *
Edward Dutton is a man who likes bold concepts and great unifying theories. Accordingly he begins his study with a few chapters that attempt to dissect the roots of Bowden’s politics and philosophy. He then goes on to postulate numerous psychological theories and neurodivergent frailties that might explain why Bowden was the way he was. (Subtitles: “Why Are Geniuses Mentally Unstable?”, “Why Is Autism Associated with Borderline Personality?,” “What Is the Nature of Genius Intelligence?”)
These subheadings tell you a lot about Dutton’s outlook and conclusions. They also take us through some tedious theorizing. Putting these chapters at the beginning was a mistake, I think, an architectural defect in the book’s design. They really belong at the end, in some kind of appendix or summary analysis of the personality of Jonathan Bowden.
Much better to skim or skip those early chapters and dive right into the main course, which begins around chapter four, with Bowden’s superficially serene middle-class childhood, as son of a cricket-loving, fiction-writing manager for the National Westminster Bank, descendant of generations of Somerset and Wiltshire yeomen; and a mother whose roots were murkier, with some apparent illegitimacy, but Mancunian and Irish, so far as we can tell.
The mother, Dorothy, was physically frail and, according to Bowden, quite mad much of the time, given to suicide attempts. (Dutton will suggest of course that the unhinged side of Bowden all came from his mother.) Bowden would tell friends that Dorothy was given to sudden crazy spells, during one of which she set the curtains on fire. But she died of coeliac disease and other physical ailments when Bowden was 15, so Bowden evidently felt free afterwards to concoct all sorts of tales about her, true or not, such as saying she was insane when she died, which is at best a matter of opinion and certainly unprovable. He also claimed her parents disapproved of her marrying Mr. Tony Bowden because Tony was a part Jew-boy. (Tony, needless to say, was not.)
Jonathan Bowden appears to have spent most of his life subsisting on an allowance from his father, but we’re told that he and dad were not terribly close. Some idea of the distance between them may be gained from Dutton’s conversation with the president of the Wokingham Cricket Club, where Tony Bowden was Club President in the 1990s. The current president remembered Tony well…but had no idea he had a son at all, certainly not one who was a political activist. Tony seldom spoke of his son to outsiders. According to Jonathan, his father became uncomfortable when mention of his son’s Right-wing activism got into the news.
Jonathan himself liked to joke about Tony Bowden’s bankerly discretion and arch-Toryness. He’d tell how one day his father boasted to him that he’d suddenly cut loose and voted for UKIP. Tony talked up this daring achievement as though he’d taken his first look-see at an exotic brothel. It looks to me as though steady, staid Tony was merely seeking his son’s approval, now that he had taken a baby-step walk on the Nigel Farage wild side. But Jonathan had long since moved on from his Monday Club-type undergraduate Conservatism, and lukewarm UKIP-style nationalist politics. He’d been a senior officer of the British National Party. So he responded to his dad’s daring with grunt and a sneer.
You can buy Jonathan Bowden’s Western Civilization Bites Back here.
The anecdotes and speculations about Bowden’s family are pretty thin stuff in the end, because Bowden himself was such an ardent fabulist, and from what we can tell for certain, there wasn’t anything terribly remarkable about his antecedents. What matters more is why and how Bowden gathered his following of fans and adherents, and what impression he made upon them.
The best illustration of that comes from the experience of author Dutton himself, which he goes into at length in that podcast monologue. He tells how he came in completely cold to the subject of Bowden, only gradually realizing that he, Edward Dutton, appeared to be one of the last people on earth—or at least one of the last in his political circles—who had neither met, nor read, nor heard of, this underground prodigy, this gadfly shaman, this now-deceased Jonathan Bowden.
I didn’t know of Jonathan Bowden during his lifetime. When he came to the heights of his fame in life [in mid-2000’s to 2012], I was living in Finland, so I wasn’t familiar with any of this. I didn’t know the New Right Forum, or wherever it was he used to go and speak in London. Only the other day I passed—what was it called? The Victory Club?[3] Somewhere near Waterloo Station. I was near Waterloo and I happened to walk past it. And I knew that he’d spoken there. And right next to that there was a fish and chip shop, this was behind Waterloo Station…called Fishcoteque, where apparently he used to dine…so there you are.
[…]I first discovered him when I was at a meeting at the London Conference of Intelligence in 2015, in central London, and there was some chap who’d come along with somebody else, and they were talking about Jonathan Bowden, and how he was such an amazing—I didn’t even know he was dead—how he was such an incredible speaker, he had such an ability to distill knowledge down to its essence, and to bring together obscure strands, esoteric strands and sort of make you feel you that you were there, and really understood some things that heretofore were totally obscure…
An example being Julius Evola, who at that point I hadn’t ever heard of, or I vaguely heard of. So I thought, well that would be interesting, I’d like to see what he has to say about this Julius Evola. So I found his speech on YouTube and he brought together in this engaging fashion, so that I really felt I understood it, in an absorbing fashion—I wasn’t just reading cold prose—the essence of this guy’s philosophy and the essence of this guy’s personality, delivered by a very charismatic, personable, interesting, funny guy. So that you really feel that you’ve taken some information in, been taken on a journey by him. And there’s something semi-hypnotic about him.
I thought he was a very interesting guy. I Googled him and discovered that he died. I had no idea that he died, and he was only forty-nine, and…shocking. And then I started watching more and more speeches by him…on some people I never heard of, and some that I had, but they were elucidated in an interesting way. And then I found some [speeches] to be more political in nature, and he was just adept at taking you into his world, taking you on a journey to his world, and kind of inspiring you about the nature of—well, the Clown World will be triumphed over in the end. This sort of thing.
So I was vaguely interested in him, by the time in 2019 when people started to say, you should write a biography, I’d really love to see a biography of him…
For me, the two key takeaways here are 1) “there’s something semi-hypnotic about him”; and 2) “Clown World will be triumphed over in the end.”
The first is probably a necessary tool in the kit of any truly compelling speaker, someone you want to hear again and again, even if you don’t know what he’s going to speak on. Which would be the case with Bowden, because he claimed he didn’t know what he’d talk about until it was time to go on. He always spoke without notes or other preparation, probably to maintain improvisational verve. (The downside to this is that Bowden would sometimes drift away from his topic, as in his speech called “Pulp Fascism,” wherein he tells us he’s going to talk about how the cartoon character Tintin was really Leon Degrelle…but gets lost talking about comic books and never comes back to make his case.)
The second point is the desideratum of any Dissident Right group hosting a speaker. You want to be assured that it’s the enemy, not you, that is bonkers; and that the enemy is self-destructive and will soon come to grief; that you, not they, are on the Right Side of History. It’s not worth your while to hear that your opponents may have some good points, and all moral judgments are in shades of gray. There’s no room for moral ambiguity when your culture is falling to pieces all around you. The battle lines must be drawn hard and fast, it’s a battle of the ages between your side and Clown World. It’s very astute of Dutton to pick out that sine qua non out of all those vaguely “inspiring” indescribables.
Thanks to this book and the proliferation of Jonathan Bowden essay collections in recent years, and his occasional mention in the press (“mainstream,” online, and otherwise) Bowden in the coming years will probably not be quite the shadowy figure he has been, known to mainly to cognoscenti who go to secret conferences, or listen to pontifications in the upper rooms of London pubs.
But, speaking of mainstream press, I recently saw a piece in the Spectator[4] by Bowden’s old secondary-school buddy Damian Thompson. It was occasioned by the publication of the Dutton book, in which Thompson is extensively quoted. Thompson’s column takes a dismissive, condescending attitude toward both Bowden and Dutton, an attitude that at this juncture seems both naïve and a real throwback.
For about 25 years, associate editor Thompson has delighted in a Spectator thumbnail bio that boasts he was “once called ‘a blood-crazed ferret’ by the Church Times.” Hoo-wee! That still seemed pretty droll to me when I’d read it back in, say, 2004. (Though I might wonder what the Church Times was, and whether it was still around.) Now it’s just tiresome and fusty, as is Thompson’s depiction of Bowden and his fan base:
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… 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.
Damian Thompson would be even more derogatory toward his old schoolmate Bowden and author Dutton, except that he was one of the primary sources for Dutton’s book. Which might draw some flak from certain quarters, along with epithets more lethal than “blood-crazed ferret.” Bowden and Thompson were not only close friends back when they were Sixth Formers at Presentation College (their private Catholic school in Reading), they even wrote up and printed a witty, well-written politi-zine called New Right (with cartoon cover by Bowden). And immediately afterwards both were deeply involved in the rightist fringe of Conservative Party activism.
So Thompson here is really getting himself off the hook for consorting with “fascists” by sneering at his old friend, while professing wonderment that anyone, even a marginal, eccentric figure like Edward Dutton, would find Bowden worthy of a biography.
Speaking of which: what I found really remarkable about the Jonathan Bowden CV as recounted by Dutton is that, for a while there, he was almost a mainstream politico, albeit of the Monday Club, Conservative Party variety. When he was one of the young firebrands in his 20s, active in the Western Goals Institute, and the Revolutionary Conservative Caucus (specifically designed as a rightist groupuscule to infiltrate and take over the Conservative Party), he appeared in Esquire (UK) magazine, July-August 1994. This was a piece written by Private Eye’s Francis Wheen. Underneath a photo of a trim-bearded Bowden and colleague, the caption read,
Stuart Millson and Jonathan Bowden dream of England; a pure Anglo-Saxon England, where blacks and homosexuals know their place, abortion is banned, and hanging rules. Francis Wheen meets Maggie’s Militant Tendency.
Radical, silly, humorous. And not beyond the pale, not in those days.[5]
At other times, Bowden was in the papers when he and associates feted Jean-Marie Le Pen a couple of times in London. And as a Monday Club member and Revolutionary Conservative activist, he had friendly contacts with such rightist Tories as Alan Clark and Michael Gove. Edgy, but respectable.
Western Goals Institute dinner featured in the Mail on Sunday, December 8, 1991.
Jean-Marie Le Pen up top next to a long-haired and bearded Jonathan Bowden.
During this same period, early 1990s, and outside the world of politics, Bowden made a curious friend in the onetime radical novelist and Angry Young Man known as Bill Hopkins. Bill Hopkins seems to have influenced Jonathan not so much in an ideological way, but rather by inspiring him with fanciful tales about what he did for a living.
Bill had given up writing in the 1950s, after his first novel was suppressed and damned as “fascist.” Right after that, there was a second one that was pulped before it was even published. So much for the fiction career. Since that time he had made do with other projects, such as editing a pro-Arab monthly called The Monitor in the 1980s. More colorfully, back in 1965 Bill managed the launch of the original Penthouse magazine, for which he pasted up pages in his own flat. He also rounded up cover features by phoning up friends of note and publishing their conversations as “interviews.”
Bill would routinely tell Jonathan Bowden (and others) that he had been very busy “writing.” This was empty conversation. When visitors came to call they’d notice Bill hadn’t moved or touched his typewriter in ages. As a further joke, Bill appointed Jonathan as his literary executor. This sounded like a thrilling legacy to sift through, but then Bill Hopkins died in 2011, not too long before Jonathan Bowden did, and it turned out there was nothing to edit or publish. No manuscripts in the Hopkins trunk at all, none whatsoever! Bowden was furious.
Actually Bill had made a tidy living for years, doing stuff that had little to do with writing or editing or pasting up magazines on the kitchen table. In the 1960s and 70s and beyond, Bill sold antiques and decorative building scrap from a stall at the Portobello Road Market near his home in Notting Hill. He may also have been a serious art dealer somehow, though that’s an iffy matter. When I last spoke to him him 20 years ago or so, he would tell me was busy arranging gallery shows of “outsider art.” He told a lot of people that. That was supposedly his specialty; he had been talking up “outsider art” for years. So now, when I was in town and rang him up, he’d tell me all about a new show that was opening at such-and-such a gallery in Bond Street; there was even an advertisement or notice for it in the Spectator. Well, I looked in the Spectator, and I looked along Bond Street, but I could not find that gallery or art show.
Reading the Dutton biography, I gather that Jonathan Bowden borrowed from Bill Hopkins these claims of being an art and antiques dealer. Bowden too began to tell people that’s what he did by way of a day job. Surely there was room for one more imaginary dealer in the outsider-art game.
And then there was another mutual acquaintance that Bill and I had, and Bowden almost certainly knew of, who was a professional printer down in Hove or in Brighton, where his family owned a pub/restaurant. That was Tony Hancock. (“The printer,” I’d say, “not the suicidal comedian.”) His father had been an old 1930s vintage Mosleyite, and a professional printer long before Tony was born. Besides routine printing jobs, the Hancocks printed up flyers and some very heavy, serious books of a right-wing nature.
I am telling you all this because I now read that Jonathan Bowden was also telling people that one of his sources of income was a printing business he owned. Where was his print shop, I wonder? No one seems to have asked him, but I’ll bet he’d say it was in Hove, or thereabouts.
In the late 1990s, the Bloomsbury Forum, one of the many rightist clubs Bowden spoke at over the years, compiled a book of essays about British statesmen and other leaders of a nationalist disposition. Bowden had done a talk about Bill Hopkins, how he was this legendary-yet-obscure survivor of the Angry Young Men of the 1950s, and how he once wrote a subversive novel about committing murder and then arranging an alibi by hiding out in the Channel Islands. The novel was called The Divine and the Decay, and it frightened so many people that it was essentially banned. By the mid-1990s Bill Hopkins seemed a miraculous rediscovery, like a prehistoric coelacanth pulled from the depths of the sea. Accordingly Bowden was asked contribute an interview with Bill to the Bloomsbury Forum’s upcoming book of essays. And in due course he came up with something that was one of the more impressive contributions to the collection, a book that was finally published in 1999 as Standard Bearers: The British Roots of the New Right. (Reviewed in 2015 here.)
Intrigued, one of his colleagues in the Bloomsbury Forum looked around to see if anyone else had ever done an interiew with Bill Hopkins. And, lo and behold, a near-identical interview had been published in 1996 in a journal called Madame X.
“Bowden had lifted the entire interview,” writes Dutton, adding this tasty aside:
Interestingly, Adrian Davies met a friend of Hopkins’ when he was in New York who writes under the name Margot Metroland. She remarks that Hopkins had never mentioned Bowden’s name to her in the long decades of their friendship. She suspected, therefore, that the interview might have been fabricated.
If I said that, it has long since slipped my mind, but there’s a very good reason why Bowden and I might never have heard of each other: by coincidence we first met Bill Hopkins right around the same time, and I spent much of the next few years living in California.
As for plagiarizing the interview, Bowden’s excuse sounds genuine. He did it in good faith. Because Bill told him to. Bill said not to bother doing an interview with him because he’d recently done one of those interviews: “Oh no, don’t bother, it’s already been done…just use that—throw out the rubbish and keep the rest.”
The story rings true to me because it’s very much like what Bill had done when putting together the first issue of Penthouse. He called up his writer friends from the 1950s and chatted amiably, and then said he was recording it all, and might he run this as an interview in Penthouse? One of the friends had a lot to say but was terrified at having it published in what sounded like a porn mag. So Bill said, very well…and proceeded to publish this fellow’s comments under another writer’s name[6].
End of the day, I believe most of Jonathan Bowden’s fantasies and confabulations were innocent inventions of this sort. Questions about one’s background, profession, and personal life will of necessity come up in conversation when talking to new acquaintances. The thing to do, if you’re like Bill Hopkins, or Jonathan Bowden, is have a mild and blameless cover story to deflect people from getting curious and digging deeper. My late husband did this sort of thing for many years. When people asked what he did for a living, he’d tell them he was a licensed insurance broker—which in fact he was, keeping his license to the end, though he never really worked at it after leaving Marsh & McLennan. It was a very boring answer and no one bothered to inquire further.
The trouble with Bowden is that he pushed his cover stories a bit too far. He didn’t want to bore people. He had to be interesting. And he was interesting, but he felt compelled to make himself even more so, the way highly intelligent people will often try to convince you that they’re even smarter than they really are.
So instead of telling people he had a dull marriage, scarcely worth talking about, he described exotic marriages, with multiple children. He couldn’t stop with a white lie, he had to keep embroidering. He couldn’t be a poor drudge, or even someone who worked in a bank like his father. He had to be independently wealthy, with a printing company and an art dealership on the side. He was a shaman and a mystic, and the trappings of a clerk or even a lowly academic just weren’t going to fit the bill.
Notes
[1] “If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying.” ― John Ruskin, Sesame and Lillies: Three Lectures. It is unclear whether Dutton is deliberately parodying a Bowden misquotation or just picking a random attribution on his own.
[2] Alex Kurtagic.
[3] Victory Services Club, in Seymour St., London W2; a military services club to which London Forum members would repair after talks by Bowden and others, most likely at The Horse Pub and Restaurant (now Horse & Stables, SE1) near Waterloo Station. The Horse must be the pub Dutton is recalling, as the Victory Services Club is a long distance away. An amusing story in the Dutton book, one of many illustrating Bowden’s gluttony, has him at the Victory one evening, wolfing down another member’s burger-and-chips plate when it is inadvertently set down before him.
[4] The Spectator, London; issue of 08 March 2025.
[5] There was an American analogue to this around the same time, when The New York Times Magazine did a story about the New Young Right, featuring Laura Ingraham in leopard-print miniskirt on the cover (along with some more forgettable young “conservatives,” as things turned out). Issue of February 12, 1995.
[6] John Braine is the writer who didn’t want to be in Penthouse. So Bill Hopkins instead ran his comments as part of Stuart Holroyd’s “interview,” featured on the cover of Issue No. 1. Recounted in Colin Wilson, The Angry Years: A Literary Chronicle, 2007.
27 comments
Mr Johnson, isn‘t it high time to publish a book by Mrs Metroland?
I agree, assuming she’s a real person (the default rational assumption with anons being to assume they are personae at best).
That said, what a writer! And her pseudonym comes from one of my favourite novels, so I’m biased.
His life story sounds not dissimilar from any number of English punk rock artists.
I probably shouldn’t ask this, but was Bowden a “confirmed bachelor”? The mentioned ad from The Spectator is a little “interesting.”
Bowden was a confirmed heterosexual.
Back in 2014, I got to look at more than 300 of his paintings. They leave little question on that matter.
Oh, now I remember that he had a huge thing for Siouxsie. Me too.
Another great Metroland review, this time of a book that’s quite a curate’s egg.
“Putting these chapters at the beginning was a mistake, I think, an architectural defect in the book’s design. They really belong at the end, in some kind of appendix or summary analysis of the personality of Jonathan Bowden.”
Exactly my thoughts on (trying) to read it. This would work for a biography of, say, Napoleon or Al Capone, where you can assume people know something about him, and agree that he’s worth investigating. As it is, anyone who isn’t “tuned in” to the Dissident Right will wonder who cares about this git? I suspect Dutton thought this was an opportunity to dump a load of what really interests him, which frankly is the sort of stuff that makes my eyes cloud over, and use investigating Bowden for a biography as an excuse (or “hook” as one says). I suggest anyone interested in Bowden himself to just skip over any “research” sections, and as MM suggests, you’ll find lots of nuggets.
A much better model — unfair though it may be to compare this to a classic of the genre — is Symons’ The Quest for Corvo, which doesn’t spare its subject — Fred Rolfe, aka “Baron Corvo” was really quite like Bowden, especially the lying part — but conveys the excitement of the chase after scraps of information on a cult figure, and even gives a diagnosis — at the end.
Come to think of it, I reviewed it here myself: https://counter-currents.com/2014/10/e-caviar-for-the-masses/
I didn’t want people to be put off by Edward’s heavy theorizing. For one thing, it distracts from the central narrative. For another, I don’t expect most people to appreciate that Dr. Dutton greatly delights in exploring hypotheses. People might easily misread his theories as cruel diagnoses.
Enjoyable essay. Cogent review. Thank you.
I might have to read this book, although I never met Bowden. I recall hearing about him once in the 90s from a BNP officer who was lecturing in America. Sounds like he was an interesting guy. But, yes, a fabulist. I once had a friend like that, a congenital liar but not in a fraudulent way, just someone who had a deep psychological need to build himself up as much as possible. Obviously, extreme psychological insecurity is the root of such self-aggrandizement. Reminds me a little of Trump.
Who was your crazy old genius friend? You can tell it now, he’s probably dead. Do you recommend buying this book? I read Edward Dutton’s At Our Wits End. It’s a good book.
I’ll be coy and withhold the name, but he has been mentioned in these pages (maybe by me, certainly by others) in the past. He may well still be alive though he has escaped the grasp of even this most indefatigable researcher/genealogist. I will tell you he was an undoubted child prodigy and later a multilingual translator. He was very fond of eel pie and jellied eels as well. He had so many native gifts, his head sort of couldn’t contain it all.
I secretly think it’s Alex Kurtagić.
Well he’d certainly know where all the bodies are buried. Maybe they switched places, like in The Prince and the Pauper. One gets cremated, the other becomes King and writes his own Authorized Biography.
Jonathan at heart just seems like a good dude, of rare oratory talent and damaged in his own way. I’ve done what he did several times, walking the opposite way as intended from the place of departure so the people you’ve left think you’re going elsewhere, and unsuccessfully hiding yourself in your clothes hoping they don’t see to cover up a home life embarrassment perhaps. He will be missed.
Do I get this right: Bill Hopkins worked for Bob Guccione in the early days of “Penthouse”? 😛
I heard this from others but thought it was just another untraceable rumor until I came across Colin Wilson’s account in The Angry Years (2007). Go find it, it’s probably at Internet Archive. Somehow I read or skimmed that book once or twice before ever noting or caring that Bill was in the catbird seat of the whole Penthouse thing. Search for a picture of the inaugural issue, and you’ll see Bill’s friends all featured on the cover.
Colin doesn’t say, as he had mostly exiled himself to Cornwall at this time, but I would suppose the Guccione connection was basically the same as Bill’s nexus to Stephen Ward and his great & good friends Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies…that scapegrace patron with initials PR.
Dear Misses Metroland,
It is not up to you to decide that people might be put off by the initial chapters and their sections on divers psychological subjects by author-biographer Mister Edward Croft Dutton – Doctor Of Theology. This discloses a shallow anti-intellectual interest on your part of an excellent biography by Doctor Dutton. These psychological pages are appropriately where they should be, at the beginning of Doctor Dutton’s biography, for they take the reader across the threshold to comprehending a suffering human being, Mister Jonathan Bowden, who had an otherwise healthy culturally rich mind, more akin to a Continental European or Latin American than the Anglo-Saxon world he so loved, keeping in mind that in this latter world there was very much the Negative Space of dynamic cultural thought in Mister Bowden to be found, more American than British above all. A similarity to a Greil Marcus for example; no partitions that would cause a compartmentalization of what is of value whether of the New World or Old World, but a unification of both. Our author, Doctor Dutton, has attempted by going into a meticulous psychological journey of the personality disorders that have been discovered and studied, to relate to us something that many a thoughtless person can never comprehend: compassion for a suffering individual, his subject, Mister Bowden, who despite his fabrications that came from extreme pain in his life and allowed him to survive, never once as my wife Irena has stated accurately, did he attempt to take advantage of anyone, monetary or otherwise. God Bless, Eric Galati
Very funny indeed. Full marks for effort.
(Attentive readers will be aware that Eric Galati, a longtime friend of the late Jonathan Bowden, makes many appearances in the book.)
The American Jack Antonio (b. 1950) also makes many appearances in the book. And turns out to be the most discerning of the lot of longtime friends of the late Bowden. But I could find out nothing about him. Can you kindly supply any information?
Chloë: April 3, 2025 The American Jack Antonio (b. 1950) also makes many appearances in the book. And turns out to be the most discerning of the lot of longtime friends of the late Bowden. But I could find out nothing about him. Can you kindly supply any information?
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I can, a little. Jack contributes to National Vanguard occasionally, like here: Yankee Go Home! | National Vanguard See also his article: Fade to Black | National Vanguard Just yesterday NV republished an article by Lipton Matthews that Jack had forwarded to me from TOO: Voodoo and Superstition Rife in Africa | National Vanguard
He’s practically a neighbor now. We lunched together at the excellent German restaurant in Johnson City and got to know each other better.
Thank you! The first two articles you cite are excellent. No surprise there considering the author. Mr Antonio’s erudition, clear-headedness, and longer perspective are especially invaluable in these times.
As an aside in that regard, HamburgerToday says American White Nationalists cannot look to Britain or the Continent for our leadership. We need folks like Jack Antonio, in other words.
I could not find the third article you mention at TOO; but in the course of the search found an interview Matthews did with Thomas Dalton.
Please give Mr Antonio my regards.
Dear Misses Metroland,
Very witty! Mister Evelyn Waugh would be proud of you. I’m told you also knew Mister Bill Hopkins. Over the years since his death on May 6th, 2011, I have wanted to know how his wife Misses Carla Hopkins-Haberle is but she seems to not reside anymore at Kensal Rise,
London. We conversed by telephone at length about Mister Hopkins at the time shortly after his death, which Mister Jonathan Bowden hadn’t known of until I had informed him of it.
By the way it should interest you that as can happen in many an historical work there are two errors regarding me in the excellent biography by Doctor Edward Croft Dutton – Theologian:
1.British Officer Jeremy Bedford-Taylor had taken Mister Bowden to a somewhat Traditional Mass at The Society of Saint Pius X’s The Church Of The Holy Cross in Woking. Mister Bowden never told me that I should attempt to go to such a liturgy. I had been at times for various periods always in attendance at an authentic Mass, that one does not find with The Society Of Saint Pius X. When I resided in London, thirty odd years ago, I did attend the insult to Orthodoxy and Tradition, The Society Of Saint Pius X and their churches, Saints Joseph & Pardan in the ward of Holloway Road and Saint George’s Chapel in Wimbledon Park. This organisation is a Luciferic distortion of Metaphysics. What ought to have been reported in the biography was when I ceased attending church for many a month for my own existential reasons Jonathan attempted to convince me to return to a house of worship for congregating is a part of the Human Condition necessary to our lives and he feared I’d be alienating myself from an important requirement for my life.
2. I never attended with Jonathan The Ladies, as the geometrically lopsided Traditionalists called them: The Romantics Of The Aristasian Embassy. I was informed of them by a gentleman I became friends with, Mister Thomas Whitaker, who explained to me of their being of authentic Tradition. I telephoned them and a Miss Trent desired I come over one evening to their home at Snaresbrook, London/Middlesex, because I was a best friend of Doctor Rama Ponnambulam Coomaraswamy, himself a Perennialist as I am, the son of one of the first Perennial Philosophers in the twentieth century, Doctor Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, along with Baron Julius Evola, Mister René Guénon and Mister Marco Pallis. This was 1996 and I did not know Jonathan until 1997.
Keep Strong and well. God Bless, Eric Galati – A Most Blessed & Happy Easter – It would be a pleasure to converse with you one day.
Chloë: April 3, 2025 Thank you! The first two articles you cite are excellent. No surprise there considering the author. Mr Antonio’s erudition, clear-headedness, and longer perspective are especially invaluable in these times.
As an aside in that regard, HamburgerToday says American White Nationalists cannot look to Britain or the Continent for our leadership. We need folks like Jack Antonio, in other words.
I could not find the third article you mention at TOO; but in the course of the search found an interview Matthews did with Thomas Dalton.
Please give Mr Antonio my regards.
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I will, and you are welcome. Chloë.
I’m not a fan of HamburgerToday’s big tent strategy and have made that clear here on C-C in our exchanges. He opposes the radical, time-tested vanguard approach. His view is unrelenting, like concrete: all mixed up and hard set. In reading Jack’s “Yankee, Go Home,” you know he lived in UK for 30 years. Wimpy is right, because of UK’s draconian race laws White leadership there has been neutered, defunctionalized. They still seem to think they can vote their way out of the racial mess.
Speaking of Dr. Dalton, the SPLC doxxed him, or tried to, a couple of weeks ago, but he’s retired from academia now and will not lose his career or need to become defensive as an author of the top rank for our side: See: Spreading the Word by Dave Chambers. I put a comment under that C-C essay that is worth repeating. From Dr. Dalton’s latest hard-hitting essay: Blacks and Jews: Raus! | National Vanguard
…The only remedy is to remove the chief source of the problem: Blacks raus and Jews raus…
And who has the courage to talk about this? I don’t claim any special abilities, but I see many in the alternate media and dissident right who merely dance around these issues (I’m thinking here less of podcasters than writers). Many of the more prominent figures, like Tucker Carlson, Jonathan Cook, Pepe Escobar, Alastair Crooke, Michael Hudson, or Patrick Lawrence, scarcely have the nerve to mention Blacks or Jews at all. Others do mention them, but then tiptoe around the topic, neglecting to put forth anything like a vision or solution to the problem. For all the bluster in the dissident media, there is a real lack of courage regarding solutions.
Sometimes there is virtue in simply speaking the truth, bluntly and clearly: White and European societies cannot flourish or survive with large numbers of Blacks or Jews; therefore, they must be removed—all of them. Who else will join this call?
Thank you, Will, for your gracious reply.
Wouldn’t you agree that in advising American WNs against looking across the Atlantic for leadership, HamburgerToday is actually recommending something other than a “big tent”?
To be fair, I’ll quote him a little further on this matter.
The more I encounter supposedly ‘right-wing’ British artists, the less impressed I am with their commitments to Whiteness.
The most ‘indentitarian’ blood-and-soil poem by T. S. Eliot is dedicated to non-Whites (‘To the Indians who Died in Africa’) and Kipling regularly extoled the virtues of non-Whites (‘Gunga Din’) as well as openly supported race-mixing (‘Mandalay’).
Either way, White Americans cannot look to England or the Continent for thinkers about our situation. We need to grow our own. So far, we’ve not taken that seriously enough to harvest anything of value. The endless stream of NSDAP wanna-be’s are not cutting it, I think.
Something to consider. Best wishes.
Chloë: April 4, 2025 Thank you, Will, for your gracious reply.
Wouldn’t you agree that in advising American WNs against looking across the Atlantic for leadership, HamburgerToday is actually recommending something other than a “big tent”?… I’ll quote him a little further on this matter.
White Americans cannot look to England or the Continent for thinkers about our situation. We need to grow our own. So far, we’ve not taken that seriously enough to harvest anything of value. The endless stream of NSDAP wanna-be’s are not cutting it, I think…
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Hamburger Today is partially correct when he says Brits are not positioned to lead our race and I say it is partially due to their inability to oppose or overcome the harsh race laws there: Race Relations Act 1965 – UK Parliament
The truth, as usual, lies somewhere between what I call his “big tent” approach, where he claims the White resistance is made up of any and all Whites who care for their people, and the more focused and serious vanguard approach that includes those who have learned from lessons of race-based National Socialism. I’m not the only one at C-C who disagrees with Wimpy (Hamburger Today). E. Perez addresses Wimpy under the topic Nationalism Doesn’t Need National Socialism
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E_Perez: March 9, 2025 This comment [by HT] only makes sense when you know what is “Hamburg today’: a failed city overrun by third worlders (isn’t ex-chancellor Scholz a “Hamburger today’?).
“German National Socialism … has at least one glaring problem: It failed.”
Oh no, German National Socialism was the most successful political/economical system between the wars and that is precisely why is was brutally destroyed. It did not ‘fail’ contrary to Roosevelt’s New Deal and Stalin’s communism.
Success or failure of a political system cannot be judged by the outcome of war waged on it by its opponents, but by its achievements when it is left on its own.
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I added this on 11 March:
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Hamburger Today speaks against National Socialism and for the “WN” social media herd that follows Keith Woods. The reference of Hamburger Today is [not to Allied bombing of Hamburg, Germany, but] to the character in old Popeye the Sailorman cartoons: “I’ll gladly repay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.”
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Several excellent counterarguments to Mr. Woods’ dismissal of NS have been provided here under that essay.
An example of how White UK activists: when I asked our friends at UK’s Heritage & Destiny to place a copy of our National Alliance’s anti-illegal immigration sticker in their magazine — that simply states a biological fact — the publisher informed me that his solicitor told him that if he publised this sticker he would spend the next two years in prison.
Consider that.
https://www.natall.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/National-Alliance-Flierr-immigration-8x10in.jpg
I perfectly accept that there is a White Vanguard. It’s made of of Whites who have made a commitment to White survival and White thriving. White people who are ‘concerned’ about their situation can enter the White Vanguard of their own volition at at their own speed. You call my position ‘big tent’ and, I suppose, it’s true. Except in one respect: I think that only Whites who care about Whites because they are White and no other reason are in that ‘tent’.
Whites who denigrate Whites for various ‘instrumental’ reasons (not smart enough, too hedonistic, not educated enough in NS, etc) aren’t in the ‘big tent’. It’s not for them. They can join the ‘conservatives’ in their contempt for the common White person.
As for NSDAPery, it’s absolutely the case that I think it’s a distraction. It’s just one more way that Whites can find ways to divide us from each other. There are lots of issues with the NS faction, but the chief one is that American NS has yet to produce a single thinker who can apply NS theory and practice to the situation of Whites in the US in a way that is productive for Whites who don’t want to march around in Hugo Boss uniforms and throw the ‘Roman salute’.
Hitler was a pragmatist. Every move he made in the climb to power was guided by flexibility while remaining focused on his objective: The Chancellery. I don’t see the same creativity or discipline to apply ideas to real-world situations without citing Hitler or some other NSDAP leader.
I’m also of the opinion that even if the NSDAPers got everything they wanted Whites would still be dispossessed from power and from their lives because NSDAP philosophy contains a indissoluable kernel of contempt for ‘certain kinds’ of White people.
No sensible White person is going to give power to a leadership cadre whose intrinsic philosophy gives license to spontaneously removing the protections of the State because someone, somewhere in the Party has decided that their kind of Whiteness is ‘undesirable’.
Between the NSDAP antics and the uniforms and the posturing as morally and racially superior to other Whites and the ‘one size must fit all or off to the camps’ against Whites, there’s a good reason why NSDAP-inspired movements in the US have failed to gain traction with ordinary concerned Whites.
Whatever ‘arguments’ you think have been presented to making NS central to White survival cannot overcome the obvious fact that every NS-inspired White movement has imploded with racor.
The fuhrer prinzip is toxic.
There is only one principle that Whites need to guide them: Whites caring about Whites because they are White (and no other reason). Any deviation from this principle leads to collapse and suffering and more time wasted pursuing dead-ends.
Hamburger Today: April 5, 2025 I perfectly accept that there is a White Vanguard. It’s made of of Whites who have made a commitment to White survival and White thriving. White people who are ‘concerned’ about their situation can enter the White Vanguard of their own volition at at their own speed.
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We are making progress, Wimpy. Except it takes more than Whites merely being “concerned” for them to somehow be in the exclusive White vanguard.
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You call my position ‘big tent’ and, I suppose, it’s true. Except in one respect: I think that only Whites who care about Whites because they are White and no other reason are in that ‘tent’.
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There you go again. But at least you define your ” big tent” WN movement accurately.
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No sensible White person is going to give power to a leadership cadre whose intrinsic philosophy gives license to spontaneously removing the protections of the State because someone, somewhere in the Party has decided that their kind of Whiteness is ‘undesirable’.
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Protections of the State — you’re joking. Who said anything about a “Party”?
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The fuhrer prinzip is toxic. There is only one principle that Whites need to guide them: Whites caring about Whites because they are White (and no other reason). Any deviation from this principle leads to collapse and suffering and more time wasted pursuing dead-ends.
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You are hopeless, sir. Others may appreciate this from Martin Kerr, a White man who knows what he is talking about: Notes on the Leadership Principle | National Vanguard
The Leadership Principle is an authoritarian leadership doctrine, in which power or authority rests in the hands of those in command. Leaders are appointed rather than elected. Instead of governing by committee, consensus or majority vote, an appointed leader makes all decisions for the field of operations under his command by himself. Likewise, along with absolute authority, a leader also bears absolute responsibility for the decisions he makes; there is no passing the buck if something goes wrong…
I can attest that the LP, rather than democracy, works in effectively organizing the military and can be applied to organizing our race by a process of appointing the most deserving, proven leaders, at least temporarily.
…As it is commonly (if falsely) portrayed, the Leadership Principle is synonymous with absolute dictatorship. That is, we are told that it means that all power in a given organization is concentrated into the hands of a single person at the top of hierarchical pyramid. He has all of the power (or 99 percent of it) and no one else has any. The leader is answerable to no one, and he can wield his power in any way that he chooses, for good or for ill. Anyone who dares to contradict this supreme leader or who goes against his stated desires faces punishment, which, in the popular imagination frequently means execution.
This description is a gross misrepresentation of the Leadership Principle, which is, in fact, a nuanced and efficient manner of leading men. Far from being capricious and unjust, it is a balanced and judicious method of command, that allows each person in the organizational chain to operate at his maximum potential… In his recent biography of Adolf Hitler, Ullrich Volker notes concerning the Führer’s leadership style:
He demanded of all his underlings that they spare him from unwelcome, banal, everyday details. “The best man is for me the one who burdens me the least by taking responsibility for himself ninety-five out of every one hundred decisions,” Hitler declared in October 1941. “Of course, there are cases that I ultimately have to decide.” In other words, Hitler claimed the solitary right to decide only on fundamental issues, not on routine matters he considered ancillary; it was then that he made use of his function as coordinator. Seen from this perspective, it is clear that a National Socialist leader is a team captain rather than an Oriental despot…
I won’t cut & paste a large wall of text from what William Pierce told us more than 50 years ago, except for these few words from this: Principles of Organization | National Vanguard
THE PROPER STRUCTURE of any organization depends on the goals of that organization and the conditions under which it is obliged to strive toward those goals. The long-range goals of the National Alliance are of unprecedented magnitude, and the conditions under which we must work, while not unprecedented in difficulty, are certainly formidable enough.
We want to build a whole new world, and we want to build it on a radically different ideological basis from that of the present world. In order to do so we must contend with the most determined and even fanatical opposition from the carriers of the Judeo-liberal-democratic sickness and from all those with a vested interest in the present System. Unfortunately, our opponents are able to marshal overwhelming forces against us and have almost unlimited resources at their disposal. Their chief strength, of course, is their monopoly control of the mass media. Not to be forgotten, however, are their dreadful power of the purse and their ability to deploy all the police powers of the state against us.
We are at present not only a minority but an unpopular minority. If our fellow Americans had not been hypnotized by the mass media, most of them would find themselves in agreement with the ideals for which we stand. But the Enemy has managed to raise a barrier of fear and misunderstanding between us and the public, a barrier which we must break down…
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