John Griffith Bowen

John Griffith Bowen (5 November 1924 – 18 April 2019) was a British playwright and novelist. Early life John Bowen was born in Calcutta, India, to Ethel (née Cook) and Hugh Bowen; his father 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 five and a half he was placed on a boat in Bombay and sent back to Britain where he was brought up by his uncle Donald and aunt Dolly in Whitehaven. Bowen was sent to board at Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School, Crediton in Devon, where he developed an interest in literature and drama. In 1939, his mother returned to England with her three younger children, Patricia (b. 1926) and twins Daphne and David (b. 1930), and 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 the University of Calcutta. At the age of 18, much to his chagrin, he was drafted into the army, and during the latter part of World War II, served as a captain in the Mahratta Light Infantry until 1947, serving as a Railway Transport Officer in transhipment stations in Bengal.