In 2001, Jeremy Bowen, among the best-known BBC war correspondents, took two weeks off work. A violent incident had left him “pouring with blood” and his face “so swollen up” he couldn’t possibly present the Breakfast show.
Given this is a man who’s reported from some of the harshest war zones in modern memory, readers may be surprised to hear this grim altercation was in Camberwell. Without even a hint of irony, Bowen says: “It did make me cautious about where I went, which I never had been.”
I met Bowen at the Hermits Cave in January, a gloomy but cosy pub just minutes away from where the mugging took place. He enters wearing a dark cap pulled tightly over his head. He’ll return to Israel next week where he’s been reporting on the recent conflict.
You get the sense that, deep down, he’s already there.
Bowen, 63, has enjoyed a glittering 40-year career at the BBC. What began as a traineeship in 1984 has seen him rise to International Editor, reporting conflicts in Iraq, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan in between. For almost all that time, Camberwell has been home. In his early days at the BBC, he took the 12 bus to Oxford Circus.
Bowen is arguably best known for his work in the Levant, where he has covered the near-constant fighting between Gaza and Israel. Since October 7, Bowen has been back there. I ask him what it’s like right now.
“It’s desperate. It’s strange. If you’re in Israel, physically, apart from the areas that are very near Gaza and very near the northern border, it looks the same,” he says.
“Shops are open, people are going about their business. But it’s different because everything has changed in people’s minds.”
He adds: “Jerusalem is always tense. Jerusalem is the most consistently intense place I think I’ve ever been to.”
He is, of course, talking about the tensions between Palestinians and Israelis which re-erupted with the October 7 attack.
The Hamas invasion killed around 1,200 people and over 25,000 Palestinians have been killed since Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza, according to the Hames-run Health Ministry.
It’s telling that Bowen’s first thought is of the relative domesticity of Jerusalem rather than the devastation across the wire fence. He, like many journalists, has been largely denied entry into Gaza by Israel which he says “wants to control the media battleground”.
Bowen and his team have been allowed into Gaza once – a brief trip into the city’s north in an IDF armoured personnel carrier (APC). Outside the vehicle, he found himself standing atop a “wasteland”.
The APC was an advanced model; with internal screens that allow you to scroll through different camera angles as you cruise through Gaza.
But a shiny bit of kit offering 360-degree views of the destroyed city could never replace what Jeremy has been doing his entire career – “eyewitness reporting”.
“It’s very frustrating not being able to get in Gaza. It’s had a huge impact on our ability to tell the story fairly, Bowen says.
“We can go to any number of hostage family events in Tel Aviv but not being able to get into Gaza even for a day to report fairly in Rafah…it’s not the same as being there yourself.”
But during his brief foray into the strip, where neighbourhoods he once recognised were flattened, he still “learned something”.
“Which was: ‘My god every building is destroyed’. That was back in November so imagine what it must be like now,” he says.
In the months since that visit the BBC has, predictably, come under fire from both sides over perceived bias. So it’s with hesitancy that I ask Bowen for his own views on an immediate ceasefire.
“I’m not gonna talk about my own opinion here. What I’d say is that the humanitarian organisations all say there needs to be a humanitarian ceasefire because the humanitarian plight of the people is so serious,” he says.
“It’s not for me as a BBC journalist to express an opinion about when and how it should happen but I can report very fairly that that’s very much the opinion of not just the UN, but many other countries. In a way, Britain and the US are outliers.”
Bowen’s physical detachment from the battlefield is also an outlier. For as long as he can remember, he wanted to be a foreign correspondent observing and reporting on history’s biggest moments.
Journalism is in his blood. His parents were both in the business, his mother a photojournalist, with his father Gareth known for his coverage of the 1966 Aberfan disaster which saw 144 people, including 116 children, killed when a colliery spoil tip collapsed in south Wales.
Bowen studied History at UCL and after some internships in Washington started a prestigious BBC traineeship in 1984. Around that time, he briefly lived with his now wife Julia Williams in a hard-to-let 1950s Walworth flat by Burgess Park. It was still heated with a solid fuel fire.
Bowen describes it as an “absolute dump” but perhaps it sparked an appetite for south east London. A couple of years later he bought a “beautiful” Georgian flat in Camberwell Grove for £48,000 and has been in the area ever since.
At the BBC, Bowen did stints as a financial news reporter, a correspondent in Geneva, and in Television News where he covered the Lockerbie Disaster.
He was pipped to a job as a developing world correspondent by the late George Alagiah. But Bowen had impressed enough to get a role on the foreign affairs unit, meaning being sent across the world to cover breaking stories.
“I was still only 28 and suddenly there I was,” he says. “There’d be an earthquake somewhere and they’d call me up in the middle of the night and off I’d go. I loved it, loved it. I absolutely loved it.”
Soon Bowen was sent to report his first war – El Salvador, 1989. He’d been in Afghanistan earlier that year but this was the first time he encountered close-quarters gunfire. Bankrolled by the Americans, the government was fighting a vicious war against Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front rebels.
Some years earlier, a young Bowen has sat opposite Gordon Martin, a former diplomatic correspondent and “distinguished old boy”. Over drinks at El Vino, a swanky Fleet Street bar, Martin had recounted wild tales of chartering a taxi to the front line, with “the rain lashing down”, wearing only “a lightweight Italian suit”.
While Bowen didn’t go that far, he was under-equipped by modern standards. “Nowadays we’d have flak jackets and first aid knowledge and training. I didn’t even have a bandaid,” he says.
El Salvador was a brutal introduction. Bowen saw his first dead body and the corpse of a guerrilla being burned on an open fire. In his autobiography War Stories, he describes bullets buzzing around his head like “insects”.
Bowen says: “It was a story like any other but the difference was there was danger involved. And I found, to my surprise, far from being frightened by the danger, I found it exciting.”
He adds: “And I wanted a bit of this drug, this dangerous drug. I wanted a bit more of it.”
He’d get more. He was soon sent to cover the Gulf War from Baghdad where his honest reporting of the Amiriyah shelter bombing, which killed over 400 civilians, won huge plaudits.
In Sarajevo, during the Bosnian War, he reported from a city under siege, an experience Bowen describes as a “privilege”.
“If you’re in a dangerous place you’re closer to the essence of life and death. And that means your experiences can be very intense and sharp and quite meaningful,” he explains.
Bowen’s work in Sarajevo saw him tell the sort of painful, human stories that emerge from a four-year siege that kills over 11,500 civilians. His reporting was even used as evidence as he testified against Slobodan Praljak in the Hague for war crimes in Mostar.
In one of his rare moments of downtime, Bowen found time to abseil down the side of his bullet-holed Sarajevo hotel after being goaded by a French journalist. “That was a stupid thing to do,” he admits.
In 2000, following the death of his friend and colleague Abed Takkoush in Lebanon, killed by an IDF tank, Bowen took a break from war reporting. From 2000 to 2002 he presented BBC Breakfast. He says being in a studio was “alien” but was helped by the camaraderie of his co-presenter Sophie Raworth.
In 2005 he was made Middle East editor and was often back in the field. Six years later, the Arab Spring, a transnational wave of anti-government protests, shook the region. In 2011, Bowen was the first Western journalist to interview Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi as he presided over the last months of his crumbling regime.
“I didn’t think he was mad. I just felt he’d lived in a bubble for a very long time. I felt he actually believed his own propaganda which is pretty dangerous,” Bowen says.
Four months later, the dictator was hauled out from the drainage pipe where he hid and killed by rebels.
Turning to issues closer to home, Bowen says he’s seen “very many changes” in Camberwell during his 40 years as a resident.
In the early days, he remembers “pretty rough” pubs with frosted glass and “strange” empty restaurants that a friend assured him were gambling fronts.
But he’s enamoured with the area. “It’s home now,” he says. That feeling persists despite suffering a knife-point mugging nearby.
“He pulled a knife and said give me your money now,” Bowens recounts. “He slashed at my jacket.”
The assailant “thumped” Bowen: “I was pouring with blood! I was a presenter on Breakfast… I couldn’t go to work for a few weeks because my face was so swollen up!”
Camberwell still has a crime problem which Southwark Council recently tried to address by removing the table tennis tables from the Green to prevent people from drinking there. But Bowen is sceptical about that as a solution.
“People are hopeless and become drinkers like that because they have big problems in their lives,” Bowen says. “I don’t think it’s because there are table tennis tables.”
He says Camberwell benefits from the local arts universities which give “life” to the local area but bemoaned the high house prices which deter young people.
“If you don’t have young people able to move into the local area it just becomes a bit dead,” he says.
The Hermits Cave is testament to that change; where old-school locals mix with the local arts crowd. Admittedly, it’s probably not the most exciting place Bowen has ever had a drink.
In 1989, Bowen spent his 30th birthday in a Bucharest hotel as the Romanian revolution raged outside. I ask him whether he’d rather have a drink back at that hotel, at that moment, or here in this trendy Camberwell pub. Bowen, a happily married father-of-two, turns his thoughts to home.
“To be honest now – I’m going to be 64 in a couple of weeks – I’d rather have a nice glass of wine in my own house.”