In Search of Tom Bowen

Hi folks, here's my latest blog from thebowenbookblog page and site www.thebowenbookblog.com


It's Time to be a little Realistic about Tom Bowen.
It’s nice that a little statue commemorating Tom Bowen was placed in the Geelong park near where he once worked. Tom was extremely generous with his skills and did lots of good work in the community, especially with sporting clubs and disabled people. The fact that the plaque on the statue refers to ‘the six boys’ myth, which was built into the design is unfortunate, but it’s still nice that Tom’s community work was recognised in this way and, as I have previously stated, those who went to the trouble of arranging it deserve credit.

I seem to say things that put people off-side sometimes (well, lots of the time) and here we go again I guess but the adoration of Tom, above and beyond recognition of his skills and wonderful contribution to the community, has gone way too far. Recent discussions with someone who claimed to have known Tom well confirmed a common theme that popped up during my research; Tom would be horrified to see the way his name and work have been used to further the aims of those who make outrageous claims as a business model and the way some folk have placed him on a pedestal, regarding him as a guru, as one who could walk on water or change water to wine, or as would be in Tom’s case according to a few folk, change the water to whisky.

I reckon we could chart the course that led to this guru worship back to the Rentchs and was pushed along by those influenced by them (um, most of us really, at least initially until we saw the light). That they went on to set themselves up as gurus based on their ever evolving fantasy contact with Tom Bowen is a wondrous story in itself.

That so many of us accepted without question what the Rentchs were saying and furthered the myth of infallibility upon Tom Bowen was probably as much due to our own uncertainties about what we were doing as anything else. After all, how can I do such a small amount of work and create a healthy change in so many people without a genius having led the way?

I’m afraid it is necessary to point out that Tom was not unique. In and around Melbourne, and probably many other places, there were therapists at least as popular and effective as Tom Bowen. This was basically the era of the last of the ‘untrained’ therapists. Government enquiries were established into manual therapies in the 1970s partly due to the popularity of therapists without formal training who commanded great support from the public.

We got all excited about the Chiro, Osteo and Naturopath enquiry report that appeared to show Tom as seeing huge numbers of people. That the figures in the report just did not add up or make any real sense hasn’t stood in the way of us crowing about these magnificent figures. And we ignored the fact that the figures in the report were supplied by the therapists themselves, not by any investigation by the authorities, as some websites still claim. With the figures, perceived, distorted or whatever, we rave on about how incredibly popular he was.

Tom was a great therapist which, in itself, was enough to create a high level of popularity. Add to this the fact that he was extremely generous and treated heaps of people for free, no charge, gratis, complimentary. Of course he was hugely popular! He was simply an incredibly generous person.

But the time for unbridled glorifying of Tom Bowen has well and truly passed. It serves no good to his memory to worship him as a unique, one-of-a-kind healer who could do no wrong. Orthodox medical people, terrorised by their unqualified enemy, had been quoted in newspapers decrying the popularity of these people for decades before Tom came on the scene.

The biggest kerfuffle during Tom’s earlier time as a healer centred on George Saunders during the debate in parliament over legislation to have him registered as a qualified masseur. The fact that he’d been head masseur for many Olympic and Empire (now Commonwealth) Games without any formal qualifications drove Doctorville crazy. The State Government’s moves to register him had them tearing their hair out.

George’s father, Ernie, Tom’s Mentor, had been through it all some time before. The sheer weight of Ernie’s popularity with prominent people saw legislation passed to have him formally recognised despite the howls from orthodoxy. That his son was also awarded qualifications via parliament was another major blow to their struggle for complete power. Tom saw the stuff about George in the papers and he must have been a little envious.

Unfortunately these little victories were just battles won; winning the war against the wider political and financial might of orthodoxy is another matter.

After the passing of Ernie Saunders in 1951, while Tom was doing his thing and packing them into his Geelong clinic and George had them lining up in Brunswick, Bill Mitchell was filling the bench seats at the South Melbourne football club. I should point out too that Chiropractor Keith Davis, who observed both Mitchell and Bowen work, claims they were birds of a feather. A book by Lisa Casanelia and David Stelfox
titled ‘The Foundations of Massage’ had this to say about Bill Mitchell:

“In Melbourne in the 1960s many people were treated by Bill Mitchell who was a trainer at the South Melbourne Football Club. No appointments were available so patients would arrive at the clubrooms and wait in turn, then be called in and treated. Mitchell would watch a client walk towards him and by the time that client reached him he would have a fair idea of what the problem was.” A familiar story?

Keith Davis will also tell you of Les Dettman on the outer edge of Melbourne who travelled to the USA with Ernie Saunders. Some years later down at Langwarry in Gippsland another ‘self taught’ healer, whose name I can’t recall, operated out of his garage. I had a treatment with Mitchell and took some footballers to see the Langwarry man for treatments but that was well before we all became aware of Tom Bowen.

Further down in East Gippsland, Lester Cox was later to be doing his own thing, another variation on the work passed along by generations of healers before. I also had a treatment with Lester and Lisa did a little course that he ran once.

George Schofield who lived just out of Melbourne, might have had his name written alongside these healers but he chose to only work with animals, particularly dogs. George claimed, I am told, to have learned his basic skills from Bill Mitchell. His was a household name in the greyhound racing community.

These are just those of whom I know. I have no reason not to believe that other special healers existed at or around the same time that Tom was doing his (Saunders influenced) thing. Many would see reputations climb after ‘healing’ people ignored by the medical profession. I have no knowledge as to whether any of these other healers were as generous as Tom Bowen with their skills but I don’t recall any of them ever being regarded as wealthy folk. The main difference between these people and Tom Bowen, in the bigger picture, is that nobody grabbed their name and used it as a title to their work.

So it is helpful if we can be a little realistic. Yes, Tom was an incredibly generous man with wonderful therapeutic skills and was widely admired and appreciated. While we can laud this, what were the results on those other than the beneficiaries of his generosity? Despite being hugely busy there is little evidence to point to this translating as providing any particular wealth to the family. His son Barry might argue the lack of benefits to his family, or at the very least, to him as a son.

In case you hadn’t twigged, what I’m getting at here is that only taking the good bits, perceived or factual, as our understanding of anyone and using this as our model of that person, is a seriously flawed concept. The enthusiasm of some to paint Tom as a guru is more based on fantasy than history, more on desire than reality. And as those who knew him well will tell you, he was anything but a guru and he’d be horrified to see such references.

The fact is, (1) Tom Bowen was an man who did little or nothing to further his (formal and informal) education, particularly in the area in which he worked. (Experience was a great teacher, of course.) This was clear in the government enquiry transcript and even some six or so years later when he applied for registration. He just could not explain what he was doing.

We must also consider that (2) Tom Bowen had a health problem that led to him spending time in a mental hospital. And (3), it has been suggested he was a little more than enamoured with alcohol.

If you were going to form an opinion about him based on these three points, what would it be? More to the point, if our detractors in orthodoxy wish to paint a picture of Tom, what would they say?

So come on everyone, let’s keep our feet on the ground and honour Tom in a realistic and appropriate manner; he was an admired, wonderfully generous and skilful practitioner and we are proud to carry on his name with the work we use. From my personal viewpoint, I am more than pleased to suggest that Tom’s memory is today’s flag bearer for the many ‘untrained’ therapists who served the public so well in the time when regulations and insurance claims were not a burden.

As the dedication in the front of The Book states;

'I’d also like to dedicate this to the manual healers of old. To those whose often selfless dedication brought relief to so many people, especially those who could ill-afford to pay medical bills and those whom medicine could not help. I pray I do them justice. They were real healers; special people to whom many of us today owe great debt. It’s unlikely we shall see their likes again to any great extent. They are basically not ‘allowed’ to exist anymore. As chiropractor Romney Smeeton said; “Probably the fact that we have to all be at certain levels of education, I think, will prevent people of that innate talent ever coming to the fore again. Their intuitive talent is killed with education because they then look on health in a blinkered fashion. To work like those guys did, you’ve got to look at it with a different pair of glasses.”

Is there an optometrist in the house?'

The Bowen Book