Based at opposite ends of the country, Edith and Alex Bowman don’t meet up for a pint very often. Like many adult siblings, they rarely make time for a catch-up at all. Their lives have taken dramatically different paths since Edith left home in the East Neuk of Fife in Scotland aged 19, at the start of a journey that would eventually lead to London and a highly successful career as a radio, TV and podcast broadcaster.
Her brother Alex, seven years her junior, studied sports science in Edinburgh, was capped for Scotland under-18s as a young footballer and had stints coaching in America, but has otherwise kept it close to home for most of his life, first running a much-loved pub in Elie, along the coast from their childhood home in Anstruther, before later retraining to work offshore.
And yet, to spend some time with them both, as they chat over a pint in one of their old East Neuk haunts is to quickly appreciate what it is that bonds them. Both possess a natural, infectious gregariousness and gift of the gab, virtues that have served each of them well in their respective careers – her on the airwaves, him behind the bar. And there’s no doubt as to how and where it was forged. “It’s how we grew up,” reflects Edith of a youth spent helping to run the family hotel, the Craw’s Nest, in Anstruther. “It’s all we knew.”
Family is everything in the Bowmans’ world, and the Craw’s Nest was its nexus, not to mention a hub of the wider community – host to concerts, plays, film screenings, social clubs, discos, local society meet-ups and many a good night out. And when the Bowmans say family, they mean the whole enormous extended clan – grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, the lot. Edith and Alex’s mother Eleanor was one of seven children, and five families mucking in with the running of the hotel. “We all used to go away on holiday together every January,” Alex remembers, of the annual post-festive season blowout. “One year, 60 of us went all together.”
While their friends were out socialising on evenings and weekends, first Edith and later Alex were servicing rooms, working in the kitchen, waiting tables or serving behind the bar. The hours were long, not even Christmases were sacred (“we used to open our presents at midnight,” Alex remembers), but it taught them a dogged work ethic, the value of earning their own money and the joy of friendly interaction with people of all ages and backgrounds. “Alex could find common ground with anyone,” says Edith. “It was a brilliant upbringing.”
Yet where Alex felt increasingly at home in that environment, his big sister – a self-confessed tearaway in her teens – itched to seek out broader horizons. “I remember for me one of the biggest things was passing my driving test,” she recalls. “I had my little red Metro, Mabel, that had a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle pillow in the back. The feeling of freedom that I got from that! I bought that car with money I’d made from the hotel, working my arse off.”
After moving to Edinburgh to study media, Edith spent her student loan on a showreel that helped land a newsroom job at the newly launched MTV UK, with its refreshing remit to promote regional accents – her Scots burr having until then turned off small-minded station managers. From there she went on to join the BBC and become one of the most recognisable new voices and faces in British broadcasting in the 2000s, and a friend to the stars. As Alex meanwhile became a father for the first time at 21, a gulf could easily have grown between them, but they wouldn’t let that happen. “Even when she was miles away, she always involved me,” Alex says of his sister. “She’d invite me to festivals, the MTV awards. She never ever forgot about me.”
Both have played their part in making sure the Bowman clan continues to expand – Edith and her husband Tom, frontman with indie rock band Editors, have two children, while Alex and his wife Nicola, a hairdresser, have three. Alex pushes his youngest around in an old Silver Cross pram inherited from his parents, which now carries a third generation of the Bowman family. “I remember pushing you around in it,” says Edith, “I could just see over the top of it.”
The age difference between the pair is such that Edith admits to feeling motherly towards Alex sometimes. But that’s not to say that he doesn’t feel protective over his big sister in turn, on occasion. For instance, Edith still treasures a letter Alex sent her in her late teens, after she’d been through a bad breakup with a boyfriend. “It’s not that mushy,” Edith reassures Alex, as he fidgets in his bar stool beside her at the memory, “all it is, is a letter from a concerned brother. I’ll always love the last line especially,” she recalls, laughing as she speaks it: “‘I never liked him anyway.’”
Before Alex was born, Edith had wished for a little brother or sister, and now they’re separated by hundreds of miles, it clearly plays on her mind. “I can’t remember the last time we did this,” she says towards the end of the afternoon. “Like, just the two of us, because we’ve always got the kids. But I wish we had more time to do it. We need to make more time.”
