They were so happy... then they were gone
Former MP Gerry Bowden tells Robert Mendick of his heartbreak at losing his daughter and granddaugher in a tragic seaplane crash
It had been a year since Emma Bowden met and fell in love with Richard Cousins in a chance encounter in a London pub. They had been sat at tables next to each other and by the end of the evening, Richard, a captain of industry in charge of one of Britain’s biggest companies, had summoned his driver and limousine to take her home. Twelve months on, Emma had given Richard a touching card marking their first anniversary. “Thank you for a wonderful year, and I’m so looking forward to many more together!” wrote Emma.
The card was dated April 6 2017 and on the front was printed the slogan “Live, Love, Laugh”. Surrounding it were photographs of Emma and Richard at such locations as the Academy Awards, or else mucking about on a yacht. The card was signed “All my love, Em” and sealed with a kiss, and with the PS: “Here’s to more backflips off boats!!”
Gerry Bowden, 82, Emma’s father, a former Conservative MP and friend of the Thatchers, puts down the card and picks up another. This one is a “save the date” notice posted just before Christmas, announcing Emma and Richard’s impending wedding in July. The third is a note sent out to family and friends shortly afterwards.
“Following recent tragic events, it is with great sadness that the engagement celebrations and wedding of Emma Bowden and Richard Cousins will no longer be taking place,” it reads. On New Year’s Eve, Richard, 58, the chief executive of the £25 billion Compass Group, and Emma, 48, art editor of OK! magazine, were killed when their seaplane crashed outside Sydney. Heather Bowden-page, Emma’s 11-year-old daughter, and William and Edward Cousins, Richard’s two twentysomething sons, also died along with the pilot. Bowden, speaking for the first time, is still struggling to take in the enormity of a tragedy that has robbed him of seeing his daughter and granddaughter find new happiness.
Before the entourage flew out to Australia in a sort of pre-wedding bonding exercise, Richard and Emma had hosted a pre-christmas dinner for her father at her modest terraced home in Tooting, south London. “I had never seen Emma and Heather happier,” recalls Gerry. “They were so excited… so happy.” Then a day before the crash, Emma had phoned from Sydney to wish her father a happy new year; Heather had chipped in with a chirpy “Hello, Grandpa”.
“She said they were going to a smart restaurant for lunch and then flying back to Sydney for the fireworks to see in the new year.” It would be the last time they would talk. The seaplane took a “sharp turn” before nosediving into a river. An inquest this week heard that all on-board either died from multiple injuries or drowned. The plane sank in seconds.
Bright-eyed and vivacious, Emma Bowden had enjoyed the happiest of childhoods, part of a large extended family that included a younger sister and two older half-siblings.
But in 1984, at the age of just 15, her mother Heather died of breast cancer. Emma would later name her only daughter in her memory.
“Emma knew at the age of 15 what it was like not to have a mother, and somehow she was determined to compensate for that. She devoted her life to bringing up Heather,” says Gerry. Richard Cousins had also suffered a terrible loss through cancer. His wife, Caroline, had died of the disease in 2015.
It was a common connection that Emma and Richard did not readily discuss, but may explain why that chance encounter in the pub would lead to such a deep attraction.
“How they met is something they chuckled about,” says Gerry. “Emma was meeting a couple of friends from college for a drink in a pub in Covent Garden. It was a crowded place and at the next table were these three guys. One of them was Richard. They got into conversation and went on to a salsa dance bar in Charing Cross Road. When it was time for the party of six to get their last trains, Emma piped up, ‘Richard has offered me a lift home’.
“One of the friends said to me later that it was rather strange because, when we left, there was a big car – like something from MI6 – trailing us. It turned out to be Richard’s car. They hit it off straight away.”
What the group hadn’t realised was that Richard was chief executive of the world’s largest catering company, a business that employs more than half a million people around the world. A modest Yorkshireman with a passion for cricket, Richard had transformed Compass Group’s fortunes, taking charge at a time when the catering industry was reeling from Jamie Oliver’s “turkey twizzler” onslaught.
Romance blossomed. Richard took Emma to the Academy Awards in LA – Compass had a catering contract for the event – and on other glitzy trips. By the autumn, he announced he was retiring from Compass. The reason wasn’t made public and the stock market was baffled, but by then Richard and Emma had fallen in love and decided to make time for each other. Work was a distraction.
“Richard told me that after his wife died, he had immersed himself in travelling on business at every opportunity,” recounts Gerry. “But after he met Emma, he told me he didn’t want to travel unless it was with her. He thought he would celebrate his 60th and her 50th by doing the things they wanted to do. That’s when he decided to retire earlier than intended,” says Gerry.
A tall, dignified man, Gerry still lives in the family home in south London, a Georgian townhouse where Emma grew up and where she often popped in on her cycle route home from OK!’S offices to Tooting. Some of her belongings are now
‘Emma knew what it was like not to have a mother, she devoted her life to Heather’
piled high in the house’s front room. Gerry has the unenviable task of picking through the possessions, trying to decide what needs keeping. That’s when he came across the first anniversary card that Emma had given Richard and other poignant messages.
When his wife died, Gerry, an Oxford-educated barrister and law lecturer and tribunal judge, brought up Emma and her siblings as a single father.
In 1983, a year before his wife’s death, he had been elected MP for Dulwich, the constituency in which Margaret and Denis Thatcher kept a family home while in Downing Street. A photograph on the mantelpiece shows a teenage Emma posing for a group picture with her younger sister Kate, their father and the Thatchers at a party function in the House of Commons. Only Denis, as Emma once remarked to her dad, appears properly jolly.
Realising that late night sittings and three-line whips were not conducive to being a single parent, Gerry packed his daughter off to boarding school in Dorset. She cried for much of the journey there, but later forged close friendships. That would include meeting at the boys’ school Alex Page, Heather’s future father.
But Emma and Alex had split by the time Heather was born, explains Gerry, and Emma was left to bring up her daughter as a single mum in south London. Alex, an agricultural expert, who now lives in the Czech Republic, has also been left devastated by his daughter’s death.
Emma’s determination to get by as a single mum on a journalist’s wage might have been hard graft – “Emma was short of money, but she got by on a rather limited budget” – but Gerry would do his bit, picking Heather up from school and babysitting. They were consequently – grandpa and granddaughter – a close unit. “We would sit there making Christmas and birthday cards together. We would watch
Mamma Mia! for the 10th time and Peppa Pig… Heather was bright, a bit of a chatterbox.
“She had that wonderful mixture of being polite and just a touch of cheekiness, which made conversation with her interesting.”
Heather was gradually introduced to Richard and he – the CEO of one of the FTSE 100’s biggest companies – would help with her homework. A limousine would often pick Richard up from Tooting – he had by then moved from his former family home in the Chilterns – to go to work.
The two families had seamlessly merged. Heather was to be bridesmaid and Will and Ed best men at the wedding at the Hurlingham Club. “Heather was the daughter Richard never had and Will and Ed were the sons Emma had never had,” says Gerry. “It was a very close fit for a family. Emma was the perfect companion for Richard. She knew how to get on with people. Somebody said to me after she died that when she entered a room, it lit up. She just had this shining presence. She was beautiful, but it was her goodness that shone through.”
The Australia trip had been some time in the planning. Richard and his sons were cricketing enthusiasts, and the holiday was planned around the Ashes tests first in Melbourne, and then in Sydney.
The party had enjoyed a New Year’s Eve lunch at the Cottage Point Inn and were returning to Sydney 20 miles away when the singleengine De Havilland DHC-2 Beaver aircraft crashed.
For now, Gerry is trying to overcome one hurdle at a time. Emma and Heather’s funeral was held at the local church in south London, followed by a burial the next day in the church graveyard in Dorset where Emma’s mother lies. Next week, there will be a memorial service for the pair at St Martin-in-the-fields church in Trafalgar Square. Hundreds are expected, drawn from family, friends, Emma’s colleagues and Heather’s school friends. A separate memorial service for Richard and his sons will be held next month.
Gerry, meanwhile, sits among the photographs and the “save the date” cards, tears in his eyes. He can’t really fathom how it could have gone so wrong so quickly for a family that had finally got it so right.