Dame Deborah James, teacher, writer and broadcaster who worked to demystify the bowel cancer from which she suffered – obituary
Dame Deborah James, who has died from bowel cancer aged 40, was a deputy head teacher, podcast presenter and author who published on social media under the name Bowelbabe, aiming to debunk the myth that the disease is confined to smokers, meat eaters and old men; she also presented the award-winning BBC podcast You, Me and the Big C with the journalist Rachael Bland and the lifestyle blogger Lauren Mahon, both of whom had breast cancer.
Deborah James was a healthy, 35-year-old, non-smoking vegetarian who often went for 10km runs when in 2016 she noticed blood in her stool. She was slow to seek treatment, but when she did her GP suggested that, given her age, it was probably irritable bowel syndrome. Ten days before Christmas that year came the diagnosis that she had a particularly aggressive 5.5cm tumour in her bowel.
“I knew from the start that the situation was quite dire,” she told The Sunday Telegraph in 2021, pausing to pat Winston, her pet cavapoo. She described going down the Google rabbit hole in search of information. “Only about 35 per cent survive the first year, 8 per cent survive for five years,” she said. “But I had to factor in that I have a very rare mutation. And I could not find a single living example in a textbook of someone surviving more than three years.”
Her oncologist declared: “I will throw the kitchen sink and then some at this.” Indeed, no stone was left unturned, and she took part in countless drug trials that bought her precious time. She had 17 tumours removed, her lungs were deflated, her body was dissected for thoracic surgery, and she underwent cyberknife surgery, a non-invasive alternative to traditional surgery. After one gruelling operation doctors feared that she had contracted sepsis.
The Bowelbabe blog started as a way of updating friends and the school community about her progress. Soon she was attracting a wider following and was approached to become a cohost of the You, Me and the Big C podcast, which was likened by one critic to “listening to three raucous friends in the pub”. It rode high in the iTunes charts, rising to No 1 just before Rachael Bland’s death in 2018.
In 2017 Deborah James began a weekly online column for The Sun newspaper called “Things Cancer Made Me Say”. She also documented her experience navigating the “cancer rollercoaster” in her book F*** You Cancer: How to face the big C, live your life and still be yourself (2018), a breezy and irreverent guide for new members of the “cancer club” that is rich in detail about the change in bodily functions that can be expected during chemotherapy.
Two years ago she ran the London Marathon to raise funds for the Royal Marsden hospital, where she was being treated, but was disappointed not to be well enough to repeat the exercise last year. She was also the driving force behind the daytime television presenter Lorraine Kelly’s No Butts campaign to raise awareness of the signs and symptoms of the disease, and in 2019 she received an honorary doctorate from the University of East Anglia.
Although she understood why the government threw everything at the Covid-19 pandemic, she could not understand why the same is not happening with cancer. “More people died last year of cancer than of Covid,” she said in 2021. She wrote to Boris Johnson several times, but he did not write back; ditto Sajid Javid, the health secretary. She did manage to collar his predecessor, Matt Hancock, but he refused to do an interview with her for a BBC Panorama programme she made in 2020 about cancer care.
Deborah James was not only a tireless campaigner for bowel cancer awareness, but also for the rights of cancer patients, appearing regularly on television and radio, where she railed against the notion of “fighting” the disease. In 2020 she had a public disagreement with Lord Sumption, the former supreme court justice, after he appeared to suggest on the BBC One show The Big Questions that her life was “less valuable” because of her diagnosis.
Meanwhile, she published a second book, How to Live When You Could be Dead (2021), urging her readers to “live in the now and to value one day at a time”.
Deborah Anne James was born on October 1 1981, one of three children of Alistair James and his wife Heather (née Yeatman), and brought up in Woking, Surrey; her siblings were Sarah and Ben. Young Deborah was known for her fiery temperament. “My dad refused to keep a knife block in the house when we were kids, which I think says it all,” she wrote. Tragedy struck the family in her late teens when their 18-year-old cousin was killed in a car crash.
She read Economics at the University of Exeter, where she was known for enjoying nights on the town, and went into teaching. Eventually she became deputy head teacher at Salesian School in Chertsey, Surrey, specialising in computer science and e-learning, before being parachuted in to help turn around Matthew Arnold School in Staines-upon-Thames.
She helped to lead national research into “growth mindsets” in schools and was on a fast-track scheme to become a head teacher. That all stopped as she increasingly became a poster girl for the cancer community, a strange and unwanted honour that she often struggled to comprehend.
In May 2022, Deborah James announced that she was receiving hospice-at-home care, and in the next 48 hours more than £3 million was raised for her Bowelbabe Fund. Two days later she was appointed DBE; her damehood was conferred by Prince William at her parents’ home. Within a few weeks the sum raised had passed £6 million.
In 2008 Deborah James married Sebastien Bowen, a French banker working in private equities. He survives her with their two children, Hugo and Eloise.
Dame Deborah James, born October 1 1981, died June 28 2022
