How it all started, The E.C.B.S. story. by Julian Baker

In 1992 my wife Louise Atwill and I, returned to England from Australia where we had been living for the past five years. We had originally not planned to live in Australia, but the beauty of the country just captured our hearts and we stayed. After our daughter Cara was born in Townsville in 1991, we decided to take out Australian citizenship as well!

I had been studying Reflexology for some time before coming across The Bowen Technique and was taken by it immediately. Because there were no workshops at that time, it took me some time to come to understand exactly what I had my hands on, but the more I worked with it the more I realised that the less work you did the more power it seemed to have. As someone who had previously been an exponent of "put loads in and see what works", this was pretty difficult to come to terms with.

When we got back to England I contacted Isy Saunders, who was in living in London. She had some plans to get Ossie and Elaine Rentsch over to teach and between us we found two venues and planned two seminars for the spring of 1993. The turnout was very disappointing with less than 30 people spread between the two venues in Somerset and London. As a result they were planning to return the following year to do only one seminar and one refresher, where everyone would be qualified.

Within a few months Isy discovered she was pregnant and made plans to return to Australia to have the baby, leaving me holding the Bowen baby! It was a pretty dismal picture, as apart from the few who had attended the original seminars, very few people knew anything about the technique and it seemed that fewer wanted to know.



Push coming to shove

It was March 1994. Louise and I had been back for nearly two years with very little to show for it, except another baby, this time a boy, Piers. I had returned to my original career of catering, to pay the bills and was trying to build up a practice in the spare time I had. Ossie and Elaine were planning on coming to the UK and with no support from them and no advertising budget, the interest in their course was poor. If things were to keep on the way they were, we would be heading back to Australia where at least we could be poor with good weather!

As part of spreading the word about the technique and my planned teaching, I put a small advert in an excellent free magazine called The South West Connection. It had featured an advert in the previous year and a few people had contacted us for details, so it was worth another try. To this day I only know of one person for sure who saw that advert, that person being Jane Alexander. Jane is a freelance journalist specialising in complementary health and was always looking for something interesting to write about. She phoned me to ask if I would do an interview with her. As she lived in Somerset too, it wasn't difficult to set up.

It was for me a voyage into the unknown. I gave her a treatment and talked to her for a couple of hours about the therapy. She was a delightful person and very interested in the whole thing.

I then found out that she was writing for the Daily Mail, a national newspaper with extensive readership, especially at the weekend which is when her features always ran. How would people react? I had no idea. I went home and waited until the weekend. Jane had done the technique proud. She wrote sensitively and with an amazing understanding of the work in a huge article covering two pages in the Saturday paper. What would the general public make of it?



The mail man cometh...

The response when it came was more of a deluge than anything else. The phone started ringing at 7am and continued to do so virtually 24 hours a day for the next month. The letters poured in by the sackful. After the first two thousand we stopped accurately counting, but estimate that we received over five thousand letters and calls from that one article. It was phenomenal to go from absolutely nothing to that level of interest. It was very fortunate for us that Louise had a background in top level office management and kicked into organisational orbit. As it was, we had nothing. Unprepared for any such event we had an old 286 computer, no filing cabinet or even any space to have an office. We were living in rented accommodation in Frome, Somerset and in our wildest dreams could never have expected what happened. Without Louise to take it all on, I have no doubt that Bowen would not be where it is today. Very few people could have worked the way she did and still does.

I immediately resigned from my catering job and almost straight away started teaching to try and meet the demand for courses that had arisen from nowhere. From all of this, even more publicity arose. Derek Jameson contacted me to see if I could help him with his frozen shoulder which had been troubling him for some years. After two treatments at my London clinic, he was 95% better and the idea of featuring the therapy on his show 'The Jamesons' came up. After an on air treatment during which he proclaimed the technique " a miracle", the mail box needed widening again. The BBC were inundated with calls and we received another two thousand letters looking for therapists and courses.

Since that time we have gone from strength to strength. Not a week goes by without a magazine or paper contacting us for information or for interviews and we have over 250 calls a month from members of the public looking for a Bowen therapist. We have been on the Jameson show three times in all and have also appeared on TV and on several other radio stations around the country. We have recently been contacted by a major television station, with a view to doing a feature on The Bowen Technique. We now employ three people, one of them virtually full time, as well as Louise and I who are full time, times three!

Looking back over the last few years it has been an incredibly exciting and exhilarating time, as well as being very tiring and with quite a few emotional ups and downs. We are thankfully no longer associated with Ossie and Elaine and can stretch our wings as we were severely limited in our ability to make effective decisions and the financial cost was crippling. The split was sad at the time but very liberating and enabled us to shed a lot of the dead wood that had gathered.

Our name change from Bowtech to ECBS gave us clarity and the chance to separate ourselves from the past, as well as to identify us more as a professional independent training school and to associate with professionals in the field of physical therapy. We made the decision to move away from the more alternative end of the treatment and present Bowen as a primary health care tool to Chartered Physiotherapist and other health professionals

We now have seven well trained and excited teachers working hard and have established branches in Holland, Iceland, Sweden, South Africa, and Ireland, with Germany, Spain and Poland opening in the near future. Our policy for operating overseas is based on our ability to have all our notes translated into the host language and have a resident trainer in place to teach in the language of our host country.

The Future.

In 1998 E.C.B.S. instigated the only formal teacher training programme for the Bowen Technique, anywhere in the world. Anyone wishing to teach the technique under the banner of E.C.B.S., has to have been treating at least 25 people a week for the last two to three years, have a recognised qualification in Anatomy and Physiology and be prepared to take on the responsibility of running a busy business as well as being able to undertake over 400 hours of intensive teacher training for six months before being allowed to teach. Continuous development and training is carried out and inspections of teachers are carried out on a random basis.

We reason that in the not too distant future standards will be brought in to all complementary therapies that will require all colleges and teachers to attain a clearly defined standard and to operate under a regulatory body. Although this is currently a long way away, the groundwork needs to be done before legislation is brought in.

Together with other organisations we are working towards this goal and firmly believe in implementing and raising standards in all complementary therapies. The standards of the past have required some improvement and we are pleased to be at the forefront of these changes. New training formats will ensure that all E.C.B.S. trained Bowen Therapists have been assessed and examined to establish their proficiency before certificates are issued. In addition the training format for E.C.B.S. is now the most comprehensive course of Bowen study available anywhere in the world, with trained teachers, answerable to a central body.

We are pleased to be the founders of The Bowen Therapy European Register, (BTER) which held its first meeting on 25th October 1998. This is an organisation of Bowen therapists run by therapists for therapists. Teachers and those with a vested interest in influencing decisions, will not be permitted to sit on the committee. The committee is made up of people elected by the membership, rather than directors of a company. They are answerable to the membership and can be voted on or off accordingly. BTER will liaise with the other organisations to eventually enforce standards and will make decisions regarding membership criteria and on-going training. Initial requirements for full membership will be that 14 hours of Bowen study has been undertaken in the previous 12 months, that a certificate in Anatomy and Physiology is held, that a current first aid certificate be held and finally that professional indemnity insurance of at least £1 million is in force.