Tom Parker Bowles
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[edit] Birth and Parentage
Thomas Henry Parker Bowles (born 18 December 1974) is the son of the Duchess of Cornwall (formerly Camilla Parker Bowles) and Andrew Parker Bowles. His stepfather and godfather is The Prince Charles, Prince of Wales. His younger sister is Laura Lopes and, of course, his stepbrothers are Prince William and Prince Harry of Wales.
[edit] Education and Career
Parker Bowles was educated at Summer Fields prep school[1] in Oxford. He then attended the prestigious Eton College and Worcester College, Oxford, where he was a member of the exclusive and notorious Piers Gaveston Society1. From 1997 through 2000, Parker Bowles was a junior publicist for Dennis Davidson Associates public relations firm.2 He is currently a food writer for the Mail on Sunday and the magazine Tatler. His favourite cooking ingredient is the chilli pepper. His first book, published in 2004, was E Is For Eating - An Alphabet of Greed. His next, The Year of Eating Dangerously, was published by Ebury in October 2006. Writing about his prized recipes appears to be his current focus, however in the late 1990's and into the 21st Century, Parker Bowles was a leader in a group of Old Etonians who had a clever head for business. He and first cousin Ben Elliot, for example, founded Quintessentially in 2000 along with Luca Del Bono, Ben Goldsmith, James Tollemache and other leading members of the privileged group of young Old Etonian entrepreneurs.
[edit] Media Coverage
His life has been scrutinised by the media because of his mother's long on-off relationship with Prince Charles. In 1999, he was exposed by a tabloid newspaper for taking cocaine at a West End party, and for supplying cocaine to a lady at the Cannes Film Festival, although he has always claimed he was set up[2] and it seems that he truly was set up because it was apparently an undercover journalist, from the Sunday Times or News of the World who approached him to ask where she could acquire cocaine.3
The Fleet Street press made much ado about the reality of Parker Bowles being a close friend to Prince William and Prince Harry, even calling Parker Bowles a "mentor" or "role model" for the former.
[edit] Marriage
On 10 September 2005, he married Sara Buys, a fashion features editor at Harpers & Queen, in St. Nicholas' Church, Rotherfield Grey, Oxfordshire, an Anglican church, although Tom and his sister, Laura, were raised as Roman Catholics, as their father, and particularly their paternal grandmother, the late Dame Ann Parker Bowles (née de Trafford), were Roman Catholics. The wedding was attended by Andrew and Rosemary Parker Bowles (his father and stepmother), his mother and Charles, Prince of Wales, and Charles' sons, Prince William and Prince Harry. Ben Elliot (first cousin and business collaborator) was the best man of the groom.
[edit] Footnotes
1 Mail on Sunday article, 9 July 2000, verifies the membership of Parker Bowles in Oxford's Piers Gaveston Society.
2 People reported the name of the PR firm where Parker Bowles was employed from 1997-2000. This was done in Volume 51, Issue 20, dated 31 May 1999. Another source, Royalty Database, translates a Spanish language article in the Clarin newspaper website, and reports the name of the PR firm as simply being "DDA." This article was originally published in the same timeframe as the People article and provides, essentially, the same "news" and information.
3 This information about the circumstances around the "cocaine" scandal comes from the same sources there were cited in Footnote 2.
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