[1] Bowden was born in Rochdale[2] and was educated at Heywood Grammar School and the Royal Manchester College of Music.
She was also an eloquent advocate of the music of her contemporaries, singing and recording to advantage Tippett's A Child Of Our Time, Britten's ingenuous A Charm Of Lullabies, Lennox Berkeley's tender Four Poems Of St Teresa Of Avila, and the role of Isabella in Bernard Hermann's opera Wuthering Heights.
Between 1954 and 1979, when she retired, she gave more than 750 performances and/or broadcasts under the most distinguished conductors of the day, among them Josef Krips, Paul Sacher, Solti, Sargent, Boult, Mackerras and Boulez.
Bowden's operatic appearances were limited to some with the English Opera Group and the role of Madame Larina in Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, at both Glyndebourne and Covent Garden.
Her interpretation of that part, sympathetic and well-pointed as regards the text - she sang it in both Russian and English - showed what the stage lost through the infrequency of her excursions into opera.