She Chose Other
People’s Futures.

A tribute to Dame Deborah James — BowelBabe, campaigner, deputy headteacher, mother, Dame — and the woman who spent her last breath giving other people a reason to hope.

There is a particular kind of courage that does not announce itself. It does not ask for credit or recognition. It simply gets up, every morning, and decides to make the day mean something — regardless of what the medical notes say, regardless of what the odds are, regardless of what the body is asking.

Dame Deborah James had that kind of courage in extraordinary abundance. She was diagnosed with incurable bowel cancer at 35 and spent six years living — not surviving, not enduring, but actively, defiantly, joyfully living — in a way that changed the conversation around cancer forever. She smashed taboos. She made people laugh about poo. She danced with her children. She raised £17 million for cancer research. She was made a Dame by Prince William at her parents’ home in Woking while she was still alive to receive it.

She died on the 28th of June 2022. She was 40 years old. She had spent her last weeks not on herself, but on other people’s futures. And that is the thing about Deborah James that cannot be overstated, cannot be romanticised, cannot be captured in a single statistic or headline: the woman chose, with every last drop of her energy, to give.

Before the diagnosis.

Deborah Anne James was born on the 1st of October 1981 in Chertsey, Surrey, to Heather and Alistair James. She was, by every account, a woman of remarkable energy and conviction from the beginning. She trained as a gymnast from the age of nine — thirty hours a week by the time she was a teenager. She studied economics at the University of Exeter. She became a teacher, then a deputy headteacher specialising in computer science and e-learning, first at Salesian School in Chertsey and later at Matthew Arnold School in Staines-upon-Thames.

She married Sebastien Bowen in 2008. They had two children — Hugo and Eloise. She was, as she described herself, living a completely ordinary, completely full life. She had no particular reason to think about cancer. She had no family history. She was 35 years old and, from the outside, entirely well.

December 2016.

In December 2016, Deborah James was diagnosed with stage four bowel cancer. She was 35. Her first instinct, she later said, was to shout from the rooftops. Not to hide. Not to grieve quietly. Not to step back from the world. To talk about it — loudly, honestly, and with every platform available to her.

That instinct to talk became her life’s work. She started the BowelBabe blog. She became a columnist for The Sun, writing a weekly piece called Things Cancer Made Me Say. She co-hosted You, Me and the Big C — the BBC Radio 5 Live podcast that broke open the conversation around cancer in a way that nothing had quite managed before. She was funny. She was honest. She was, as Cancer Research UK described her, bright, brilliant, and beautiful. She wore a poo emoji costume to campaign events. She danced at her fundraisers. She laughed in the middle of the hardest thing.

Rebellious hope.

Deborah James coined a phrase that has outlived her, and that will continue to outlive her for as long as people are living with cancer and searching for words to describe what it means to keep going anyway. She called it rebellious hope.

Rebellious hope is not toxic positivity. It is not the demand that you perform wellness you don’t feel, or pretend that everything is fine when it isn’t. It is something more specific, more hard-won, and more honest than that. It is the choice — made deliberately, in full knowledge of the statistics — to remain open to the possibility that things can be better. To keep fighting for a future even when the future is uncertain. To laugh, to dance, to fundraise, to campaign, to give — because the alternative is to let the diagnosis define the entire narrative.

Deborah chose never to let it.

The final weeks. The fund. The damehood.

In May 2022, Deborah announced that she was moving to at-home hospice care. It was, by any measure, the hardest announcement of her public life. And what she did alongside that announcement was extraordinary.

She launched the BowelBabe Fund for Cancer Research UK. She set a target of £250,000 — the cost of a coffee for everyone who had followed her journey. She asked people, gently, to donate. Within two weeks, she had raised over £6.5 million. With Gift Aid, over £7.5 million. The fund has since raised £17 million — funding clinical trials, personalised medicine research, and bowel cancer awareness campaigns. The BowelBabe Lab at the Crick Institute in London, visited by the Secretary of State for Health in April 2025, bears her name and her purpose. It is searching for new treatments for bowel cancer. It is her voice, still working.

During those final weeks, Prince William visited her at her parents’ home in Woking, Surrey, to bestow her damehood in person. She received it in her garden. She was, by all accounts, exactly herself — warm, funny, grateful, and entirely focused on what came next for the people she was leaving behind. She died on the 28th of June 2022 at her parents’ home, surrounded by her family. She was 40 years old.

What she means to National Cancer Survivors Month.

We have saved the final chapter of this series for Dame Deborah James — and there is no more fitting close to a month spent honoring women who faced cancer and kept becoming.

Because Deborah did not survive cancer in the clinical sense. She did not reach remission. She did not have a clean scan to celebrate. What she did — and what makes her perhaps the most powerful voice in this series — is she showed us what it looks like to survive the idea that a diagnosis has to diminish you. She survived that idea, completely and absolutely, for six extraordinary years.

She did it by talking. By writing. By laughing. By fundraising. By choosing, every single day, to be present for the life she had rather than grieving the life she had lost. And she did it by caring, with everything she had, about the people who would come after her — the people who would one day receive the same diagnosis and find, because of the BowelBabe Fund, better treatment options waiting for them. Because of her campaigns, earlier detection. Because of her columns and podcasts and honesty, less shame, less silence, less alone.

This is the final Women Worth Watching feature of National Cancer Survivors Month 2026. We began with Jo Malone, who lost her sense of smell and launched a second empire. We honoured Kanya King, who built a stage that changed British music and never stopped building even as she faced the hardest news. We wrote about Kris Jenner, who let the cameras stay on while she was afraid. We celebrated Kris Carr, who picked up a camera two weeks after her diagnosis and chose to live fully — without waiting to be cured.

And we close with Dame Deborah James. BowelBabe. Deputy headteacher. Mother of Hugo and Eloise. Wife of Sebastien. Daughter of Heather and Alistair. A woman who was, in her own words, just an ordinary person — and who used that ordinary person’s life to do something utterly extraordinary.

She asked us, always, to have rebellious hope. To find a life worth enjoying. To take risks. To love deeply. To have no regrets.

She did all of that. Every day. Right until the end. 🎗️

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