Rowan de Aragues, a very well-known figure in and around Helmsley, owned the Feversham Arms in the town for more than 30 years.
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Famous visitors there during her time included writer and broadcaster J.B. Priestley, the actor Peter O’Toole and the American singer Art Garfunkel.
Peter O’Toole was among Rowan’s guests She died on Saturday, July 5 after a long battle with cancer.
Born into a hotel-owning family in Leicester on December 16, 1942.
Rowan was the eldest of four children of James Bowie, a Scot who had previously worked as a mining engineer in India, and his wife Olive, née Elcock, originally a teacher. James’s family bought the Belmont Hotel in Leicester in 1934; James and Olive took it over after their marriage and later also owned an inn at Hathersage in Derbyshire.
Rowan was educated at Wyggeston Grammar School for Girls in Leicester and went on to study hotel management at Westminster Technical College in London. In 1963 she travelled to the Costa Brava to work as an English secretary in a high-class hotel — and met her husband-to-be, Gonzalo Aragues y Gaston, who was a telegraphist at Canfranc international railway station, the Spanish terminus of the Somport tunnel under the Pyrenees, and later an accountant.
They married in 1966 – taking ‘de Aragues’ as their surname to make a connection to Gonzalo’s ancestral village of Aragues del Puerto in the Aragon province of Huesca – and decided to follow Rowan’s parents in the hospitality trade by taking the tenancy of Helmsley’s Feversham Arms, which was then pub with a local clientele and a dartboard.
With Rowan front-of-house, Gonzalo keeping the books and a menu featuring Spanish flavours, ‘the Fev’ became a popular choice for holidaymakers and Ampleforth College parents, as well as shooters of pheasant on the Duncombe Park estate and grouse on the nearby North York Moors.
Rowan was also leading member of Helmsley’s tennis club, rode with the Sinnington Hunt, enjoyed horseracing as a spectator and in later years found time to trek in Nepal and Peru and complete the Camino de Santiago in northern Spain.
In 2013, on a train from King’s Cross to York, she fell into deep conversation with David Howell, a professor of politics at York University specialised in the history of the British labour movement.
They were married in 2016 and David was at Rowan’s side through a long final battle with cancer.
He survives her with the three children of her marriage to Gonzalo: Richard, a filmmaker; Annabel, who manages a Buddhist centre in Glasgow; and Rosalind, a screenwriter.
