Ann Scott

Post-war Reconstruction

On 6 June 1945 Gowers wrote to his son: I am on the move all day now saying my goodbyes. I shall be very glad when Sunday comes and I can draw breath. … I haven’t any other job [than coal] at present except my school and hospital odds and ends. I was asked by the Secretary of State for Air to take on the chairmanship of a Commission to investigate and report on every aspect of the results of our bombing of Germany but I said no. I have had enough of bombing; I would sooner turn my mind to something more constructive.1

William Richard Gowers 1845-1915: exploring the Victorian Brain

Intra-rectal Diazepam (DZ) is the first rescue medication for acute prolonged convulsive seizures in children in many countries. In this study, we aimed at assessing the experience of the families of patients presenting Dravet Syndrome (DS) with respect to the use of intra-rectal DZ.

Serendipity: a personal tale of two biographies, William Richard Gowers (1845-1915) and his son Ernest (1880-1966)

Between 2004 and 2012, the author wrote two biographies, the first of 20th century civil servant Ernest Gowers and the second of his father the Victorian neurologist William Richard Gowers. This article describes the author’s experience conducting the research for two biographies at a time when the research tools available were rapidly shifting from paper-based to digital records. Technological aids have made the preliminary research of historians easier, but they have not taken the place of hard copy archive-based research. While the paper will focus primarily on the biography of William Richard Gowers, the author describes the research methods she employed to help reveal the personalities, strengths and weaknesses of both men, each of whom left his own intellectual legacy.

Education for Public Service

Sir William Gowers made three significant choices affecting his sons’ careers, the last perhaps dictating the previous two: he chose Rugby as their public school, Classics as their subject, and entry into the Civil Service for their careers. The public school curriculum, the Classics courses at Oxford and Cambridge, and the entrance examination into the Civil Service were closely linked. Anyone wishing to gain a place as a First Division clerk in the late nineteenth century was well advised to study classics.

Mine Owners’ Bogy Man

While Gowers was chairing the Board of Inland Revenue, new legislation was being developed for coal. The Coal Mines Act 1930 came into force in August 1930. On 10 December, the Government announced that it had appointed the members of the Coal Reorganization Commission, created under the Act, with Gowers as Chairman.

Revising Fowler’s Modern English Usage

The final years of Gowers’ life were spent at Rondle Wood, revising Fowler’s Modern English Usage (MEU) as well as providing a welcome holiday retreat for many friends, his children and grandchildren. After his successes with Plain Words and its successors, Cambridge University awarded Gowers an honorary Doctor of Letters. Gowers was introduced at the degree ceremony with the words: I present to you in plain words the indefatigable opponent of administrative and governmental incomprehensibility, the ardent champion of the devocabularisation of words like devocabularisation, the tireless and eloquent defender of the principle that intelligent rulers should be able to make intelligible rules. It is a subject on which he can speak with authority born of much experience; for it is more than fifty years since he exchanged the austere discipline of prose composition in the Classical Tripos for the unbridled luxuriance of English as she is writ in Government offices.1

Influential Head of ‘Enfeebled’ Mines Department

Shortly after the First World War ended, Ernest Gowers began an association with coal that was to ‘claim many years of his labours’.1 In 1919 he was appointed Director of Production in the Coal Mines Department within the Board of Trade, becoming Permanent Under-Secretary for Mines when a new Mines Department was established by Act of Parliament in September 1920. He held this position through seven tempestuous years for the coal industry, only moving on for a brief respite in Inland Revenue after the end of the painful and protracted miners’ strike in 1926. Altogether, however, Gowers was involved with the troubled coal industry for 30 years. His respite as Chairman of the Board of Inland Revenue came to an end in 1930 when he was appointed Chairman of the Coal Reorganization Commission, and he did not sever the connection totally until coal was nationalised after the Second World War. Despite the heavy demands of running London’s civil defence during the war, Gowers combined this task with his Coal Commission responsibilities.

Anatomy of a Victorian Family

Queen Victoria had been on the throne for 43 years when Ernest Gowers was born, and the British Empire was still expanding. The coal industry, the problems of which were to preoccupy him for many years, was at its peak during Victoria’s reign, starting to decline at the turn of the century Gowers was in his last year at Cambridge and at the threshold of his career when Queen Victoria died in 1901. His Civil Service career spanned the introduction of the welfare state, two world wars, the Great Depression and the decline and then nationalisation of the coal industry. After an early, rapid rise through the administrative ranks, he went on to hold a wide range of Civil Service positions before retiring in the late 1940s. But in practice he did not stop working until 1965, when he was in his mid-eighties. Few Civil Service contemporaries matched him as a generalist and few, if any, continued to work for as long as he did.

‘Quis Custodiet?’ — Surtax, Syntax and Scandal

It is hard to inject much sense of drama into an account of Ernest Gowers’ three-year appointment as Chairman of the Board of Inland Revenue. Ivor Nicholson, friend and ex-colleague of Gowers from the Wellington House days, wrote a series, ‘Stories of Success’, for the Pall Mall Magazine. In September 1927, he chose Ernest Gowers as his subject. He was somewhat less reticent about the Board: Of all the poisonous institutions in this pleasant country the most odious and most unpopular is undoubtedly the Board of Inland Revenue — in other words Income Tax. … [Gowers] is at the head of an organisation which costs nearly seven solid million pounds a year to run, and he is responsible to the Chancellor of the Exchequer for the collection of a revenue which is given in reference books as £428,441,000.1 Gowers moved to the Board of Inland Revenue at the beginning of August 1927, on a salary of £3,000 a year, after what must have been a gruelling seven years as head of the Mines Department. He was knighted for his work with the coal industry, receiving a Knight Commander of the Bath (KCB) in June 1928.

WWII: Leading London through the Blitz

In October 1940, when Wallace went on sick leave and Gowers took over as Senior Regional Commissioner, the threat of invasion was, for the moment, receding. On 12 October 1940, Hitler had cancelled Operation Sealion, because the Luftwaffe had failed to establish conditions under which the Germans dared hazard a Channel crossing. The attempt had cost the Luftwaffe 1,733 aircraft. It was one of the decisive air battles of the war.1