Abstract
Ann Scott (2010) Ernest Gowers: Plain Words and Forgotten Deeds. Basingstoke, Palgrave. ISBN-13: 978-0-230-58025-1 (hardback), 255pp.
The theme of this volume is expressed in its subtitle. Sir Ernest Gowers (1880-1966) is best remembered as the author of Plain Words, a treatise on the use of the English language. Yet the bulk of his career was spent in the recesses of Whitehall. Here, unbeknown to the public, he served successive governments of different and mixed political hue; he did so in a variety of guises, as would befit a prototypical mandarin in the heroic age of the ‘gifted all-rounder’. Written by his granddaughter and mobilising family as well as official archive documents, the book throws light on the wide range of issues with which Gowers grappled in a long and active career.
A public school (Rugby) and Cambridge (Clare College) classicist education brought Ernest Gowers to the portals of Whitehall’s bureaucratic elite. Within a few years he was PPS to Lloyd George, becoming part of the ‘loan collection’ – a group of rising stars gathered to implement the National Insurance Act, 1911. He remained nominally with the National Insurance Commission as he operated during World War One in a secret Foreign Office unit known as Wellington House. Shortly after the war, there began an association with the coal industry lasting, on and off, a quarter of a century – first when briefly assigned to the Coal Mines Department of the Board of Trade, followed by seven years as permanent undersecretary of the newly created Mines Department; then, after a three-year stint as head of one of his former departments (Inland Revenue), he became chairman of the Coal Mines Reorganization Commission; and finally, during the Second World War, he chaired a secret internal committee charged with making recommendations about the future of the industry. He had by this time become convinced about the desirability of a public corporation solution, long having held a jaundiced view of the mine owners.
During the war and as Senior Regional Commissioner for the London region his activities were focused mainly upon the defences of the capital. Although formally retired, he remained active in public service after the war. He was appointed chairman of the Harlow New Town Corporation, engaging in sometimes testy exchanges with ministry officials. New-found loyalties demanded nothing less than that the gamekeeper become poacher! Yet he remained one of the ‘great and the good’, deputed to chair several public enquiries and commissions. One of these, the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment (1949), was followed by a book A Life for a Life? (1956) in which Gowers proclaimed his conversion to the abolitionist cause. By now he had emerged from Whitehall obscurity with his Plain Words (1948) and ABC of Plain Words (1951), later combined as The Complete Plain Words (1956). These works were commissioned by the Treasury; Scott details her grandfather’s battles with officialdom over matters of publishing and royalty rights.
Like most Whitehall mandarins of his age, Gowers was highly cultivated, humane, liberal and judiciously statist. Above all he was a man of integrity and high public service ideals. This book gains from its familial provenance, highlighting the human side of its subject without lapsing into hagiography. One must wonder how Gowers and his like would have stacked up amidst the demands of the more frenetic and sometimes neurotic political masters of today, compounded by the intrusions of a 24-hour media. But he and his contemporaries were what they were – people of their time. Ernest Gowers: Plain Words and Forgotten Deeds is a monument to one public servant’s lifetime achievements; it makes a welcome and worthy addition to the literature.
Manchester Metropolitan University, UK