Civil service career In 1902 Gowers graduated from Cambridge with a First in the Classical Tripos and attended
Wren's, a civil service
crammer in London, to study for the highly competitive
Civil Service Examination. He also sat for the Inner Temple Bar exam, which he passed in 1906. In December 1903 he passed the Civil Service Examination, and embarked on the career that led to the claim that he "may be regarded as one of the greatest public servants of his day." In November 1912 Lloyd George appointed him to the
National Health Insurance Commission, as one of a team of promising young civil servants (including
John Anderson,
Warren Fisher,
Arthur Salter, and
Claud Schuster) nicknamed the "Loan Collection" as they had been hand-picked from across the civil service. The members of the loan collection were deployed to other departments during the First World War. While nominally continuing to hold his post, Gowers was attached to the
Foreign Office working under
Charles Masterman MP at
Wellington House, Britain's top-secret wartime propaganda unit.
Grappling with the coal industry In 1917 Gowers was appointed secretary of the Conciliation and Arbitration Board for government employees. In 1919 he began a 25-year involvement with the coal industry, joining the
Board of Trade as director of production in the mines department. The following year he was promoted to head the department as permanent under-secretary for mines, a position he retained throughout the Miners' Strike. In 1927 he became chairman of the
Board of Inland Revenue. but deficiencies in the Act soon became evident.
The Times commented, "Sir Ernest Gowers and his colleagues struggled manfully with their difficulties, but Parliament had inadvertently tied their hands behind their backs." A new and more powerful body, the Coal Commission, was set up in 1938, with Gowers as chairman. In July 1942 all unmined coal in Britain ceased to be the property of the colliery owners and was vested in the Coal Commission.
Senior Regional Commissioner for Civil Defence, London Region Throughout the 1930s Gowers and his colleagues had also been involved in preparing for possible war, and invasion. From 1935 onwards he combined his frustrating work with the coal industry with civil defence planning, attached to the Department for the Co-ordination of Defence. John Anderson was given control of civil defence planning in 1938 and set up a network of civil defence regions.
Euan Wallace MP was appointed head of London Region, but ill-health forced him to retire in 1940. Gowers, his deputy, became Senior Regional Commissioner for Civil Defence in London, running civil defence through the Blitz from a concrete bunker underneath the
Natural History Museum, with
Harold Scott and
Edward "Teddy" Evans as his deputies. The prime minister,
Winston Churchill, told Gowers, "If communication with the Government becomes very difficult or impossible, it may be necessary for you to act on behalf of the Government… without consultation with ministers."
The Times wrote of Gowers, "In this post he showed his full powers as an administrator, and indeed as a leader. Energetic, forceful, always cheerful, with an unfailing eye for the essential, he gave the impression of being master of every unexpected development and, as a result, infused confidence into all who came in contact with him."
Post-war reconstruction After the war Gowers was appointed chairman of the Harlow New Town Development Corporation, one of several new towns being built to provide housing for people displaced by wartime bombing, but he fell foul of the bureaucracy in the Ministry for Town and Country Planning and his three-year contract was not renewed. He was told that he was too old. This did not prevent his being invited to chair a series of committees of inquiry on Women in the Foreign Service (1945); Closing Hours of Shops (1946); Houses of Outstanding Historic or Architectural Interest (1948); and Foot-and-mouth Disease (1952). As a result, he wrote
A Life for a Life? The Problem of Capital Punishment (1956), The political debate dragged on and it was not until 1965 that capital punishment was effectively abolished in England.
Plain Words and Modern English Usage Gowers first went into print on the subject of bureaucratic English usage, in 1929. in an article entitled "Mainly About the King's English", and he continued this crusade throughout his career. After the Second World War,
Sir Edward Bridges, head of the home civil service, invited him to write a pamphlet on English usage for use in civil service training courses. It was followed by the
ABC of Plain Words (1951), and the two books were combined in 1954 and published by
Her Majesty's Stationery Office as
The Complete Plain Words. This was revised in 1973 by
Sir Bruce Fraser, and then in 1986 by
Sidney Greenbaum and Janet Whitcut. In March 2014, a new revision, by Gowers's great-granddaughter Rebecca Gowers, was published by Penguin Books. In 1956, at the age of 76, Gowers accepted a commission from the
Oxford University Press to undertake the first revision of
HWFowler's
Modern English Usage, which had been in print since 1926 with only very minor changes. It took Gowers nine years to complete the task. In 1996, Gowers' edition was succeeded by a more radical revision, edited by
Robert Burchfield. Gowers bought a house in Sussex in the 1930s and lived there permanently after the war, writing books and managing a small farm. He became chairman of the board of the hospital where his father had worked, the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases (now the
National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery), Queen Square, London, and was on the board of
Le Court Cheshire Home near
Petersfield. Gowers died in April 1966, at King Edward VII Hospital, Midhurst, Sussex, age 85, nine months after his revision of Fowler's
Modern English Usage was published. He was
Gentleman Usher of the Purple Rod of the
Order of the British Empire, 1952–60. He was a Freeman of Royal Borough of the
Kingston-on-Thames. and an honorary Associate of the
Royal Institute of British Architects, and was elected president of the
English Association (1956–57). ==Personal life==