Ernest Gowers
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Sir Ernest Arthur Gowers GCB GBE (1880–1966) was a British civil servant, now best known for work on style guides for writing the English language.
At the invitation of HM Treasury he wrote Plain Words, a guide to the use of English in 1948. It was designed to woo officials away from pompous and over-elaborate writing, and was so successful that the Treasury asked for a sequel, The ABC of Plain Words, which was published in 1951. Both these works were slim paperbacks. Their success encouraged Her Majesty's Stationery Office to commission a hardback book combining the best of both earlier publications. This was The Complete Plain Words, published in 1954, and never (in various revisions) out of print since.
Its success was wide — far beyond the original audience of civil servants — and Gowers was invited by the Oxford University Press to prepare a new edition of Fowler's Modern English Usage, which was in need of updating, having been in print since 1926 with only very minor changes. The second edition was published in 1965 and remained in print for three decades, being succeeded by a third edition in 1996.
Gowers wrote also on capital punishment, having chaired a Royal Commission set up by the Attlee government to examine all aspects of the subject.
He was the grandfather of composer Patrick Gowers and greatgrandfather of mathematician and Fields Medallist Tim Gowers.
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