Rebecca Gowers - Plain Words: A Guide to the Use of English

Ernest Gowers was born in 1880 into a well-heeled London family. His father, Sir William Gowers, was a celebrated neurologist, one of the founders of the discipline, whose immense body of work on the subject is today described by Oliver Sacks as matchless. But this workminute, illustrated observations of disorders ranging from syphilis to writers crampwas not the only comprehensive record he left behind. He also kept delightful accounts of all the larks and entertainments that he provided for Ernest and his siblings. They went to the river for steamer rides, to Lords for the cricket, to the Zoo to see Jumbo the Elephant, and to the Egyptian Hall for performances by the amazing automaton artist, Zoe; they took in magic displays where peoples heads were cut off, ladies disappeared and electric storms ripped round the room; they even visited the famous Wild West show, where Annie Oakley shot glass balls out of the air while Buffalo Bill commanded massed ranks of rough riders.

But these pleasures had been hard earned. William Gowerss own upbringing was impoverished by comparison. His father, a Hackney bootmaker, died when William was only eleven, catapulting the boy into a world marked by graveyards, gun shops and gelatine factories. This misfortune for the child, compounded by the death of all his siblings, seems to have led him to seize almost with desperation on whatever chances came his way. There is scant record of his early education, but he started his career in medicine aged sixteen as the apprentice of a country doctor, at the same time studying by correspondence for the London University matriculation. Diaries he kept at the time show him to have been exhausted and sometimes harrowed by this existence, one requiring an effort of will on his part of a kind we now associate with the young Charles Dickens. And it is therefore perhaps little surprise that when the time camebeyond the cowboys and elephants and other jollificationsDr Gowers would take great care over the formal education of his sons.

Ernest Gowers was sent to Rugby in 1895. He went on to read Classics at Cambridge, and in 1903 passed what was by then a genuinely competitive exam for the Home Civil Service. Though he also soon afterwards qualified as a barrister, he did not take up law. Instead, he remained in the Civil Service, advancing rapidly, until in 1911 he was appointed Principal Private Secretary to Lloyd George, then Chancellor of the Exchequer.

This was, as Gowers would later recall, a stormy period in which to take up post. Lloyd George was attempting against the odds to usher a socialist National Insurance Bill through Parliament: he faced virulent public opposition, not least from the British Medical Association and the Northcliffe Press. And getting the Bill passed was merely the start. In short order, Gowers found himself one of a crack team of young civil servants charged with the immense task of making the resulting Act work. These young men were nicknamed the loan collection because they had been drawn from across several departments, but Gowers called them a desperate remedy. Not only were they being asked to implement from scratch an entire system of health and unemployment insurance, and somehow to explain its complexities clearly to the public, but they were also being required to do so in a matter of months. Difficult as this task was, however, those to whom it had fallen would soon view it as having been good preparation for the yet greater challenges that came with the outbreak of war.

In 1914 most members of the loan collection were reassigned. Though Gowers continued to work at Wellington House, the building where the National Insurance Commission was based, this was now a front: Wellington House became the code name for a covert propaganda unit. Gowers started as its General Manager, but within a year had risen to the position of Chief Executive Officer. The job of the unit was to make the case for going to war. Many writers secretly agreed to give their services, among them H. G. Wells, J. M. Barrie, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, John Buchan, Arnold Bennett, A. C. Benson, Robert Bridges, G. K. Chesterton, John Galsworthy, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, Henry James, Hilaire Belloc, Rudyard Kipling and Thomas Hardy. A. S. Watt, the prominent literary agent, was drawn in both as an adviser and as a go-between conducting undercover negotiations with sympathetic publishing houses. It was important to the credibility of the works sponsored by the unitinitially books and pamphlets, in many languagesthat its existence should remain unknown. Within nine months Wellington House had more than ninety titles in print, with two and a half million copies of these titles circulating at home and abroad.