Fowler had hoped that his work would help ‘the half-educated Englishman of literary proclivities’. Gowers was confident that well-educated civil servants would not be ‘caught out in false concords or split infinitives’, but he claimed that their written language was often marred by archaisms, jargon and obscurity. He began his campaign against officialese in 1929 with an address entitled ‘Mainly about the King’s English’. A recurring theme in his later speeches was the need for officials to use clear, informative language. Plain Words appealed to general readers who during the war years had been deluged with government circulars written in turgid prose. Gowers later regretted the attacks on civil servants by language zealots, and argued that clarity of both thought and language should be the concern of everyone. He was a great admirer of Fowler, and in his revision of Modern English Usage he insisted that Fowler’s idiosyncrasies, wit and occasional prolixities be retained. Ann Scott alludes briefly to the battle between the prescriptivists and the descriptivists, and describes Gower as a ‘gentle, liberal and good-humoured prescriptivist’. Fowler was subjected to a much more drastic revision by Robert Burchfield in 1996: the descriptivists had triumphed.

Henry Fowler was a schoolmaster, journalist and lexicographer who did much of his writing while living on the island of Guernsey. In contrast, Gowers spent most of his life in London, and was in many ways the quintessential Whitehall mandarin. The son of a distinguished physician, he received a classical education at Rugby and Cambridge, and joined the Civil Service in 1903. His official career lasted fifty years. He was very much the generalist administrator, moving frequently between ministries and commissions, including a stint as private secretary to Lloyd George. For most of the interwar years, as secretary of the Mines Department and later as chairman of the Coal Commission, he was preoccupied with the endless coal crises that eventually led to the nationalisation of the coal industry. During World War II, Gowers was given the enormous responsibility of commanding the Civil Defence Services in London. In his later years, he presided over numerous committees, boards and inquiries, including the Royal Commission into Capital Punishment in 1949–53.

Ann Scott is a retired Queensland academic and public servant with a strong interest in public administration. She also happens to be the granddaughter of Ernest Gowers, and knew him well in his later years. She obviously remembers him with much affection and is concerned that his distinguished official career has been forgotten, or relegated to footnotes or terse labels (Plain Words etc.). Her stated aim is ‘to provide a record of the long and interesting life’ and ‘to look at the momentous events in which he participated’. In the final chapter, she refers to some of the later criticisms of the old British Civil Service, dominated by Oxbridge generalists, but she does not question whether Gowers was ever hampered in his official duties by an inadequate knowledge of economics, finance or industry. Not surprisingly, she skates over his weaknesses or failures, but she does occasionally quote from writings of colleagues whose admiration of Gowers was qualified. They acknowledged his energy, efficiency, tact and judgement, but also described him as being cold and aloof.

Biographers of civil servants face considerable difficulties. There have been notable exceptions, but, as Gowers once said, officials have generally shunned ‘the warm glow of limelight’ and their public utterances tended to be circumspect. Unless diaries or revealing private letters have survived, the records of their ideas, opinions and actions are usually buried deep in official archives, if they exist at all. Gowers changed jobs frequently, and some of his posts, such as the Board of Inland Revenue, were distinctly unglamorous. Scott has to cover a diversity of subjects: national insurance, the Marconi scandals, wartime propaganda, the 1926 General Strike, the control of coal mines, the organisation of civil defence, the creation of new towns. She is good on context, summarising the functions and problems of each office in a few pages, but in the early chapters Gowers remains shadowy: the figure is almost lost in the background. He comes to life in the two chapters on London during the war. Drawing on memoirs, diaries and speeches, Scott is able to create a much more vivid picture of Gowers and his colleagues in their dangerous and exhausting work protecting the lives and property of millions of Londoners.     The book is included in a Macmillan series entitled Understanding Governance. Opening with a statement of aims and research method, it has the appearance of a political science monograph. It is not, however, a dry monograph but a well-crafted biography, enlivened by personal recollections and occasional touches of humour, covering Gowers’s private life and writings on English usage, as well as his long career. It is written in plain words, with very little theory or technical jargon. Gowers would have approved.