Department of Linguistics
A NATIONAL BULLETIN ON ISSUES IN
AUSTRALIAN STYLE AND ENGLISH IN AUSTRALIA
| Volume 16 No 2 | December 2009 |
book notes 1Alan Kuslap, a public servant with the Attorney General’s Department, reviews the biography of Ernest Gowers, Plain Words and Forgotten Deeds. Ann Scott has a wealth of experiences and achievements in the public arena but, as the granddaughter of the late Sir Ernest Gowers, she has written about another civil servant in a more turbulent time. Sir Ernest is best known as the author of Plain Words, a text championing the replacement of pompous and overly elaborate written language with plain, understandable English. A text written at the end of Sir Ernest’s career that took him from the anonymity of the civil service into the public eye of authorship. In Plain Words and Forgotten Deeds one discovers the man behind this corner stone in the use of everyday English. We get an insight into his working life more normally hidden in the mysterious corridors of bureaucracy. We see a man formed by his circumstances and who equally influenced the circumstances in which he was found. It is a quirk of history that placed a man like Sir Ernest in the British Civil Service during a period that spanned two world wars and a volume of social revolutions. Ann Scott has not told the story of the author of Plain Words as much as she has painted the canvas of the life of a career civil servant, seemingly undramatic, but the image of a proverbial “paddling duck” comes to mind as the tale unfolds. In this book the author has fulfilled her aim, set out in the book’s preface, to both ‘preserve the memory’ as well as ‘prolong the usefulness of a valuable life.’ Though this is a book backed by scholarly research and built from archival material, the heart of a granddaughter discovering the character and inner workings of her grandfather underlines every page. I may be a biased public servant, but I enjoyed reading the life and times of one of the ‘back room’ boys who helped hold together the fabric of society whilst participating in the revolution of change savagely pushed by conflict, political will (or the lack of) and self serving indulgences of others. Selective quotes from Sir Ernest and his peers punctuate and illustrate his professional career, and though you can glimpse the character of the individuals, what you can’t miss is the character and machinery of Government. Sir Ernest was a formidable leader within the Civil Service. His political masters placed him in many different roles utilising his capacity to drive and negotiate change, yet somehow maintain stability. In these pages we see into the conflict of profiteering coal mine owners resisting a Government’s attempts to nationalise their rampant, unsafe and inequitable industry. We gain an understanding of the home guard’s role in resisting the onslaught of the blitz bombing of London in World War II (nothing like Dad’s Army). We witness the struggle of individual and political will as the case for the abolition of capital punishment locks horns with popular opinion. These are just some of the tasks taken in the stride of a competent and versatile civil servant, but it is the ‘forgotten deeds’ that give character and colour to this book. One initially has the impression that all the worldly upheaval played a significant role in eliminating the language divide in British society, and that Sir Ernest was simply in the right place at the right time. But the man who chaired committees and led investigations, invaded board rooms and bantered with politicians, yet only noticed by those with whom he directly interacted, takes a deliberate and dramatic turn in his career to write Plain Words. Not happenstance at the culmination of his career, rather an exclamation mark on a life well spent. Scott’s biography of Gower sits in a series sub-titled Understanding Governance and as one who has spent over 25 years in the Australian Public Service I found moments in reading where I cheered at the revelation and insight that leapt from the pages. |