A. S. F. Gow

Andrew Sydenham Farrar Gow (27 August 1886 – 2 February 1978) was an English classical scholar and teacher. Apart from eleven years as a master at Eton College between 1914 and 1925 his career was entirely at Trinity College, Cambridge.

At Trinity, Gow was a colleague and friend of A. E. Housman, on whose works he became an authority. The two men shared a sharp-tongued scholarly intolerance of anything they saw as slipshod, pretentious or badly thought-through, but Gow nonetheless won the affection of many of his students. He was Housman's literary executor, and published a book about his friend shortly after Housman's death.

Gow's principal subject as a scholar was the Greek bucolic poet Theocritus, his works on whom remain a core source for modern students of the poet.

Life and career Early life Gow was born in Gower Street, London, the eldest of the three children, all of whom were boys, of Dr (later the Rev) James Gow (1854–1923) and his wife Gertrude Sydenham, née Everett-Green. James Gow, formerly a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, was headmaster of Nottingham High School from 1885 to 1901, and of Westminster School from 1901 to 1919. Gow was christened Andrew after an uncle who was Keeper of the Royal Academy, and, according to a biographical sketch in The Times, it may well have been from the uncle and his circle of friends, which included Poynter and Alma-Tadema, that Gow derived his interest in paintings.

Gow was educated at Nottingham High School and then at Rugby School, after which, in 1905, he won a classical scholarship to Trinity, Cambridge. |group= n kind of countenance being set off by bushy eyebrows and side-whiskers, and anything like conceit or pretentiousness on the part of a pupil might provoke a wounding sarcasm. His Eton pupils included Alan Clutton-Brock, David Lindsay, Anthony Powell, and George Orwell.

Trinity don

By 1925 Gow was settled at Eton and looking forward to becoming a housemaster, when he was invited to resume his fellowship at Trinity as a preliminary to being appointed Tutor.

Gow served successively on the Council of the Senate, the General Board of the Faculties, and, as chairman, the Board of Fine Arts. More congenial to him, according to The Times, was his long membership of the Fitzwilliam Museum board. |group= n he wrote of Gow:

Gow, like his friend and Trinity colleague Housman, was known for his high standards, impatience with anything second-rate, and a sharp tongue. The Times observed that another side to Gow's character was shown in the letters he wrote month by month to pupils serving in the forces during the Second World War: "In them he is as his friends knew him – wise, warm-hearted, and possessed of a rich sense of humour. Shortly after Housman's death in 1936 he published a short study of his friend; although it concentrated on Housman's scholarship, in Lloyd-Jones's view it "throws more light upon him than almost any of the studies by literary persons". Gow supervised a second edition of Housman's edition of Manilius in 1937.

From 1947 to 1953 Gow served as a trustee of the National Gallery. He built up a private collection of the works of Degas, which he left to the Fitzwilliam Museum.

Gow's scholarly publications include editions of his main study, Theocritus, and works by Nicander, Machon, Moschus, and Bion. He prepared the second edition of Housman's edition of Manilius, and the second volume of Sir William Ridgeway's The Early Age of Greece. In Lloyd-Jones's view Gow's work on Theocritus and Hellenistic epigrams will remain "an essential instrument of scholarship".

In 1951 Gow retired from his lecturing posts, continuing to live in rooms at Trinity until 1973 when he moved to a nursing home in Cambridge, where he died in 1978 at the age of ninety-one. He never married.

Works by Gow Author

Editor and translator

Notes, references and sources