A. S. F. Gow

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.

His biographer Hugh Lloyd-Jones suggests that Gow's personality and appearance were a hindrance: It was feared that he would alarm and discourage his pupils, particularly the weaker sort.

Indeed Gow's appearance was formidable, an uncompromisingly Scottish[n 1] 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.

He did not serve in the armed forces during the First World War, because a heart murmur disqualified him for service;[1] he volunteered to help train young soldiers in the use of the Lewis gun.

[3] Lloyd-Jones writes that Gow did much to interest undergraduates in art, "a subject by no means popular among the Cambridge dons of his generation.

Among the undergraduates who were grateful for his enthusiasm and guidance was Anthony Blunt;[n 2] he wrote of Gow: During the years after his return to Cambridge in 1924 he was almost the only don to take a positive interest in the art of the past and his rooms were the one place where one could find a good library of books about the Italian Renaissance, a fine collection of photographs of paintings and above all stimulating conversation about the arts in general.

[3] His Eton colleague and lifelong friend George Lyttelton commented, "That Housman blend of an impossibly lofty and unsympathetic standard with needlessly abusive words is really very regrettable and unhelpful".

[8] Gow's scholarly publications include editions of his main study, Theocritus, and works by Nicander, Machon, Moschus, and Bion.

[1] 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.