[3] He left Eton during the Second World War and joined the Royal Navy Submarine Service straight from school.
There he reached the Men's Single Sculls semi-finals, in the same heat as the American Jack Kelly (who lost a close race as Rowe finished third; neither advanced to the final).
[4] In 1949 Rowe was president of the Oxford club and a member of its Boat Race crew that was narrowly beaten by Cambridge.
Western became famous, and Rowe may have risked prosecution under British obscenity law, when he printed for Penguin Books the first unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover, which other printers had avoided.
He had identified a market for short-run printing and set out to make profitable runs of 100 or fewer when the threshold was generally considered to be 1,000 copies.
After his retirement from Pitman Press in 1983, he established Antony Rowe Ltd in Chippenham, Wiltshire, using new techniques and equipment to cut costs; it became a successful business thanks to his ability to "think small".
One evening his dinner with Charlotte was disturbed by a dozen SAS officers crawling up his lawn late at night when the security alarm was set off in error.
[2] Antony Rowe had three brothers, Ronnie, Michael and David, and three sisters, Heather, Grace and Glory, who entertained each other as children playing music together.
His family's favourite dog was his German Short Haired Pointer, Apollo, who accompanied him to the Bath Press every day.