35 Facts About Maurice Bowra

Maurice Bowra was Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, from 1938 to 1970, and served as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford from 1951 to 1954.

Maurice Bowra's father, Cecil Arthur Verner Bowra, who worked for the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs, had been born in Ningpo, and his paternal grandfather, Edward Charles Bowra, had worked for the Chinese Customs, after serving in the Ever Victorious Army under "Chinese Gordon".

Maurice Bowra later said he had been fluent in Mandarin, but forgot the language after settling in Britain.

Maurice Bowra's parents went back to China in February 1905, leaving their children in the care of their paternal grandmother, who, having been widowed, lived with her second husband, a clergyman, in Putney.

The boys attended a preparatory school in Putney, where Maurice Bowra came first in all classes except arithmetic.

In 1909 the Maurice Bowra brothers journeyed across Europe and Russia by train to visit their parents in Mukden.

Maurice Bowra did not enjoy such features of the school as outdoor games or the OTC, but he won a scholarship in the internal exams held in June 1911.

Maurice Bowra maintained a connection with the school in later life, being instrumental in the appointment of Cecil Day-Lewis as a master there and serving on its governing body from 1943 to 1965.

Maurice Bowra served in the Royal Field Artillery on active service in France from September 1917.

Maurice Bowra saw action at Passchendaele and Cambrai, and in 1918 he participated in the resistance to the Ludendorff Offensive and the Allied counter-offensive.

Maurice Bowra was left with a lifelong hatred of war and military strategists, and seldom mentioned the war afterwards.

In 1919 Maurice Bowra took up a scholarship he had won to New College, Oxford.

Maurice Bowra took a first class in Honour Moderations in 1920 and a first class, with formal congratulations, in Literae Humaniores in 1922.

In 1922 Maurice Bowra was elected a fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, with the support of the Regius Professor of Greek, Gilbert Murray, and appointed Dean of Wadham shortly afterwards.

Maurice Bowra became a Doctor of Letters of the University of Oxford in 1937.

Maurice Bowra was supported in the election by his colleague Frederick Lindemann.

The election was held on 5 October 1938, and coincided with the Oxford by-election campaign, in which Maurice Bowra lent his support to the anti-appeasement candidate, Sandy Lindsay.

Maurice Bowra was Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1946 to 1951.

Maurice Bowra delivered the 1957 Earl Grey Lecture in Newcastle on "The Meaning of a Heroic Age" and the 1963 Taylorian Lecture on "Poetry and the First World War".

When T S R Boase was indisposed by an eye problem in 1959 Bowra returned to chair the committee and privately remarked that "jokes about his beaux yeux are not thought funny".

Maurice Bowra was President of the British Academy from 1958 to 1962.

Maurice Bowra's tenure was marked by two achievements: he chaired the committee that produced the Report on Research in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, which resulted in a grant for those purposes from HM Treasury; and he helped to establish the British Institute of Persian Studies in Tehran.

Maurice Bowra had learned the value of verse during the First World War.

Cyril Connolly wrote that Maurice Bowra "saw human life as a tragedy in which great poets were the heroes who fought back and tried to give life a meaning".

Maurice Bowra was an important champion of Boris Pasternak, lecturing on his work and nominating him repeatedly for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

However, Maurice Bowra was never able to fulfil his wish to be accepted as a serious poet himself.

Maurice Bowra's output consisted of "sharp satires, in verse, on his friends ".

Maurice Bowra wrote a satire on John Betjeman, who had become choked with emotion on being presented by Princess Margaret with the Duff Cooper Prize on 18 December 1958.

Maurice Bowra retired in 1970, but continued to live in rooms in the college that had been granted to him in exchange for a house he owned.

Maurice Bowra became an honorary fellow of Wadham and was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Civil Law.

Maurice Bowra died of a sudden heart attack in 1971 and was buried in Holywell Cemetery, Oxford.

Maurice Bowra was knighted in 1951 and was appointed a Companion of Honour in 1971.

Maurice Bowra was a Commandeur of the Legion d'honneur in France, a Knight Commander of the Royal Order of the Phoenix in Greece and a recipient of the order "Pour le Merite" in West Germany.

In 1992 Wadham College named its new Maurice Bowra Building in his honour.

Maurice Bowra wrote a foreword to Voices From the Past: A Classical Anthology for the Modern Reader, ed.