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Sir Cecil Maurice Bowra
(8 April 1898 - 4 July 1971) U.K.

Sir Cecil Maurice Bowra

Literary critic

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Sir Cecil Maurice was born in Jiujiang, China, to English parents. His 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 also worked for the Chinese Customs, after serving in the Ever Victorious Army under "Chinese Gordon". Soon after Maurice's birth his father was transferred to the treaty port of Newchwang, and the family lived there for the first five years of Maurice's life, except during the Boxer Rebellion, in the summer of 1900, when Maurice was evacuated to Japan along with his mother, his elder brother, Edward, and other women and children of the European community.

The family returned to England in 1903, travelling via Japan and the United States, and settled in the Kent countryside. Maurice later said that he had been fluent in Mandarin, but forgot the language after settling in England. Maurice's parents went back to China in February 1905, leaving their children in the care of their paternal grandmother, who lived with her second husband, a clergyman, in Putney. The boys attended a preparatory school in Putney, where Maurice came first in all classes except arithmetic.

During his time at this school Maurice began his classical education with lessons from Cecil Botting, a master at St Paul's School. In 1909 the Bowra brothers journeyed across Europe and Russia by train to visit their parents in Mukden, China. They also visited the site of the Battle of Mukden and encountered Lord Kitchener. Their return journey, which they made in the company of their father, took them through Hong Kong, Colombo, Suez, Naples and Algiers.

Maurice boarded at Cheltenham College from April 1910. He did not enjoy such features of the school as outdoor games, but he won a scholarship in the internal exams held in June 1911. It became clear that he had a particular aptitude for classics, for which the school laid a thorough grounding in Latin and Greek. During his final two years, in the sixth form, Maurice became bored with his school work, acquired sufficient French to read Verlaine and Baudelaire, studied a bilingual edition of Dante's Divina Commedia, and began to learn German. Maurice maintained a connection with the school in later life, serving on its governing body from 1943 to 1965.

Sir Cecil Maurice BowraBy 1916 Maurice's father was Chief Secretary of the Chinese Customs and resided in Beijing in a household with thirty servants. In January that year Maurice's mother came to England to visit her sons, who were both about to see active service in the Army. In May Maurice departed with his mother for China, travelling through Norway, Sweden and Russia. In Beijing he visited the Great Wall of China and the Ming Tombs, and witnessed the funeral of Yuan Shikai.

Maurice departed from Beijing in September and on his way home spent three weeks in St Petersburg (then called Petrograd). During this time he attained a working knowledge of Russian. After his return to England he began training with the OTC in Oxford before being called up and sent to the Royal Army Cadet School in March 1917. He served in the Royal Field Artillery on active service in France from September 1917. In 1918 he participated in the resistance to the Ludendorff Offensive and the Allied counter-offensive. During this time he continued to read widely, including both contemporary poets and Greek and Latin authors.

In 1919 Maurice took up a scholarship he had won to New College, Oxford. Maurice was very sociable as an undergraduate. In 1922 Bowra was elected a fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, and was appointed Dean of Wadham shortly afterwards. When Murray vacated his chair in 1936 Bowra and others believed that Maurice Bowra himself was most likely to succeed him, but Murray recommended E. R. Dodds as his successor, rejecting Maurice because of "a certain lack of quality, precision and reality in his scholarship as a whole". Some believed that the real reason was a whispering campaign over Maurice's "real or imagined homosexuality".

Maurice became a Doctor of Letters of the University of Oxford in 1937. In 1938 the Wardenship of Wadham fell vacant and Maurice, still the Dean, was elected to the post, keeping it until 1970. During the Second World War Maurice served in the Oxford Home Guard and was not offered any war work. Maurice was Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1946 to 1951.

He was at Harvard when the post of vice-chancellor fell unexpectedly vacant in 1948, on the sudden accidental death of William Stallybrass. When the most senior head of house, J. R. H. Weaver, declined the post Maurice could have succeeded to it,[ but he chose to stay in the United States and Dean Lowe filled the post until 1951, when Maurice served his three-year term.

Maurice was President of the British Academy from 1958 to 1962. His 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 was homosexual. As an undergraduate in Oxford in the 1920s, Maurice was known to cruise for sex. He used the term "the Homintern" and privately referred to his leading position in it, also calling it "the Immoral Front" or "the 69th International".

Maurice 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. He became an honorary fellow of Wadham and was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Civil Law. He died of a sudden heart attack in 1971 and was buried in Holywell Cemetery, Oxford.

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Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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