Grey Gowrie
1993 Judge (Chair)
- Prizes judged
Lord Gowrie was variously a poet, an art dealer, assistant to Robert Lowell, Minister for the Arts under Mrs Thatcher, and clan chief of Clan Ruthven in Scotland.
Grey Gowrie, whose grandfather was deputy constable of Windsor Castle, grew up among the royal family and claimed he learned the facts of life from a Leonardo drawing in the Royal Collection. Luxuriantly coiffed and bow-tied, he went on to become a lecturer in English and American literature and hold a variety of government posts. He famously resigned from the Thatcher government claiming he could not live in central London on a ministerial salary. The resulting furore ‘taught me a lesson that in politics it can be ill-advised not to put a gloss upon the truth’. He was born on 26.11.1939 and died on 24.09.2021.