include provision for recommending its abolition. He was profoundly affected by the evidence presented to the commission and said later that what he learned as chairman of the commission converted him from vague support of capital punishment to strong opposition. As a result, he wrote A Life for a Life? The Problem of Capital Punishment (1956), of which H L A Hart wrote, "Certainly the publication of this report in England introduced altogether new standards of clarity and relevance into discussions of a subject which had too often been obscured by ignorance and prejudice." The political debate dragged on and it was not until 1965 that capital punishment was effectively abolished in England. Plain Words and Modern English Usage Gowers first went into print on the subject of bureaucratic English usage, in 1929. in an article entitled "Mainly About the King's English", and he continued this crusade throughout his career. After the Second World War, Sir Edward Bridges, head of the home civil service, invited him to write a pamphlet on English usage for use in civil service training courses. The resulting Plain Words, a work 94 pages long, became an instant success, not only within the civil service but internationally. It was published in April 1948 and by Christmas of that year, it was in its eighth impression, with more than 150,000 copies sold. It was followed by the ABC of Plain Words (1951), and the two books were combined in 1954 and published by Her Majesty's Stationery Office as The Complete Plain Words. This was revised in 1973 by Sir Bruce Fraser, and then in 1986 by Sidney Greenbaum and Janet Whitcut. In March 2014, a new revision, by Gowers's great-granddaughter Rebecca Gowers, was published by Penguin Books. In 1956, at the age of 76, Gowers accepted a commission from the Oxford University Press to undertake the first revision of HWFowler's Modern English Usage, which had been in print since 1926 with only very minor changes. It took Gowers nine years to complete the task. In 1996, Gowers' edition was succeeded by a more radical revision, edited by Robert Burchfield. Gowers bought a house in Sussex in the 1930s and lived there permanently after the war, writing books and managing a small farm. He became chairman of the board of the hospital where his father had worked, the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases (now the National Hospital for