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Even Thomson’s entry in the old Dictionary of National Biography, which is solemn and strait-laced to a fault, hints there was something amiss. Alongside his awards and honours, it found space to notice his ‘peculiar grin’ and the fact that he was ‘most careless in his attire and appearance, and behaved as though it were a matter of no interest either to himself or others’. The obituary in Country Life said he had ‘the appearance of a grocer’s errand boy’. However it was left to one of his Trinity colleagues, A. S. F. Gow, to administer the sharpest rebuke, though he couched it ‘in the decent obscurity of a learned language’:
In memoriam Josephi Thomson, qui, propter minimarum particularum scientiam maximo utriusque universitatio collegio praepositus, alteram officii partem omnino neglexit, altera ita functus est ut neglectam maluisses. Raucus, edentulous, ipexus, urorem duxit non amabileum, cuius ope et auxilio suffultus, heredibus LXXX milia librarum sterling-arum, collegio domicilium hara immundius, posteri exemplum memorabile avaritiae reliquit.
George Lyttelton, who had been a master at Eton alongside Gow, before he moved to Trinity, copied this into his commonplace book, providing a translation:
In memory of Joseph Thomson who, by virtue of his knowledge of the smallest particles, attained the mastership of the greatest college in either university. He totally neglected the one part of his duties and discharged the other in such a way that it would have been better if he had neglected that also. Loud-mouthed, toothless and unkempt, he married an unpleasant wife, thanks to whose money he was able to leave £80,000 sterling to his heirs, a house filthier than a pigsty to the college, and to posterity a model of avarice never to be forgotten.
Who was the censorious Gow? Andrew Sydenham Farrar Gow (1886-1978) was the son of a headmaster of Westminster, educated at Rugby and Trinity, where he took a double first and then won a prize fellowship. He served as a master at Eton, 1914-25, then returned to Trinity for the rest of his life. Altogether he lived 60 years in college: no wonder he resented Thomson. He was terrifying to look at, with sprouting eyebrows and bushy side-whiskers. As a schoolmaster his fury at shoddy work was formidable, marked by his comment: ‘Oh, death, boy!’ His highest praise was: ‘Not wholly bad.’ Yet he never struck or beat a pupil, and being a bachelor-and-a-half he was known to Etonians as ‘Granny Gow’.
Gow, like his Trinity colleague A.E. Housman, specialised in the deeper obscurities of classical learning. Housman was much the older, and when he died made Gow his literary executor. Indeed Gow wrote a brief memoir, much the best thing ever written about the poet. While Housman became the greatest expert on Manilius, Gow chose Theocritus, though afterwards moved to Hellenistic epigrams. He and Housman competed in finding, editing and glorifying the dimmest authors of antiquity. They also sought to outdo each other in excoriating inaccuracy, and putting down the smallest exhibition of literary pretentiousness. Both were masters of the laconic snub, the brief, dismissive letter and the monosyllabic, albeit courteous, rejection of honours. One of the things they objected to in Thomson was that he grabbed at anything going. Housman surely approved of Gow’s fustigation, though if he had written it, the Latin would have been more elegant.
You may ask: what right had a backward-looking classicist like Gow to go for a world-conquering scientist? It depends what you mean by culture. Gow had a dicky heart and was rejected for service in the first world war. Handed a white feather by a bellicose woman, and asked aggressively, ‘What are you doing to defend our civilisation?’ he replied, ‘Madam, I am that civilisation.’ (The story is told of other scholars.) The repellent Thomson left Cambridge the Cavendish lab. Old Gow, despite bare means, was a perceptive art collector, and when he died left the Fitzwilliam 24 works by Degas, six by Rodin and six by Forain. He kept himself spotlessly clean, too.
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