Maurice Cowling

Maurice John Cowling (6 September 1926 – 24 August 2005) was a British historian and a Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge.

Life

Cowling was born in Norwood, South London, to a lower middle-class family. His family then moved to Streatham, where Cowling attended an LCC elementary school, and from 1937 the Battersea Grammar School. When the Second World War started in 1939 the school moved to Worthing and then from 1940 to Hertford where Cowling attended sixth-form.Michael Bentley, ‘Prologue: The retiring Mr Cowling’, in Bentley (ed.), Public and Private Doctrine. Essays in British History Presented to Maurice Cowling (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 3.

In 1943 Cowling won a scholarship to Jesus College, Cambridge, but was called up for military service in September 1944, where he joined the Queen's Royal Regiment. In 1945, after training and serving in a holding battalion, he was sent to Bangalore as an Officer Cadet.

In 1946 Cowling was attached to the Kumaon regiment and the next year-and-a-half he travelled to Agra, Razmak on the North-West Frontier and Assam. As independence for India neared in 1947, Cowling was dispatched to Egypt as a camp adjutant to the British HQ there. Cowling was then promoted to captain in Libya. By the end of 1947 Cowling was finally demobilised, and in 1948 he went back to Jesus College to complete his History Tripos, where he received a Double First.Bentley,...
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