Ronald Gow

Infobox Writer
name = Ronald Gow
birthdate = birth date|1897|11|1|mf=y
birthplace = Stockport, England
deathdate = death date and age|1993|4|27|1897|11|1|mf=y
deathplace = Beaconsfield, England
occupation = Dramatist
nationality = British
influences = George Bernard Shaw, Harold Brighouse, Stanley Houghton
influenced =

Ronald Gow (November 1, 1897 – April 27, 1993) was an English dramatist, best known for "Love on the Dole" (1934).

Born in Heaton Moor, Stockport, the son of a bank manager, Gow attended Altrincham County High School. After training as a chemist, he returned to his old school as a teacher. In the late 1920s he made several educational silent films with his pupils: "The People of the Axe" (1926) and "The People of the Lake" (1928) recreated life in ancient Britain, the latter produced 'with the approval of' Sir William Boyd Dawkins; "The Man Who Changed His Mind" (1928) was a Boy Scout adventure with a cameo from Robert Baden-Powell; "The Glittering Sword" (1929) was a medieval parable about disarmament.

Writing occupied his spare time during his years as a schoolmaster, and he wrote several plays for the BBC. At the age of 35 he had his first professional production, in London, with "Gallow's Glorious" (1933), a play about the American slavery abolitionist John Brown.

In 1934 he wrote "Love on the Dole", based on Walter Greenwood's novel about unemployment in Salford during the Great Depression – the play was a huge success. Wendy Hiller played the lead in the play, and also made her first film appearance in the Gow-scripted "Lancashire Luck" - in 1937 Gow and Hiller married, and they had two children. He continued writing plays into his eighties, providing material for his wife in adaptations of "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" (1946), which was a great success while "Ann Veronica" (1949) quickly proved a commercial failure. His other adaptations include Vita Sackville-West's "The Edwardians" and "A Boston Story" (1966), based on Henry James' "Watch and Ward".

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