Waterhouse, Gilbert (1888–1977), academic, was born at Hipperholme, Yorkshire, on 15 July 1888, son of Harold Waterhouse of Tarleton, Lancashire. He was educated at Manchester Grammar School, renowned for its rigorous teaching of modern languages, and St John's College, Cambridge, where he was the first recipient of the prestigious Tiarks University German scholarship (1910), which funded his graduate study at the University of Berlin. From 1911 to 1914 he was assistant to Levin Schücking, Germany's leading authority on English literature, at the University of Leipzig. Following the outbreak of hostilities he acted briefly as a war correspondent before taking up a teaching post at Manchester Grammar School, prior to his appointment to the chair of German at TCD in 1915, which he held until 1932. He served as secretary to the university council 1926–32. In his lifetime, his most important publication was his pioneering The literary relations of England and Germany in the seventeenth century (1914); he followed the tradition of his Trinity predecessor Albert Maximilian Selss in writing a popular Short history of German literature (1942; 3rd ed. 1959). Other publications include his edition of the comedy Weh' dem, der lïgt (1923; 3rd ed. 1950) by Austria's leading dramatist, Franz Grillparzer, and The reformation: decadence and reconstruction (1930). He was editor of the Cambridge-based Yearbook of Modern Languages (1920).
Waterhouse made an enduring contribution to the history of modern language teaching in Britain and Ireland by his work on the 1916–18 (Leathes) royal commission on the position of modern languages in the educational system of Great Britain. He also served as secretary to the royal commission on Dublin University (1920). He gained posthumous notoriety for his (even for that time) extraordinarily xenophobic lecture, subsequently published in pamphlet form: The war and the study of German. A public lecture delivered in Trinity College Dublin on 29 May 1917 (Dublin, 1917). Here he gave active support to the campaign to dismiss German-born university professors of German in British universities (many of them naturalised British subjects) and advocated using the study of the language and literature as a vehicle for indoctrinating students with hatred for the German people. Waterhouse was appointed in 1933 to the chair of German in QUB, where he remained until his retirement in 1953. He served as deputy chief welfare officer in the Belfast Civil Defence (1941–5) and as a trustee of Magee University College, Derry (1953–67). He was a pioneer of travel literature as a literary genre, editing and translating Simon van der Stel's journal of his expedition to Namaqualand 1685–69 (1932); see also ‘St Patrick's Purgatory. A German account’ (1923) and ‘Another early German account of St Patrick's Purgatory’ (1934), both in Modern Language Review, 1923). His honours included Litt.D. (Dubl.), MRIA (1933), and FRGS. He died 25 July 1977.
He married (1920) Mary Elizabeth, eldest daughter of Sir Robert Woods (qv), M.Ch.; they had three daughters.