Stanley Ellis; Times UK obit
Hyfler/Rosner
November 24, 2009
Stanley Ellis: expert on English dialect
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article6928769.ece
Stanley Ellis was one of Britain's foremost dialect experts.
He was a leading researcher in the seminal 1950s Survey of
English Dialects, a pioneer in the forensic analysis of
voice recordings and a broadcaster whose programmes on
dialects for Radio 4 did much to popularise the subject.
He was the first person to provide expert evidence for
speaker identification in an English court, at Winchester
Magistrates' Court in 1967, which resulted in his
recruitment as a consultant to MI5 and his work with the
security forces for the next 25 years.
Ellis taught dialect studies at the University of Leeds
during the Yorkshire Ripper inquiry and spent months, with
his colleague Jack Windsor Lewis, analysing the infamous
"Wearside Jack" tape, eventually concluding that it was a
fake and that the hoaxer came from Castletown, a village on
the edge of Sunderland, more than 70 miles from the scene of
the murders in West Yorkshire. To pinpoint the hoaxer's
accent Ellis took a copy of the tape and played it to people
in pubs, clubs and post office queues in the North East,
asking them where the accent came from and listened closely
to how they themselves spoke; he also drew upon his own
research for the Survey of English Dialects. Detectives
ignored his findings but his opinion was vindicated in 2006
when it was established that the hoaxer, John Humble, had
lived within walking distance of the spot that Ellis had
located.
Stanley Ellis was born in the Lidget Green district of
Bradford in 1926, the son of a wool overlooker. From Grange
Grammar School, where he was head boy, he won a scholarship
to Corpus Christi, Cambridge. His studies were curtailed by
his National Service, during which he trained as a navigator
in the RAF and served in Delhi during Partition; he was
there when Gandhi was assassinated in 1948.
After his National Service Ellis read English at the
University of Leeds, specialising in dialectology. He gained
his BA in 1951 and went on to take his MA at the same
university: his thesis was "A Study of the Living Dialects
of Lincolnshire", and his interest in the subject was
confirmed when he took up a post, under Harold Orton, as
research assistant and fieldworker for the Survey of English
Dialects (SED), which was published in four volumes between
1962 and 1971. He spent six years travelling around the
country, from 1952-58, collecting dialect from
Buckinghamshire to the Scottish Border. He began his grand
tour in a BSA motorcycle and sidecar, which was crammed with
quarter-pound packets of Ringtons tea that he used to
persuade village postmistresses to reveal the names and
whereabouts of elderly agricultural workers. Later he
graduated to a Land Rover and caravan so that his new wife,
Jean, could accompany him.
As well as providing a little more comfort than a motorbike,
the arrangement enabled him to write an article, in the
University of Leeds Review (vol 5, 1956-57, pp 39-48), with
the improbable title "Dialect-Hunting by Caravan". Ellis
personally surveyed more than a third of the 300 or so
localities for the SED. His magisterial knowledge of the
dialects of England, gathered at first hand, laid the
foundations for his later forensic work. The SED also marked
the beginning of a distinguished career in dialectology. He
subsequently became an assistant lecturer, lecturer then
senior lecturer in the Department of English Language and
Medieval English Literature - latterly part of the School of
English - at the University of Leeds.
Ellis was a great inspiration to those who worked with him,
and many of his students and colleagues became friends. His
lectures were informative and entertaining, illustrated with
stories of meetings in farmyards with angry sheepdogs. Many
of the farmers, in whose fields he parked his caravan,
remained friends for life; he had a striking ability to
establish a good rapport with his informants.
A linguist at a rival university once said, somewhat
dismissively, that "Stanley Ellis is a populist - he is to
linguistics what Desmond Morris is to zoology", which, with
characteristic wry humour, Ellis regarded as a high
accolade. This typically self-deprecating stance belied the
essentially academic purpose of his dialectological teaching
and research.
A language historian of note, he saw, in the traditional
dialects, English speech in an observable tradition unbroken
from the earliest times. His meticulous data-gathering laid
the foundations for many of the latest explorations into
linguistic variation.
Ellis's tremendous ear was legendary. He told colleagues at
Leeds that he was able to link the voice of the person to
whom he was speaking with that of someone he had met before.
It was no idle boast. He used to ask his new students to say
a few sentences each, and then, with remarkable frequency,
locate them to within a few streets of where they grew up.
His desire to bring linguistics to a wider audience was
reflected in his regular appearances on radio and
television, his involvement with the running of the
Yorkshire Dialect Society, and editorship of its journal,
Transactions; at the time of his death he was vice-president
of the society. He presented a series of programmes on Radio
4 including Take a Place Like. . . , Talk of the Town and
Talk of the Country. He conducted phone-ins, answering
questions on dialect, place names and surnames, on local
radio. As technology advanced he was pleased to find that
these could be done by phone without the necessity of
travelling to a studio, and as they were often late at night
he often did them from the comfort of his study.
He took early retirement from the University of Leeds in
1983. With the encouragement of his late second wife,
Maggie, he then embarked full-time on his forensic work, and
for many years was one of only three experts regularly
undertaking forensic phonetic casework in the UK.
One of his most notable and likeable characteristics was the
way in which, even when holding forth on erudite linguistic
or legal matters, he never lost the common touch. Juries, in
particular, loved him. Once, when faced with a testing
question from a thrusting young barrister at Sheffield Crown
Court in the 1980s, he calmly prefaced his answer with: "Do
you know, I think your dad once asked me that."
In recognition of his contribution to the foundation of
forensic phonetics as a discipline, he was awarded honorary
life membership of the International Association for
Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics in 2004 - the first person
to receive that award. He was also a Fellow of the Institute
of Linguists.
For many years Ellis worked for the British Council, running
summer schools for teachers of English from overseas. Many
were held in Leeds, and through them countless people were
introduced to the Yorkshire countryside and culture that he
loved. Learning that he had lived and worked in Karachi, one
student from Pakistan engaged him in conversation in Urdu.
Digging into his memory he replied to her questions but was
soon stopped. "Ugh," she said. "You speak it like a sweeper",
and refused further conversation. This greatly amused him.
His passion for the Yorkshire Dialect Society was shared
with his third wife, Margaret, with whom he lived in
Harrogate. She survives him, as do his three children from
his first marriage.
Stanley Ellis, expert on English dialect, was born on
February 18, 1926. He died on October 31, 2009, aged 83