Stanley Ellis; authority on dialects and a pioneer of the forensic analysis of voice recording
Hyfler/Rosner
Leading authority on dialects and a pioneer of the forensic
analysis of voice recording.
Jack Windsor Lewis
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/nov/13/stanley-ellis-obituary
Stanley Ellis, who has died aged 83, was an authority on
English dialects, a pioneer of the forensic analysis of
voice recordings and a radio broadcaster whose programmes
brought dialectology to life through illuminating
discussions with locals about folklore and language.
He came to national prominence when he declared that a tape
released by the police in June 1979, purporting to be the
voice of the Yorkshire Ripper - then suspected of the murder
of 10 women - was by a hoaxer, someone who hailed from
Castletown, a small village on the edge of Sunderland, Tyne
and Wear - many miles from the scenes of crime. The police
disregarded his warning, a decision that may have put their
investigation on the wrong track for more than 18 months.
Ellis was proved to have been right in 2005, when the hoaxer
was identified and shown to have lived all his life within
walking distance of the area Ellis had pinpointed.
Ellis had honed his ability to identify English dialects
early in his career at Leeds University, as principal
researcher under Harold Orton on the four-volume Survey of
English Dialects (1962-71). During a decade of fieldwork on
the survey, he travelled throughout England interviewing his
subjects, all the while living in a caravan with his wife,
Jean. The resulting work remains the paramount publication
on regional speech. As well as conducting interviews, Ellis
made many recordings that are now housed in the Leeds
Archive of Vernacular Culture.
Ellis, the son of a superviser in the wool industry, was
born in the Lidget Green district of Bradford, West
Yorkshire, and attended the city's Grange grammar school,
from where he gained a scholarship to Corpus Christi
College, Cambridge. Towards the end of the second world war,
he broke off his studies there to become a navigator in the
RAF. After national service in India, he read English at
Leeds University, where his master's thesis was a study of
Lincolnshire dialect.
His friendly, unpompous manner allowed him to establish a
good rapport with his subjects, which made him an ideal
interviewer of the elderly farming folk who were the chief
target of a survey that aimed to record information on
styles of speech and vocabulary that reveal much about our
linguistic past and were about to disappear. He began his
fieldwork using a motorbike and sidecar but, when Orton was
able to find the money, he got Ellis a Land Rover that towed
the caravan housing his tape-recording equipment, and his
wife.
As a lecturer and, subsequently, senior lecturer at Leeds
University, Ellis enjoyed teaching undergraduates and was an
inspiration to colleagues and students alike. Eager to bring
linguistics to a wider audience, he was closely involved
with the Yorkshire Dialect Society, editing many volumes of
its journal, Transactions.
He began his forensic work in 1967 when he was the first
person to provide expert evidence for speaker identification
in an English court (at Winchester magistrates). He was
subsequently recruited as a consultant to the security
services.
After 35 years at the university, he took early retirement.
Encouraged by his second wife, Maggie, Ellis continued his
forensic work, attending law courts up and down the country
advising prosecution barristers or defence counsels as an
expert witness in the ever-increasing number of cases in
which recordings of voices played an important part.
In the 1980s, Radio 4 engaged him to do a series of
programmes called Take a Place Like ... and Talk of the
Town, Talk of the Country, which sent him off again to
travel around the British Isles meeting people to discuss
their milieu and the words and accents that were peculiar to
them. Besides these programmes, he later took part in
frequent radio phone-ins, often late at night, in which he
chatted with his callers not only about their speech, but
answered questions about the origins of their names and
local placenames. In recent years, thanks to technological
advances, he was able to conduct these conversations in his
pyjamas and slippers from the telephone in his study, much
to his delight.
In 2004 Ellis was awarded honorary life membership of the
International Association for Forensics, Phonetics and
Acoustics, the first person to receive the award.
He spent his retirement in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, with
his third wife, Margaret, who survives him, along with Jean,
from whom he was divorced, and their three children. Maggie
died suddenly of an aneurysm in 1996.
. Stanley Ellis, linguistics scholar and broadcaster, born
18 February 1926; died 31 October 2009
. This article was amended on 16 November 2009. The original
stated that Stanley Ellis's second wife, Maggie, died from a
brain tumour. This has been corrected.