FROM WOOLLEN MILLS T O DREAMING SPIRES

From the The Oxford Times, first published Thursday 28th Feb 2008.

Among the red brick turrets and stained glass of north Oxford they stand out like ziggurats;
four blocks of early 1970s flats now approaching middle age, their reinforced concrete walls
a little pock-marked and rain-streaked, the annealed glass of their stairwells no longer
gleaming. They have indeed become the weathered cliffs' of the architect's original vision.
To many people, the flats at Thackley End seem ugly. An estate agent, choosing his words
carefully, recently described one as a design statement of its time'. Peter Howard and Helena
Webster included them in their book Oxford: An Architectural Guide (Ellipsis, 1999), but their
verdict "a fluent essay in the late-brutalist aesthetic" is a somewhat back-handed
compliment.
But fans of modernist architecture see things to admire: the curving patterns of terracotta
tiles on the stairs; the floor-to-ceiling windows that fill the rooms with light; the balconies
with railings that bring to mind an ocean liner about to set sail.
The communal gardens, with their century-old copper beeches, laurel shrubbery, holly
hedges, and moss-covered walls, are peaceful and lovely.
Thackley End was an early example of purpose-built housing association flats, built by
Abacus Housing Society as affordable accommodation for people of modest means in a part
of Oxford dominated by huge Gothic mansions and university buildings. In an arrangement
that was unusual at the time, the occupants of the 55 flats shared the freehold, and
responsibility for their management.
And that, I thought, was the extent of the place's historical interest, until a chance
conversation threw some light on the origin of the name Thackley' and the people who used
to live in the house that was knocked down so the flats could be built.
In 1904, the eminent Oxford University professor of comparative philology, Joseph Wright
(1855-1930), and his wife, the folklorist Elizabeth Mary Wright (1863-1958), moved into a
beautiful new Georgian-style house on one of the last-remaining plots of freehold land on
Banbury Road, naming it Thackley' after Wright's birthplace in Yorkshire. No expense had
been spared: the frames for the large windows were made of teak and the roof slates,
"almost as big as gravestones", were brought from Yorkshire, and fixed with oak pegs by
specialist workmen from the county.

Elizabeth Wright later recalled: "Although the Banbury Road was not so infra dig. as Park
Town, it was still hardly Oxford'. I remember after we were settled in our new home being
asked by a real University' lady at a dinner-party: How do you like living so far out?'"
Joseph Wright is remembered today chiefly for an extraordinary feat of scholarship, his
editorship of the English Dialect Dictionary (OUP, 1898-1905).
This ambitious undertaking ran to six volumes and brought together the notations on
500,000 slips of paper, each bearing a word, its dialect pronunciation, and the district in
which it was found. Wright also wrote several other introductory grammars for Germanic
languages. Elizabeth co-authored some of these as well as writing Rustic Speech and Folklore
(OUP, 1913).
But the Wrights did not devote all their time to scholarship. They were held in great affection
by generations of Oxford students because of their hospitality and kindness. For 25 years
they held Sunday Yorkshire teas' at Thackley, to which they invited between 12 and 18
young men and also women, as they were keen supporters of female education.
These occasions - held under a quince tree in the garden in summer - had both an academic
and social purpose. Wright helped students to find their feet' in Oxford, encouraged them in
their studies, discussed topical philological issues, and told funny stories about his research
on dialect. Many were foreign students.
Writing to a colleague at a German university, Wright said: "We are always very pleased to
see foreigners, because a little kindness goes a long way to any one in a strange land!"
Wright's most famous student was J R R Tolkien. One of Tolkien's important formative
experiences while at school had been reading Wright's Grammar of the Gothic Language.
This, and later his personal contact with Wright, encouraged him to develop his love of
languages, and ultimately to invent his own.
Wright's desire to encourage scholarship in young people probably stemmed from his own
remarkable struggle to reach his intellectual potential in unpromising circumstances.
Incredible though it seems, this professor, who had an in-depth command of at least 15
languages, did even not learn to read and write in English until he was 15.
Born in 1855 in Thackley, a village near Bradford, to poor parents, Wright went to work at
the age of six as a donkey-boy, taking tools from quarry-men to the local blacksmith to be
sharpened.

At seven he began working at Sir Titus Salt's famous woollen mill at Saltaire, as a doffer in
the spinning department, his job being to remove full bobbins from the spindles and replace
them with empty ones. Even at this young age he showed a strong desire to get on, earning
extra money by sweeping up and selling horse manure and performing other small tasks.
There was a mill school but Wright only attended part time and did not learn much more
than the alphabet, basic arithmetic, and a few passages from improving' works. Looking back
on this time, he said: "Reading and writing, for me, were as remote as any of the sciences."
He moved to another mill and an apprenticeship as a wool-sorter, a skilled job that paid
much better. During the Franco-Prussian War he used to listen to other workmen reading
accounts of battles from the newspapers and wished he could read too. So he began
teaching himself, using the Bible and John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress.
He attended night school and worked through his midday dinner hour and late into the night,
moving on from English to study French, German, and other subjects. At 18, he set up his
own night school to help other disadvantaged students.
By 1876, when he was 21, he had managed to save up 40 and decided to study for a term
at Heidelberg University in Germany, walking there from Antwerp to save money.
On his return to England he found employment as a teacher and continued his studies,
returning to Germany in 1882 where he spent six years at the universities of Heidelberg,
Freiburg-in-Breisgau, and Leipzig.
During this time he studied at least 12 languages, including Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Old
Bulgarian, Old Icelandic, and Anglo-Saxon. His PhD was entitled: Qualitative and
Quantitative Changes of the Indo-Germanic Vowel System in Greek.
It seems he was blessed with a photographic memory. Much later, he wrote: "What I learn, I
never forget. There are not many memories like mine."
But he was also extremely hard-working. He advised his students: " remember you cannot
become expert at anything without a good deal of work. You must make up your mind to
face drudgery."
In 1891 Wright became deputy professor of comparative philology at Oxford and in 1901 full
professor, whilst working on his magnum opus, the English Dialect Dictionary. Having grown
up speaking Bradford dialect, he retained an affectionate respect for forms of grammar,
vocabulary and pronunciation that were specific to certain localities, and wanted to ensure

that this rich linguistic heritage was recorded in a systematic way for present and future
scholars.
He wrote letters to local newspapers around the country appealing for help with the
research, and financed the publication through obtaining subscriptions from notable public
figures.
Virginia Woolf admired Wright and he may have inspired her character Mr Brook in The
Pargiters; she was certainly thinking of him in the 1932 diary entry when she noted: " the
triumph of learning is that it leaves something done solidly for ever. Everybody knows now
about dialect, owing to his dixery."
In the biography she wrote about her husband after his death, Elizabeth Mary Wright
mentioned a surprising and rather contradictory aspect of Wright's attitude to language: "It
may have been partly his love of verbal exactness, coupled with the grammarian's respect
for language, that made any exaggerated expression, or common colloquialism - apart from
dialect - distasteful to him. He was not given to exclamatory phrases and he disliked slang of
any sort, and did not even take the trouble to learn the meaning of modern slang words
which are creeping into the standard language, especially since the War."
The workaholic Wrights occasionally took time off to go walking on the Yorkshire Moors or in
the Black Forest or to visit friends in Heidelberg. Wright followed cricket and football,
supporting Yorkshire teams, and after 1926 enjoyed listening to the wireless though, his wife
said: "he could not endure jazz', or the caperings of modern composers".
He was a keen gardener, cultivating fruit trees and bushes in the extensive gardens of
Thackley. Elizabeth wrote: "We have lived to find great satisfaction and pleasure in the
garden we made for ourselves, not forgetting the beneficent rgime of the Oxford climate,
which covers new walls with moss, and makes tree-trunks hoary before their time."
The great sadness of the Wrights' lives was the loss of both their children: Willie Boy, at the
age of three, to what may have been anaphylactic shock from an insect-bite; and later their
daughter Mary, who succumbed to appendicitis at ten. Perhaps their keen interest in the
welfare of other young people was partly attributable to this loss.
Wright resigned his chair at Oxford in 1924, an occasion that prompted many newspapers to
recount the story of this exceptional self-made man, under headlines such as Romance of
Self-taught Mill Boy'. He continued studying and writing until his health failed. Elizabeth
bought him a revolving wooden shelter that enabled him to sit out in his beloved garden

even in winter: "It gave him real happiness to sit there, in the middle of the lawn, when the
sun shone, warmly wrapped up and screened from any cold wind," she remembered.
The end came on February 27, 1930 when he succumbed to pneumonia. Elizabeth recalled
his last moments: "There was only one thing more which had to be done, a last message to
leave behind on the last day of all: and so he gathered up his strength in the midst of a long
stretch of silence, and framed his lips to say to me quite clearly the one word Dictionary'."
With thanks to: Oxfordshire Studies, William Horwood, Gill Hewett, and Christian McLening.
Archive Home
From the The Oxford Times
http://www.oxfordmail.net
Newsquest Media Group 2008

Joseph Wright (linguist)

Jump to: navigation, search

Joseph Wright FBA (18551930) rose from humble origins to become Professor of
Comparative Philology at Oxford University.
Born in Thackley, near Bradford in Yorkshire, the seventh son of a navvy, he started
work as a "donkey-boy" (carriage driver) at the age of six, became a "doffer" (remover
of full bobbins) in a Yorkshire mill, and never had any formal schooling. He learnt to
read and write at the age of 15, becoming fascinated by languages. He studied in
Germany and completed a Ph.D. on Qualitative and Quantitative Changes of the IndoGermanic Vowel System in Greek at the University of Heidelberg in 1885. From 1891

to 1901 he was Deputy Professor and from 1901 to 1925 Professor of Comparative
Philology at Oxford.
He specialised in the Germanic languages and wrote a range of introductory grammars
for Old English, Middle English, Old High German, Middle High German and
Gothic which were still being revised and reprinted 50 years after his death. He also
published a historical grammar of German.
He had a strong interest in English dialects and claimed that his 1893 Windhill Dialect
Grammar was "the first grammar of its kind in England." Undoubtedly, his greatest
achievement was the editing of the six-volume English Dialect Dictionary, which he
published between 1898 and 1905, initially at his own expense. This remains a
definitive work, a snapshot of English dialect speech at the end of the 19th century. In
the course of his work on the Dictionary, he formed a committee to gather Yorkshire
material, which gave rise in 1897 to the Yorkshire Dialect Society, which claims to be
the world's oldest surviving dialect society. He was the author of the Dialect Test.
Wright had been offered a position at a Canadian university, which would have paid
500 per year, which was then a very generous salary. However, Wright opted to finish
the Dialect Dictionary and undertook this task without any financial backing from any
sponsor.
In 1896 he married Elizabeth Mary Lea (1863-1958), and she was the co-author of his
Old and Middle English Grammars. She also wrote the popular book, Rustic Speech and
Folklore (Oxford University Press 1913), in which she makes reference to their
various walking and cycle trips into the Yorkshire Dales, as well as various articles and
essays. She survived him and wrote a biography, The Life of Joseph Wright.
Wright was an important early influence on J. R. R. Tolkien, and was one of his tutors
at Oxford: studying the Grammar of the Gothic Language with Wright seems to have
been a turning-point in Tolkien's life. In the course of editing the Dictionary he
corresponded regularly with Thomas Hardy. Wright was greatly admired by Virginia
Woolf, who writes of him in her diary that, "The triumph of learning is that it leaves
something done solidly for ever. Everybody knows now about dialect, owing to his
dixery." He was the inspiration for the character of Mr Brook in The Pargiters, an early
draft of The Years.
Wright's papers are in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

[edit] External links

Works by Joseph Wright at Project Gutenberg

[edit] References

Elizabeth Mary Wright, The Life of Joseph Wright (Oxford University Press, 1932).
R. W. Holder, The Dictionary Men. Their lives and times (Bath University Press,
2005). ISBN 0-86197-129-9.
"Secure future for Comparative Philology Chair" in Oxford Blueprint; The
newsletter of the University of Oxford Vol. 3 Issue 11 5 June 2003 .
Rowena Fowler, "Virginia Woolf: Lexicographer" in English Language Notes xxxix
(2002), pp. 54-70 postprint.
Jacqueline Simpson & Steve Roud, A Dictionary of English Folklore (Oxford
University Press, 2000) extract.
Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien: A Biography (New York: Ballantine Books, 1977).
ISBN 0-04-928037-6.