ANTITUSSIVE

The death of Bob Burchfield (or 'RWB' as he was always known to his staff, in the manner of those days) has robbed English lexicography of a scholar of international stature. He was a mixture of Johnson and Fowler, recording and documenting the vocabulary of English with painstaking detail, a scholar's neutrality, but with occasional tinges both of linguistic purism and of humour.

When he was appointed Editor of the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary in 1957 (a post which he held until 1986), he put aside his Middle English research in favour of the study of the modern lexicon, but never lost the dogged rigour in his medieval work. He joined the ranks of a group of distinguished medieval scholars from New Zealand central to scholarly work on the language in Oxford for a generation. Indeed, he was single-handedly responsible for re-establishing a tradition of historical lexical research on the OED which had evaporated with the disbanding of the original OED staff on the completion of the First Edition of the Dictionary (1884-1928). As an academic colleague of C. T. Onions (one of the editors of the First Edition) in the 1950s he ensured editorial continuity between the early editors of the Dictionary and their modern successors.

He will perhaps be best remembered for two things: for championing the 'varieties' of world English, and ensuring that these were accorded their rightful place in the Dictionary, and as the editor responsible for including the previously 'taboo' Anglo-Saxon four-letter words in the OED. The editorial traditions of the OED today owe much to Bob Burchfield's no-nonsense, practical approach to a task of gargantuan proportions. He didn't suffer fools gladly; he didn't suffer fools at all.

John Simpson, Chief Editor, Oxford English Dictionary

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Obituary published in The Daily Register, The Times, Tuesday 6 July 2004

Robert Burchfield

Lexicographer whose monument is the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary whose four volumes occupied him for 30 years.

Robert Burchfield became internationally known as a distinguished and productive scholarly lexicographer with the publication between 1972 and 1986 of the four volumes of the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary, the fruits of 30 years of immensely hard and dedicated work. The original OED - with which the name of Sir James Murray is enduringly associated - was essentially a monument to Victorian scholarship, published in instalments between 1884 and 1928; after which the work of recording the English language was seen as completed and the editorial staff was disbanded. A quarter of a century later the publishers, Oxford University Press, recognised the need to respond to growth and change in the language, and in 1957 Burchfield was appointed Editor of the Supplement.

Robert William Burchfield became a lexicographer rather accidentally. His parents were non-academic, small-town New Zealanders, but Burchfield proved an unusually clever student at Wanganui Technical College, and by 1948 he was a graduate of, and junior lecturer at, Victoria University College, Wellington.

This brought the chance of a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford, though only two New Zealanders were selected annually and he was warned that a successful candidate needed to be 'a mix of Achilles and Jesus Christ'. Certainly both academic and sporting prowess were required. Fortunately his career at Victoria University College had been interrupted by five years' war service in the Royal New Zealand Artillery, the last two actively in Italy, and this had enabled him to play rugby for the New Zealand Forces against the South African Forces. The Springboks won, but his performance was sufficient to clear the sporting hurdle, and he went up to Magdalen College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar in 1949. C. T. Onions, who had largely been responsible for the completion of the OED after Murray's death in 1915, was then Magdalen's librarian.

Burchfield's academic career was highly promising - he was painstaking as well as brilliant, and his tutors complained only of some prolixity. Although his first book was a study of New Zealand, written with his first wife and published in 1953, he intended to be a medieval scholar and was for a while a research student with J. R. R. Tolkien as his supervisor. Tolkien and Onions were his principal mentors.

By 1957 he was a lecturer in English Language at Christ Church, working on the Middle English text known as the Ormulum, and was honorary secretary of the Early English Text Society. But the University Press had determined to bring the OED out of limbo; Onions recommended Burchfield to OUP's Dan Davin, and he was offered the task.

There was some clannishness here. Davin was himself a New Zealander; there was then a firm Oxford belief - not solely based on Eric Partridge's known excellence - that New Zealanders were unusually good lexicographers of the English language; and if Burchfield was not then a lexicographer, he was unarguably a scholarly New Zealander.

He had, in fact, reservations about this change in direction and, insisting that he should also continue as a university teacher, he also became a fellow and tutor in English Language at St Peter's College - an arrangement that many would regard as holding two full-time jobs. There was, too, a strong practical consideration: he was 34 with a wife and three children, Christ Church paid £500 a year, the press offered £1,500. The press had got it wrong with Murray in 1879, expecting the OED to take ten, rather than nearly 50, years to compile, and it again got the calculation wrong with Burchfield. The Supplement, it thought, would be a single 1,275-page volume compiled in seven years. In the event it took almost 30 years, four volumes and some 6,000 pages.

This miscalculation was small, though, compared with others such as that for The Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, the 12 volumes of which appeared between 1937 and 2002, or Die Afrikaanse Woordeboek, the first instalment of which appeared in 1950, and which has now reached the letter 'O'.) The scope proved huge since Burchfield was determined to include what the OED had omitted, overseas English of all kinds and indecent words of all periods; the publication of Webster's Third in 1961 emphasised the scale of American vocabulary and of the scientific and technical terms needing collection, and everyday jargon and slang had proliferated.

There were legal problems too: it needed a High Court ruling to support his lexicographer's inclusion of unfavourable senses of the word Jew (Burchfield received some anonymous death threats on this score), and organisations such as Weight Watchers Inc and the manufacturers of Yale locks were with difficulty persuaded that a dictionary maker had the right to record usage and that this would not damage their trademarks. He started in 1957 with no colleagues, no collection of lexicographical evidence and just five dictionaries of the Oxford family. By the time he retired there were more than 20.

Over the years as Supplement editor and, from 1971 to 1984, as Chief Editor of the Oxford English Dictionaries, he built up a staff of 30 which pressed on with the main task and spawned the valuable derivative dictionaries. He became accustomed to completing a full day's work and then returning after dinner to spend several more office hours in what he called "the invisible embroidery behind the scenes".

Stamina, obduracy, a gift for handling people - among them the brilliant, waspish Marghanita Laski, who devotedly sent him invaluable material (though she wrote so fast that she would occasionally write the wrong word) - and an enduring cheerfulness combined to carry him through. Indeed, after completion, he declared: "I adored the whole process, every minute of it."

He found Oxford University Press to be splendidly supportive publishers, although in the later years, as the climate for all British publishers grew colder and more commercial, the relaxed ease of the early relationship faded a little. His was surely one of the very last great dictionary projects not electronically compiled. Soon after his retirement the pace was stepped up as the Supplement was electronically incorporated into the original main work, to create the 20 volume Second Edition of the incomparable Dictionary.

Burchfield's growing reputation as successive volumes appeared brought him other tasks. He was asked to survey the English spoken on the BBC, and the fruits of this, The Spoken Word, published in 1981, was long used as a guide for broadcasters. He also published a brief survey of the history of the language, The English Language (1985).

He was required to travel widely and lecture internationally - fortunately he was a good man on a platform or at a party. He was president of the English Association, and became an honorary foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an honorary fellow of the Institute of Linguists, and an honorary DLitt of Liverpool University and of his old New Zealand University. He was appointed CBE in 1975.

After retirement from Oxford University Press in 1988 Burchfield became an emeritus Fellow of St Peter's College in 1990. He was by now seen as a spokesman for the English language, with press and radio turning to him for comment on new or disputed usages. A cheerful and unpompous scholar, Burchfield dealt effectively with both heavy-handed and light-hearted inquiries in these fields.

He also published, in 1989, Unlocking the English Language, and then turned to another large labour - this time for Cambridge University Press, which more realistically gave him until 1995 to complete the rewriting and updating of H. W. Fowler's quirky and celebrated Modern English Usage, published in 1926.

Robert Burchfield was married twice; first, in 1949, to Ethel May Yates. There were two daughters and a son from this marriage which was dissolved in 1976. He married, in 1976, Elizabeth Knight, also a New Zealander, who was for many years the able head of publicity for the press's academic division.

Robert Burchfield, CBE, scholar and lexicographer, was born on January 27, 1923. He died on July 5, 2004, aged 81.

This text is licensed for one month from The Times, and may not be reproduced.

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Obituary published in The Independent, Obituaries, 9 July 2004

Robert Burchfield

Workaholic Chief Editor of the Oxford English Dictionaries Robert Burchfield was the last link with the last of the four editors of The Oxford English Dictionary, C. T. Onions of Magdalen College, Oxford, the college to which Burchfield went from New Zealand in 1949 as a Rhodes Scholar. That connection shaped his life, more than he knew when he arrived.

Burchfield's parentage was solidly working-class; he was born at Wanganui, on the west coast of the North Island, and went, not to its famous public school, "the Eton of the Southern Hemisphere", but to Wanganui Technical College: he was proud of that, and the city was proud of him, and gave him the Freedom of the City in 1986.

He went on to the English Department of Victoria University College, Wellington, in the first half of the 20th century the Alma Mater of many who, having gained Rhodes or Commonwealth Scholarships, went on to Britain and distinguished themselves as medievalists and linguists, or as Renaissance scholars. He was at Victoria College from 1940 to 1941, then served in the Royal New Zealand Artillery including two years in Italy, and returned to the college in 1946-48. He taught there in the year that followed his graduation: it coincided with the 50th anniversary of its foundation, and he wrote for that occasion the rarest of his publications, a brief history of the college.

When he turned up in Oxford in October 1949, properly clad in a graduate's gown, to attend Professor C. L. Wrenn's lecture series on Beowulf he seemed to his undergraduate contemporaries a formidable figure. Rhodes Scholars took a second BA in Oxford, after only two years. Magdalen knew him as a good rugby player, soon to become the captain of the Magdalen team, and his tenure of that captaincy showed his character, for he gave it up at the end of his first year because it deflected him from his work, was summoned by the Warden of Rhodes House, Sir Carleton Allen, and told that his duty lay as much on the playing-field as in the library: Burchfield did not give in.

Onions was the Fellow Librarian of his college, a daily, intimidating presence, Reader in English Philology. As such, he did not teach undergraduates, but he somehow took to Burchfield, and Burchfield learnt a lot from him informally. Formally Jack Bennett and C. S. Lewis were his tutors, and he went to Gabriel Turville-Petre for Old Icelandic. He gladly absorbed scholarship. Of those who were his contemporaries in the philologically oriented English Course I - for them there was no literature after the death of Chaucer in 1400 - no one's lecture-notes were as neatly written and as well organised as his, no one's mind was as clear as his.

Burchfield's last two years as a Rhodes Scholar were spent as a graduate student supervised by J. R. R. Tolkien on an edition of The Ormulum, a late-12th-century text the language of which requires knowledge of the early Scandinavian languages as well as, of course, Old and Middle English. Tolkien had the necessary erudition, and was an inspiring supervisor. (Indeed Burchfield chose "Tollers" as his hero for The Independent Magazine's series "Heroes and Villains" in 1989.) Burchfield's edition, however, was never completed. Sadly, when I last saw him in hospital, very ill with Parkinson's disease and no longer thinking clearly, he said, did I know, in another fortnight he would be handing in to the publishers the completed edition?

Bob Burchfield came over from Wellington newly married, to Ethel née Yates, a marriage dissolved in 1976, and from April 1950 their children were born. He needed money after the Rhodes, and during Bennett's year of study leave Magdalen appointed him as a Junior Lecturer, and then Christ Church appointed him as Lecturer from 1953 to 1957.

The growing family inhabited a college house near the railway station, and on the river, too dangerous it seemed to Ethel, who was anxious for the safety of their children, two girls and a boy. Bob may well not have noticed: he was so busy with teaching at Christ Church and at St Peter's, the college to which he was attached as Tutorial Fellow, and then Emeritus Fellow to the end of his life; as Honorary Secretary of the Early English Text Society, 1955-68; and briefly as editor with J. C. Maxwell of Notes and Queries. He was a workaholic, and he needed to be, seeing the low pay of academic jobs.

In 1957 Burchfield was appointed by the Oxford University Press to produce a supplement to The Oxford English Dictionary. The main purpose, as seen by the press, was to bring up to date that great work of reference that had become increasingly out of date; new words and new uses were to be authoritatively recorded. He knew that the whole of OED, Old, Middle, and Modern English, was in need of revision, yet all he was supposed to do was to add more recent information than was in OED. Readers of journals and books had to be commissioned to provide quotations, and when Burchfield nearly despaired of finding them many of his friends and colleagues, and their spouses, turned to, and wrote out slips with quotations.

As time went on the little house in Jericho, at the side of the press, was too small for so great an endeavour, and it was accommodated more spaciously in the house on St Giles, latterly occupied by the revisers of The Dictionary of National Biography. In 1971 the press appointed him Chief Editor of the Oxford English Dictionaries, and in 1972 the first of four huge volumes of his A Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary appeared, the last in 1984.

Honours came to him from 1972 onwards. He was appointed CBE in 1975, Liverpool University gave him an Hon DLitt, as did in 1983 Victoria University of Wellington; he was President of the English Association, 1978-79, a foundation in Hamburg honoured him with the Shakespeare Prize in 1994. Wholly unpompous and not one bit status-conscious he enjoyed being honoured, and he was pleased that Terry F. Hoad and I edited a Festschrift for him (Words: for Robert Burchfield's sixty-fifth birthday, 1988). The happiest event was his marriage in 1976 to Elizabeth Knight, also a New Zealander, and at that time on the staff of the OUP at Ely House, London.

In Who's Who? Burchfield gives as the first of his recreations "investigating English grammar". If "grammar" includes lexicography and the history of the language, that supposed "recreation" defines his life succinctly; it indicates that work is his recreation. He helped Tolkien finish his edition of Ancrene Wisse in 1962, he helped Onions finish The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology in 1966.

Among his publications, he produced in 1986 The New Zealand Pocket Oxford Dictionary, he edited Studies in Lexicography in 1987, and the volume of The Cambridge History of the English Language on English in Britain and overseas in 1994. And for the forthcoming third edition of The Oxford English Dictionary he strove to revise entries that have quotations from The Ormulum.

His last book, for the OUP (like almost all his work), is The New Fowler's Modern English Usage (1996). It shows his total grasp of the subject. The writing of it, though laborious, gave him pleasure, as did the many favourable reviews. Of course, he had prejudices, yet, unlike H. W. Fowler (the title of whose book he took over, though little else), he was permissive rather than prescriptive, and his entry prescriptivism in The New Fowler is not merely a model of clarity and of historical accuracy: it shows how he exercised his scholarly judgement. He was a practical man, not a theoretician of language.

He liked to quote what Dr Onions had said to him: "Lexicography can be done on the kitchen table."

Eric Stanley

Robert William Burchfield, lexicographer and philologist: born Wanganui, New Zealand 27 January 1923; Junior Lecturer in English Language, Magdalen College, Oxford 1952-53; Lecturer in English Language, Christ Church, Oxford 1953-57; Honorary Secretary, Early English Text Society 1955-68; Editor, A Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary 1957-86; Lecturer, St Peter's College, Oxford 1955-63, Tutorial Fellow 1963-79, Senior Research Fellow 1979-90, Emeritus Fellow 1990-2004; Editor, Notes and Queries 1959-62; Chief Editor, Oxford English Dictionaries 1971-84; CBE 1975; President, English Association 1978-79; married 1949 Ethel Yates (one son, two daughters; marriage dissolved 1976), 1976 Elizabeth Knight; died Abingdon, Oxfordshire 5 July 2004.

Reproduced by permission from The Independent, Obituaries, 9 July 2004.

# posted by Resty Odon @ 8:15 AM