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Randolph Quirk RANDOLPH QUIRK Charles Randolph Quirk 12 July 1920 – 20 December 2017 elected Fellow of the British Academy 1975 by DAVID CRYSTAL Fellow of the Academy RUTH KEMPSON Fellow of the Academy Randolph Quirk, Baron Quirk of Bloomsbury from 1994, was Vice-Chancellor of the University of London (1981–5) and President of the British Academy (1985–9). A specialist in English language studies, he became Professor of English at University College London, where he instituted the Survey of English Usage in 1960, innovative for its focus on spoken as well as written usage, and went on to lead a team of gram- marians to produce the two main reference grammars of English in the second half of the twentieth century, A Grammar of Contemporary English (1972) and A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (1985). Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy, XVIII, 31–48 Posted 8 April 2019. © British Academy 2019. RANDOLPH QUIRK Randolph Quirk was born on the family farm at Lambfell, near Peel, on the Isle of Man on 12 July 1920, the youngest child of Thomas and Amy. The Quirks had farmed that land since the seventeenth century; and it was a source of some pride to RQ (as many colleagues would later refer to him, from his distinctive abbreviated signature) that his heritage was a mixture of Celtic and Norse. The name Quirk, in that spelling, is a distinctively Manx variant of a Gaelic form, seen also in O’Cuirc or MacCuirc— son of Corc, a fifth-century Irish king. He was educated at nearby Cronk y Voddy primary school and then at Douglas High School for Boys (today the upper school of St Ninian’s), where he became the first member of his family to get to university. In the only personal interview he ever gave—a contribution to an anthology made for the Philological Society, Linguistics in Britain: Personal Histories (Oxford, 2002), from which all quotations in this memoir are taken—he reflected on how his upbringing in a farming family led him ‘to be obsessively enamoured of hard work and to be just as obsessively sceptical about orthodoxies, religious or political’. His family was ‘a mix- ture of Catholic and Protestant, of Anglican and Methodist, in an island community where self-consciously Manx values cohabited uneasily with increasingly dominant English values’. And he reflected wryly, ‘if I’m an eclecticplur alist, it may simply be that the Manx in general are’, recalling his fascination with the Scandinavian as well as the Celtic history and archaeology of the Isle of Man. He was referring to one of the adjectives often used to describe his approach to linguistics: eclectic—by which he meant a reluctance to espouse any single theory of language, but to take bits from any theoretical approach that would be useful in his description of English grammar. It was a position very different from the linguistic climate of the times, when researchers were routinely identified by a particular school of thought—one might be a Bloomfieldian, a Firthian, a Hallidayan, or a Chomskyan, for example. While RQ had lived through all these eras, and indeed had worked with scholars from each of these traditions, he distanced himself from all of them. As he commented, ‘The nice thing about eclecticism is, as its etymology proclaims, that you can choose freely and widely what you need for a particular purpose, without boxing yourself into any single (and doubtless inevitably flawed) theoretical position. It’s a matter of taste and personal intellectual bent, I suppose, but I have always found it liberating to be unconstrained by the very idea of an orthodoxy.’ It is a non- conforming and heterogeneous philosophy that earned him some criticism later from scholars who maintained the need for a strongly theoretically coherent approach. It is possible to see the origins of this intellectual bent in the earliest days of his scholarly career. At secondary school he was especially drawn to the sciences, but the pull of history, language (evidence of Manx was everywhere, though not much spok en) and thus linguistic history, caused him to switch to the arts. His strong interest in language(s) is not only documented by his school performance in languages, but also 34 David Crystal and Ruth Kempson by his school prizes. At the ages of fifteen, sixteen and eighteen he opted for book prizes: in 1935 The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English; in 1936 Cassell’s Latin Dictionary; in 1938 The Oxford Companion of Classical Literature (as his choice for the Latin prize) and also that year The History of England during the Reign of Victoria (1967–1901)—his choice for the French Essay prize! Then in 1939 he gained the Northern Universities Higher School Certificate in English, French, Latin and History, with distinction in English, and also won the Isle of Man Education Authority’s Scholarship of £80 p.a. for four years (in fact held for three years only). When he obtained a place at University College London (UCL) in 1939, he opted for English precisely because of the historical and linguistic emphasis in the curriculum there: Gothic, some Old Saxon and Old High German, a lot of Old Norse, and even more Anglo-Saxon, all in the wider context of Germanic philology, the history of the language, and palaeographical study from runes to court-hand. The year 1939 was hardly the best time to commence a degree course, and it was soon interrupted: in 1940 he began a period of five years in RAF Bomber Command, during which he became so deeply interested in explosives that he returned to his school interests, and started an external degree in chemistry through evening classes at what is now the University of Hull. During the RAF years he was also employed as an evening instructor in English and Economics (one of the books of this period was T. S. Eliot’s Collected Poems 1909–1935). He was also employed for three years as an instructor for explosives to air crews. Fortunately for English language studies, in 1945 he resumed his English course, spending some time in Aberystwyth (where the UCL department had relocated during the war), learning some Welsh, getting into local socialist politics and supplementing his minimal Manx grant by playing the clarinet in a local dance band. During his final two years he studied phonetics with Daniel Jones, encountered the subject of linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies with J. R. Firth, and became enamoured with the thought of doing research. He married Jean Williams in 1946, and they had two sons, Eric and Robin. He graduated from UCL in 1947. In 1946 he had already been awarded the Elsie Hitchcock Prize for the most distinguished work in English philology in the Department. With his graduation he won the Early English Text Society’s prize for his work on Medieval English Language and Literature. He also won the John Marshall Prize in Comparative Philology, and was given an engraved medal in silver. This is his first aca- demic medal, going back seventy years, so UCL, which was to become his beloved college, awarded him a medal at the very beginning of his academic career! The distinc- tion was such that he was also offered the Rouse Ball Open Research Scholarship (ten- able at Trinity College, Cambridge), of £300 p.a. for three years to read for a PhD, which he declined, electing to stay at UCL. He was also invited by the Folkuniversitetet in Stockholm to spend a year (1947–8) in Sweden to lecture, but he declined this as well. RANDOLPH QUIRK 35 UCL offered him an Assistant Lectureship in the English Department (he became Lecturer in 1950) and the chance to write an MA thesis under the supervision of Professor A. H. (Hugh) Smith. He chose an aspect of Germanic philology that was exercising scholars at the time: whether the vowels in such Old English words as heard ‘hard’ or feoh ‘cattle’ were really diphthongs or just simple vowels plus diacritics indicating consonant qualities. He completed his MA thesis in 1949: ‘Interpretation of Diphthongal Spellings in Old English with Special Reference to the Phonological Problems Presented by the Fracture Spellings in Cambridge University Library MS Ii.l.33’. And he began lecturing, his undergraduate classes including medieval litera- ture, the history of the language, Old English and Old Norse. The teaching had an interesting side-effect: it brought home to him the realisation that traditional Germanic philology was of little assistance to students wanting to learn Old English, whereas the neglected areas of syntax and lexicology would, he felt, be much more beneficial. So for his PhD he switched to syntax, completing a thesis that was published by Yale University Press in 1954: The Concessive Relation in Old English Poetry. The choice was serendipitous. It coincided with a proposal by Professor C. L. Wrenn at Oxford to write an Old English grammar. Up to that point, such grammars traditionally covered only pronunciation and word structure (phonology and morphology), and Wrenn wanted this book to be different, with as full an account as possible of Old English syntax as well as word-formation. The result, An Old English Grammar, published by Methuen in 1955 (an enlarged edition with S. E. Deskis appeared in 1994), became a standard course book for students of Old English, at home and abroad, referred to as ‘Quirk and Wrenn’. In the meantime, there was a development that would put RQ into close contact with most leading English language scholars of the mid-twentieth century.
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