TRAGEDY OF BBC EXPERT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 89, 7 March 1941, Page 10

TRAGEDY OF BBC EXPERT

sional career of Professor Arthur Lloyd James, of London University, one of the: greatest living authorities on the English language and its pronunciation. He taught BBC announcers the correct, or at any rate a standardised, pronunciation of all difficult or doubtful words, and was recently engaged by the Government to train R.A.F. pilots to speak clearly by radio telephone. He wrote the Encyclopaedia Britannica article on pronunciation and phonetics, and his handbooks on Broadcast English are regarded as standard at the BBC, Examples: combatant (cumbatant), route (root), says (sez), garage (garridge), apparatus (apparaytus not apparattus), acumen (akewmen with accent on second syllable), laboratory (with accent on second syllable), quandary (kwondairy, second syllable again). The second edition of the booklet in 1931 changed the pronunciation given in the first edition of 1928, of idyll (from iddill to eye-dill), iodine (from eye-o-dyne to eye-o-deen), and the "-yle" pronunciation of words such as fragile, profile, and facile, formerly given as " -ill." Declaring that the BBC announcers were "too haw-haw" in their diction, Professor James was responsible for the TT cr has ended the profes-

nickname "Lord Haw-Haw" given to the German radio propagandist. At the beginning of the Blitzkrieg, Professor James and his wife (who was formerly well known as the concert violinist Elsie Owen) moved from London to Oxford. Before Christmas they visited London and ran smack into one of its most violent air raids. Severely shaken, the professor and his wife were taken ‘o a nursing home, and later went back +o their London house where they slept in the cellar. Answering an anonymous phone call in the middle-of January, London police visited the James home. In the dining room they found the professor, wandering dazedly, reports " Time." In the bedroom lay the body of his wife, her head bashed in. From the professor’s incoherent mumblings the police gleaned this explanation: "I thought my powers were failing, and I could not cope with my work. Rather than expect my.wife to face a bleak future I decided she should die.... We were so happy. I wanted her to die while she was like that... . I thought I would "also kill myself." The Crown began its investigation, but the answer was obvious; cracked war aah th ‘ \