He introduced James to his son, Alexander Graham Bell, with a historical nicety as a consequence. Since it has long been agreed that James Murray, one summer's afternoon in 1857, taught Alexander Graham Bell the basic principles of electricity (making for the boy an electric battery and a voltaic cell out of halfpennies and discs of zinc), it is said by admirers of Murray that he is in fact the true grandfather of the electric telephone, which the younger Bell was later to invent. The first prototype telephone ever made, in fact, was said for many years to lie in James Murray's Oxford attic—though this particular anecdote, involving as it does the curious fate of the instrument, belongs rather later in this story.
Melville Bell also introduced James Murray to the existence in faraway London of the Philological Society, and showed him papers that the organization was publishing. The visitor's interest was immediately piqued—and before long he had thrown himself into the study and had taken into his head, from a paper by Prince Louis-Lucien Bonaparte, a nephew of Napoleon's, the notion of translating biblical works into Scottish dialects. After complaining that all the earlier attempts that he had read had in his view been done very poorly and inaccurately, he eventually published his own rendering of the Book of Ruth into the language of Teviotdale. The book describing how he did this 2 —Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland—was to be published in 1873, and it fully confirmed for James Murray a reputation that had begun to grow as early as the 1860s: that he was a philologist of the first water.
In 1861 he met and the following year married a local infantschool music teacher, Maggie Scott. Their wedding pictures 3 show the 25-year-old James to have been a tall, rather unkempt figure, with a bowed, almost simian appearance, with long arms that nearly brushed his knees, a ragged beard, ill-fitting and baggy clothes, and an expression that seems to mix distracted inattention with a vague apprehension of impending gloom, as turned out to be entirely appropriate.
Two years later the young couple had a baby girl they christened Anna—but she died soon afterwards of consumption, and Maggie fell ill enough for the doctors to propose (preposterously, given the Murrays' poverty) that she travel to the south of France to convalesce. Instead they went to a small house in Peckham, in south London—a marginally better climate than the Scottish Borders, the physicians agreed—and James Murray was obliged to set aside his intellectual pursuits and to take an uninteresting job at the headquarters of the Chartered Bank of India, Australia, and China. He would perch forlornly on a high stool in the Foreign Correspondence department in the very back of the office, wearing starched cuffs and an eye-shade, and write in ledgers in copperplate script while in the company of a host of wage-slaves and Lupin Pooters, all men quite devoid of intellectual curiosity or ambition.
Except that through all these travails he did not quite abandon his high-mindedness and his sense of an impending grand purpose. As Maggie slipped closer and closer towards her early death, James kept his intellect busied: he would speak to London policemen and try to determine, from their accents, from where they came; he studied Hindustani and Achaemenid Persian on his daily commute; he lectured on such topics as `The Body and its Architecture' before such groups as the Camberwell Congregational Church and his local Temperance League (he was a confirmed teetotaller). He learned how the Wowenoc Indians of Maine counted their sheep, and compared their peculiar brand of ovine numerology with that of the moorland farmers of Yorkshire. And, macabre though it may sound at this remove, he even took care to notice that as Maggie slipped into her deathbed delirium, she would cry out in the broad Scottish dialect of her childhood, abandoning in her misery the refined modulations of the classroom.
It cannot but have been a blessed release when Maggie Scott eventually died, though there is no doubt from his writings that James had loved and cared for her. Looking back on a time of evident desolation he would write: `A marriage, a birth, two deaths—all in three short years! … and I was left alone in London, doing uncongenial work.' And yet it was with an almost indecent alacrity that just a year after Maggie's funeral in Hawick, James Murray married for a second time.
Ada Ruthven, who would be his companion and helpmeet (and powerful antidote to his dithering) for the rest of his days, turned out to be a woman very much more in tune with his social and intellectual needs. Her father, George, had worked for the Great Indian Peninsular Railway—he and James Murray had indeed met on a train, where Murray found that his companion was, to his delight, an admirer of and sometime scholar devoted to the great German traveller and scientist Alexander von Humboldt. Sensing James's interest in the arcane that might not so stimulate all his hearers, George Ruthven added that his wife had long claimed to have been at school with Charlotte BronteÈ! It then seemed no more than logical, given Murray's evident fascination with these sensational revelations in a third-class railway carriage, that he should be invited home to meet the Ruthvens' daughter Ada—with the happy result that, in short order and as all concerned fondly hoped, the couple were duly married, and became wholly inseparable.
Together James and Ada produced six sons and five daughters. To underscore the formidable intellectual atmosphere that must have prevailed in the kindly-strict Murray household (Murray had an eye that could `both pierce and twinkle', a biographer remarked), it is worth noting how Wilfrid Murray catalogues the achievements of these children `in whose achievements James Murray took great pride':
Harold, the oldest son, Exhibitioner and First Class Graduate of Balliol, was author of the Oxford History of Chess (1913) and, at the time of his retirement, a Divisional Inspector under the Board of Education. Sir Oswyn, GBC, the fourth son, Scholar, triple First and Honorary Fellow of Exeter and Vinerian Law Scholar, was Secretary to the Board of Admiralty from 1917 until his death in 1936; Jowett, the youngest, was a Scholar and Triple First of Magdalen and became a Professor in the Anglo-Chinese College at Tientsin; the second, Ethelbert, was at his death in 1916 Electrical Engineer for North London in Willesden; the fifth, Aelfric (Wadham College), tookorders and became Vicar of Bishop Burton; the writer, also a Balliol Exhibitioner, was for 21 years Registrar of the University of Cape Town. Of the five daughters Hilda, the eldest, was a First Class Honours student at Oxford, Lecturer in English at Cambridge and Vice-Mistress of Girton College and has published several works; the second, Ethelwyn (Mrs. C. W. Cousins) was married to the Secretary for Labour of the Union of South Africa; the youngest, Gwyneth, (Mrs. H. Logan), a Girton First Class graduate, was married to a Canadian Rhodes Scholar who became Principal of the Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School in British Columbia; the remaining two, Elsie (Mrs. A. Barling) and Rosfrith, were both valued assistants for long periods on the Dictionary staff.
It was Murray's early friendship with Melville Bell in Edinburgh, and his later London encounters with the `cross-grained' phonetician Henry Sweet and the Cambridge mathematician Alexander Ellis, that first led him to the Philological Society, and eventually to his fateful encounter with Frederick Furnivall. It was in 1868 that Bell—who had moved down to London himself, to become a lecturer at University College—first invited Murray to St James's Square, initially to hear Ellis deliver a paper on his speciality, the development of English pronunciation. At the same time, seeing Murray's huge contentment at being among the members, he formally introduced him, thus allowing the Scotsman—who still at the time was toiling in the banking house—to join a literary corps d'élite, about two hundred strong, whose fascination with the English language in particular was to become of historic importance. Since Furnivall was the Society's sole Secretary, the two men met, and were duly impressed with one another from the very start. So impressed, in fact, that by May of the following year Murray had been elected a member of the Council—a position that he held until his death nearly half a century later.