He would then wait for a communication—a letter or a postcard—from the editors. Rather than contribute quotations as he came across them—which is what almost all the other volunteers did, and often in vast numbers—he would bide his time until the editors asked him to solve a problem which immediately confronted them. A card would come in: the staff were just then working on the word bungalow—had Dr Minor by any chance any illustrative quotations for it? Had he by happenstance something in his index books that would satisfy what the editors were calling their desiderata—had he something (in this case a word, a quotation, or the solution to some lexicographical puzzle), which the labourers in the Scriptorium wanted, required, or desired?
And the doctor—no one in Oxford in those early days knew he was in an asylum cell; it was supposed by those who knew what Broadmoor was that he worked on the asylum staff—he would go to the index folders, look up those entries for bungalow, find the relevant quotations noted in his index—often there would be scores of entries, perhaps dozens in one book alone—write each on a separate quotation slip, and put the bundle in the post for the Scriptorium. The editors would duly receive the bundle the next morning, and would ease them into the very page of the Dictionary on which they were then working. Working with Minor was just, one of them said, like turning on a tap. Whenever the Dictionary wanted specific material for words, an editor had merely to send a postcard to Broadmoor, and out the details flowed, in abundance and always with unerring accuracy.
Murray and Minor did meet, and under unusual circumstances—no one at the Dictionary, least of all James Murray, had hitherto suspected that their most assiduous contributor was a madman, a murderer, and an American. But once the two did meet they became the firmest of friends; and when the elderly Minor, ill from his self-mutilation, was clearly no further threat to any member of the public, Murray saw to it that he was permitted to go home to spend his final years in the America of his birth. The Home Secretary at the time, the minister ultimately responsible for the asylum, was Winston Churchill, and he signed Minor's release papers in 1910. When the ailing old soldier sailed away home—with his elderly brother, who had been at the trial where he had first been sentenced 38 years before, to escort him back —he took with him as memento the first half-dozen completed volumes of the Dictionary to which he had made so immense— but in many senses unsung—a contribution. And in his later years, which he spent in yet more asylums and later in a hospital for the elderly insane, he told visitors that he could remember almost by heart what Murray had written of him, so warmly, some years before he left:
The supreme position … is certainly held by Dr. W. C. Minor of Broadmoor, who during the past two years has sent in no less [sic] 55 than 12,000 quots. These have nearly all been for the words with which Mr. Bradley and I were actually occupied, for Dr. Minor likes to know each month just what words we are likely to be working on during the month and to devote his whole strength to supplying quotations for those words, and thus to feel he is in touch with the making ofthe Dictionary.
So enormous have been Dr. Minor's contributions during the past 17 or 18 years, that we could easily illustrate the last 4 centuries from his quotations alone.
The phrase `to feel he is in touch with the making of the Dictionary' has a kindly feel to it—an illustration, I like to think, of the little-seen compassionate side of Murray's normally rather stern nature. By then the editor had been well aware of Minor's sad condition; he thought, in a generous way (and, as it happens, with perfect correctness), that Minor would be a happier man if he could know that he was involved, however peripherally, in so grand and noble a project. Murray thought that it would give him a sense of purpose, a source of joy in his otherwise ruined life that he was doomed to spend behind the high walls and iron bars—and tortured fantasies—of his unending imprisonment.
And there were many others besides, men and women who were in their own ways just as eccentric, their stories just as strange— though generally rather more cheerful than the sagas of Hall and Minor. In all the nooks and crannies of this project there lurked learned and remarkable people—those who were paid seem at this remove to have been every bit as unusual as those who did their work as reader volunteers. Consider, for example, the kind of mind that must have been possessed by one of the most tireless of Murray's editorial assistants, Frederick Sweatman.
Sweatman was the son of a printer, and had little by way of a formal education. He joined the Bodleian Library in 1888, when he was just fifteen; and two years later, once Murray had come up from Mill Hill to the Banbury Road, joined him working in the Scriptorium. He remained as a word-slave for the following 43 years, saw the Dictionary through to its completion, and then worked on the Supplement that eventually came out in 1933. He died in 1936.
That he must have been exceedingly bright is axiomatic: no one with a less than razor-sharp mind would have survived the intellectual rigours of working under Murray and Bradley (nor under their immediate successors, William Craigie and Charles Onions, for whom Sweatman was also an assistant). But a clue to his particularly unusual imagination came in the early 1900s, when he decided to write a playful definition of the word radium. 6
Pierre and Marie Curie had discovered this new radioactive element in 1898; its first mention as a linguistic entity was made in both Nature and Chemistry News the following January. By what some might think a coincidence, and others a piece of lexicographic good fortune, the newly appointed William Craigie was working on the section R-Reactive in 1902, within just three years of the word radium coming into existence. One might suppose Craigie would have swooped on the word—some volunteer reader would have uncovered the quotation (`These different reasons lead us to believe that the new radio-active substance contains a new element, to which we propose to give the name of radium'—because it emitted rays) and inserted it into the section, then into the part R and then the completed Volume VIII, Q-S.
But dictionaries do not respond so quickly. Craigie, like all his brother editors, was a cautious man. And James Murray, who by
1903 was sunk in a brown study pondering both Kaiser-Kyx and P-Pennached, would have agreed with his caution. Would the new word last? Was it merely a scientific arcanum, jargon for a specialized priesthood? Or would it in due time enter the language proper, become a true part of the English tongue? To determine that, said Craigie, with Murray's concurrence—wait a while. And just for now, leave it out.
Charles Onions