Walter E. Haigh, Author of A New Glossary of the Huddersfield Dialect

In 1928, J.R.R. Tolkien published a six-page Foreword to A New Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District, written by Walter Edward Haigh, a long-time resident of that area. This dialect was of great interest to Tolkien as a philologist, since it comes from an area where the speech of the North and of the western Midlands overlap, and bears the linguistic marks of invasions from the Scandinavian countries, the fourteenth-century revival of Anglo-Saxon literature, and the Norman conquest. Tolkien is full of praise for the wide range of the glossary, its inclusion of both rare and common words, and the "excellence, humour, and idiomatic raciness of its illustrative quotations" (xiv). He surely must have nodded in agreement with Haigh's own unequivocal statement that a local dialect "is as worthy of our care and pride as are our ancient buildings, and more than as intimately useful," and his encouragement of bilingualism in standard English and one's ancestral dialect (Glossary viii).

Huddersfield, located in West Yorkshire, is a fairly young town born during the Industrial Revolution out of a cluster of older, smaller villages. In 1890, its population was over 90,000, and it was considered one of the wealthier cities in the country, being a center for the engineering, brewing, cotton, and wool industries (Jackson and Marsden 18). Tolkien considers the dialect preserved in this glossary to be rather "conservative," retaining elements long abandoned in other regions, because of its isolation "out of the main way of such traffic as there was" before this time (xvii).

Walter Haigh was born in 1856, sometime in the April-June quarter (Anderson), and brought up in what he described as "the geographical basin, measuring some ten to fifteen miles across, which lies in the south-west corner of the West Riding, close under the main ridges of the Pennines" (Glossary vii). He married fairly late in life, in the third quarter of 1905 (Anderson). Haigh was and is a common surname in the town of Huddersfield, which is located in the north-west portion of this basin. Haigh was Head of the English and History Department of the Huddersfield Technical College (which is still in existence) from 1890 through 1918, and was Emeritus Lecturer in English there until his death in 1931. The Technical College grew out of the earlier Young Men's Improvement Society (founded 1841) and Huddersfield Mechanics' Institute (1843), taking its current name in 1896, and concentrated on courses of instruction useful to the industry of the town, with the object of encouraging the trained graduates to stay in Huddersfield (Jackson and Marsden 21; Brook 203). At various times Haigh taught English, English literature, English history 1558-1714, and possibly Latin and commercial geography. His department also taught modern history and English literature, elocution, and composition for the young ladies who were "domestic economy students" (Morgan). The department Haigh headed was expected primarily to train teachers, which the college did from 1904 to 1920, and help any students going to university to pass their examinations (O'Connell).¹

Haigh's first book, An Analytical Outline of English History, was published by Oxford University Press in 1917, shortly before his retirement. Designed for use in school examinations, the book aims to "teach clearly the evolutionary character of English history" (Outline v), focusing on connections between events. To that end the book is laid out, as the title suggests, as an analytical outline, with brief paragraphs about key events, trends, and concepts. The book was successful enough that there was a second printing in 1929. Haigh was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Historical Society in October 1912 and remained a member until his death in 1931. He was obviously proud of this honor, which entitled him to use the initials F.R.H.S. after his name on the title page of his books and on his tombstone. Applicants to the F.R.H.S. must prove "an original contribution to historical scholarship in the form of significant published work," but the...