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  • In Memoriam:Mary Brennan, 1944–2005
  • George Montgomery

Mary Brennan loved the study of language and had a rare gift of sharing this with her students throughout an unusually varied and fruitful career. A talented academic lecturer, her well-modulated eloquence developed easily from the warm Tyneside Irish brogue of her childhood. Language always came naturally to her and she never acknowledged any influence from growing up a few miles from the ancient church of St. Bede, who recorded the first European signs and a one-hand finger alphabet there in the year AD 710.

Her introduction to academic life was via matriculation to the English and philosophy B.A. course at Newcastle University. She then acquired an M.A. degree in English language and linguistics before going overseas to Germany to teach English and linguistics at Cologne University.

Returning to the United Kingdom, she accepted a post in the English department of Moray House College of Education, now part of Edinburgh University. At this time I was a lecturer in the university's psychology department contributing to the training course for teachers of the Deaf run by Morag Turner and Tom McLaren and we agreed that Mary could add a valuable input of the (then quite recent) study of linguistics. This was at the time of the virtually universal oralist teaching in schools for the Deaf and the new course at Moray House breached the stultifying monopoly of the Manchester oralists on teacher training. But opposition to the ban on teaching by sign was growing. Mary soon became a member and contributor to the Scottish workshop with the deaf, participated in regular in- service courses on psychology and assessment for educational and clinical psychologists and in my first U.K. university course in Deaf studies apart from the exclusively oralist travesty of teacher training [End Page 525] in Manchester University. This was not a safe career move at that time of a well-entrenched and vindictive oralist establishment. Although careful of her academic credibility, Mary found herself addressing various protest groups and often shared a platform with "vociferous activists" like Paddy Ladd and myself.

Throughout this time, the pro-sign group was steadily encouraged by Alan Hayhurst of the British Deaf Association. Alan regularly published supplements and persuaded Mary to write "Can Deaf Children Acquire Language?" This, her first essay into the Deaf world was well received and later published in the British Deaf Association's 1976 collection of supplements and in the American Annals of the Deaf. It launched a career in sign language research that was given fresh impetus when she met William Stokoe at the Scottish workshops and at sign seminars at Newcastle and Bristol.

Early research work in Scotland with Martin Colville, Lillian Lawson, and Gerry Hughes resulted in the publication Words in Hand, often used as a sign dictionary although it was in fact a structural analysis of British Sign Language (BSL) with each sign meticulously recorded in the Stokoe notation. The influence of this book on the gradually changing communication scene in U.K. schools for the Deaf is hard to exaggerate.

Mary returned to England in 1987 to found a Deaf studies research unit with David Brien at Durham University. Together they built a team which taught a master's degree course for d/Deaf and h/Hearing students. At this time Mary reinforced her teaching by steady application to research and publication in sign linguistics focused on BSL. Often uncompromisingly theoretical and academic, at this point in her career she showed she was also effective in applied linguistics in a number of studies on interpretation and access to justice for Deaf people.

The latter part of her career was exclusively dedicated to sign linguistics and she was awarded a doctorate in this subject at the University of Stockholm in 1990, when she returned to Moray House as Reader in Deaf Studies. Despite living with cancer, Mary became usefully involved in a welter of local commitments in, amongst others, the Scottish Sensory Centre, training of teachers of the Deaf, [End Page 526] supporting Deaf students of higher education, multimedia curriculum support for Deaf children and on the education committee of Donaldson's...

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