The Meaning of Everything

Prologue

The culminating celebrations of what was to be called `the greatest enterprise of its kind in history' took place in 1928— and on Wednesday 6 June of that year, the date when this majestic phrase was first spoken, in England it was Derby Day.

A great horse race on a sunny afternoon tends always to bring out the best in people, and it is probably fair to say that the concern of most in England that summer's day was not so much with historical enterprises, however great or small they might have been, but rather more prosaically with whether to `have a flutter'— whether to back the Epsom favourite, that morning a horse called Fairway, or whether to risk a tanner, a shilling, or half a crown on a rank outsider called Felstead, on whom the bookies were offering tempting odds of 40 to one.

The prosaic concerns of the people suggest the placid temper of the time. With Europe and the world beyond generally at peace and with a fair measure of prosperity all around, a good number of those living in the British Isles, where this story both begins and ends, do appear to have been in an appropriately summery and congenial mood that day. And the weather certainly helped: the forecasters in London recorded this first Wednesday in June as having been, after an early cool dew-crispness, both nicely sunny and shirtsleeve warm, the islands basking beneath an anticyclone anchored benevolently over the Western Approaches.

All England, it is probably fair to say, languished that day in the careless blue-skies rapture of early summer, with little but pleasure—the 148th running of the Derby foremost among them—on the nation's horizons. True, there were a few small smudges of cloud to spoil the idyll. There was an outbreak of smallpox in Wandsworth, and it seemed, rather ominously, to be spreading. A Romanian woman was arrested on the Old Kent Road for trying to evade paying duty on a consignment of watches and artificial silk handbags. And in central London, a needlewoman and a dispatch clerk—neither a trade that would be formally recognized today—were found dead in Hyde Park, with neck wounds suggesting that at least one of the pair had succumbed to what the newspapers darkly referred to as felo de se, the archaic legal phrase then much used by the polite for the indelicate crime of suicide.

But these trifling domestic disturbances aside, about the most surprising news of that June morning revealed that only two transatlantic telephone calls had thus far been placed from the entire city of Manchester during the first six months of the year. Not that interest in North American matters was by any means slight: many in England were captivated that summer by the news of Miss Amelia Earhart, a lady from Kansas who was waiting none too patiently at an aerodrome in Halifax, Nova Scotia, for a doggedly persistent bank of fog to clear away. When it finally did so, she was flown in a small aircraft across the ocean to an airfield near Cardiff in south Wales, a 3,000-mile journey that propelled her to fame as the first woman aviatrix—the word was brand new, having first appeared in a newspaper only nine months before—ever to make a crossing of the Atlantic. (If she had admirers in Manchester it may well have turned out—history does not record— that some of them telephoned the news of her arrival to friends far away, thereby reversing the city's curious and brief reputation for isolationism.)

If these were rather carefree and prosperous times, for very many they were also cultured and learned times besides. Since the story that follows concerns the crafting of a monumental intellectual enterprise, it is perhaps worth recalling just how very well educated people in fact were in those days—or at least to recall how very well educated the educated classes were, for this (like it or not) is a tale of a leisured undertaking that is necessarily and intimately involved with the complexities of British social stratification. The project whose completion was celebrated on this Derby Day was one that had taken much time and much learning—and many will say that it was undertaken, and completed, and duly celebrated, mainly because people, or people of a certain kind in the Britain of the day, were quite simply possessed of much time and much learning, and in far greater abundance than many like people possess it today.

Items from the newspapers of the time hint at the almost incidental, quite casual cleverness of the cleverest of the reading public. An illustration of the kind of thing appears that day in the `Telegrams in Brief ' section of The Times, in which it reports, without explanation or adornment, that:

Further hostilities are reported between the Zaranik tribe and the forces of the Zaidi Imam Yahya of Sana'. The Zaranik attacked a Zaidi detachment at Mansuria, near Hodeida, and have been plundering caravans trading with Sana'.

No further details are offered to suggest where all this fighting was (Yemen, one imagines), nor of the identities of the parties to the feud. The newspaper's editor presumes that readers, quite simply, had sufficient education to know.

And by and large, newspaper editors in London were probably right in making assumptions like these. The English establishment of the day may be rightly derided at this remove as having been class-ridden and imperialist, bombastic and blimpish, racist and insouciant—but it was marked undeniably also by a sweeping erudition and confidence, and it was peopled by men and women who felt they were able to know all, to understand much, and in consequence to radiate the wisdom of deep learning. It is worth pointing this out simply because it was such people—such remarkable, polymathic, cultured, fascinated, wise, and leisured people—who were primarily involved in the creation of the mighty endeavour that the following account celebrates.

On that idyllic and blissfully warm Derby Day evening, two magnificent social events were due to be staged, at the beating heart of the nation's social life. Up in London—it was always Up, except for those who lived in Oxford, who regarded going everywhere else as Going Down—Prince George's older brother, Edward, the very Prince of Wales who would in time become king and then abandon his throne for his love of a Baltimore divorcée— would preside that evening over one of them, the year's official Derby Ball held at the Mayfair Hotel.

This was a very grand dance indeed—a party that would attract only the great and the good, the nation's A list, men and women from the very finest of the county families all kitted out in the fullest of full fig, with all available medals and miniatures and sashes and Orders to be worn with flash and abandon, and with the unassailable wealth of the landed classes on shameless show. The Earl of Derby's great race (which, it turned out, the rank outsider Felstead did indeed win, to the amusement of the attending King and Queen, to the bookies' great chagrin, to some punters' great joy, and to the humiliation of a crestfallen Times racing correspondent, who had predicted quite otherwise) was the grandest fête staged each year for those able to afford what was still called `the sport of kings': those who attended the ball that followed the race whirled like stately dervishes until three, when dawn came up in all its brief midsummer eagerness.

But it was the other event of that Wednesday that more particularly concerns this story. It was a dinner, and it was as formal in its own way as the ball in Mayfair, except that it took place not among the fashionable demi-monde of the West End but in the more cerebrally active neighbourhood of the City of London. Specifically, it began at eight o'clock sharp, in Philip Hardwick's grand faux-Palladian palace just by St Paul's Cathedral, and known as the Goldsmiths' Hall.

On this very site those who worked in and with gold—for centuries known as members of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, the fifth most senior of the twelve original livery companies of London—had practised the mysteries of their craft since the fourteenth century. The hall was then employed, as it still is today, as the London Office of Assay, where precious metals are measured for their purity and value. Its grandest room is the Livery Hall, which seats 200 among pillars and portraits and beneath a vast array of chandeliers and tracery. And it was there, on 6 June 1928, that the company's Prime Warden, the renowned crystallographer Professor Sir William Jackson Pope, formally staged the celebration that both begins and ends this story.

It was a dinner for 150—all of them men, one feels slightly shamed to note today—each one of whom was monumentally distinguished in achievement and standing. If the Derby Ball attracted the nation's richest and most glittering, then the Goldsmiths' Hall that evening attracted the nation's brightest and most wise—a stellar gathering of intellect, rarely either assembled or able to be assembled since.

There were two bishops, three vice-chancellors, a dozen peers of the realm (including the Earls of Birkenhead, Elgin, Harrowby, and Crawford & Balcarres, the Viscount Devonport, the Lords Aldenham, Blanesburgh, Cecil, Percy, Queenborough, Wargrave, and Warrington of Clyffe), 27 knights of the realm (among them Sir Ernest Rutherford, splitter of atoms; Sir Arthur QuillerCouch, Cornishman and editor—under the pseudonym `Q'—of the then best-known of poetry anthologies; Sir Henry Newbolt, whose imperially minded, patriotically inspired poetry was known to every jingoist in the land; Sir Gerald Lenox-Conyngham, inventor, Triangulator and Surveyor of India, and first-ever Cambridge Reader in Geodesy; Sir Owen Seaman, the noted satirist, Punch editor and parodist who also `set great store by social activities, shot and swam well and had been Captain of Clare boats'; and Sir Charles Oman, who, despite being `in no sense a thinker', held the Chichele Chair in History at Oxford, was a worldrenowned numismatist, and wrote screeds of fascinations about Domesday Book).

As if these ennobled and honoured figures were not sufficient, there were also twenty professors (one of them, listed simply as J. R. Tolkien, would go on—with an additional initial R—to worldwide fame as the fantasist inventor of Hobbits and Gollum and the Lord of the Rings), any number of generals and colonels and half-colonels, as well as printers, headmasters, college presidents and deans and wardens in monstrous abundance. There were also eight of the capital's leading journalists. Those newspapermen on one side of the central table found themselves sitting sandwiched between Sir Archibald Garrod, the nation's leading authority on diseases of the joints, and a Great War historian (and biographer of Wellington) named C. R. M. F. Cruttwell. On the far side, their colleagues were book-ended by Brigadier-General Sir Harold Hartley, CBE, MC, FRS, a chemical engineer who in 1928 predicted that the world's population in 2000 would be three billion (it turned out in fact to become twice that), and by one F. S. Boas, an expert on Elizabethan manuscripts. One supposes the newspapermen probably talked mostly among themselves.

The diners were well looked after by the Goldsmiths: they feasted on caviar and smoked salmon, clear turtle soup, saddle of lamb or quail, Muscat salad, York ham, asparagus, chilled fruit mousse, and Italian biscuits. The wine list was fairly impressive too: the men began with a Vino de Pasto sherry, then took a 1917 Pommery & Greno champagne and a 1900 Grafenberg-Auslese hock, then a very much more popular wine than now; they next drank a 1907 Chateau Margaux with their lamb (or a Grand Musigny of 1911 if they preferred the quail); and they finished with either Fine Old East India Madeira or, carefully decanted by the Livery Hall footmen, an 1896 Crofts port.

And it was with one of these two latter ancient and fortified wines that the diners were to raise their glasses for the toasts—for indeed, it was the toasts, rather than the dinner, for which they were all attending.

There were four of them. The first two were formalities only— toastmasters appeared from behind the arras to propose that the Church and His Majesty the King be offered the salutations of the assembled, and in short order thereafter similar good wishes were offered to Her Majesty the Queen, the Prince of Wales (by then presumably dancing his Derby evening away a mile away at the Mayfair Hotel), and the other members of the royal family. It was then announced that, royalty having been suitably recognized, those who wished might now smoke.

And then, as glasses were clinked, cigars were lit and lucifers put away, chairs pushed back from the long tables, and a hush was demanded, so from the centre of the high table rose the slightly less than commanding figure of the celebration dinner's most celebrated guest, the Right Honourable Stanley Baldwin, PC, MP, the nation's three-term Conservative Prime Minister.

Perhaps no political leader or statesman in British history could have been better suited to the task that lay at hand. Baldwin, the calm, taciturn, steady, unadventurous, pipe-smoking son of a Worcestershire ironmaster, a figure of elaborated ordinariness— and a cousin of Rudyard Kipling—was both extraordinarily wellread (though his history degree from Cambridge was modest) and inextinguishably proud of being a sturdily provincial Englishman. `I speak', he once wrote, `not as the man in the street, but as the man in the field-path, a much simpler person, steeped in tradition and impervious to new ideas.'

A colleague assessed Baldwin rather more acutely, in writing specifically of how this then 61-year-old politician saw his role as the nation's elected leader.

Above all he must be patriotic; a lover of his fellow-countrymen, of his country's history, of its institutions, its ancient monarchy, its great parliamentary traditions, its fairness, its tolerance.

All these things were innate in his own disposition. But he steeped himself in them, as the part which it was his duty to play as Prime Minister, and they became more deeply ingrained in consequence.

It was thus in part Stanley Baldwin the actor—a man whose radio-ideal voice was said to be `delightfully modulated' and who was known for taking the greatest of care in selecting the words he spoke—who rose before his quietening audience. He was to deliver a speech which, if by no means the most important of his long career, must surely have been one of the most pleasurable, both to utter and to hear. He was there for no less a task than to propose a formal Toast of Gratitude and Admiration to the Editors and Staff of what was to be formally and unforgettably called The Oxford English Dictionary—for the twelve mighty tombstone-sized volumes were now, and after 70 long years of terrible labour, fully and finally complete. The first two sets had been made and formally presented: one had gone to King George V, the other to the American President, Calvin Coolidge. Downing Street had been obliged to purchase its own official set for Mr Baldwin—and rarely, he later said, did a day go by when he did not consult it.

In 15,490 pages of single-spaced printed text, and at long, long last, all 414,825 words that the then Editor-in-Chief, Professor Sir William Craigie—this Derby Day newly knighted, and newly blessed with an honorary degree (which Oxford had bestowed on him the day before) and now positively beaming with pride from his place to the Prime Minister's left—all the words which Sir William and his colleagues had amassed and catalogued and listed and annotated and which were thus far in their sum reckoned to make up all that was then known of the English language, had now been fully and properly defined, their preferred and variant and obsolete spellings all listed, their etymologies all recorded, their pronunciations suggested, required, or demanded.

There were in addition no fewer than 1,827,306 illustrative quotations listed—selected from five million offered by thousands of volunteer readers and literary woolgatherers—that showed just how and when the uses and senses and meanings of all of these words had begun and evolved and then, in the nature of the English language, had steadily and ineluctably reshaped and reworked themselves. These were essential: the millions of words from these quotations offer up countless examples of exactly how the language worked over the centuries of its employment, and by their use they mark the OED out as the finest dictionary ever made in any language, and made, as it happens, of the language that is the most important in the world, and probably will be for all time.

And the work that was unveiled during that glittering Goldsmiths' summer evening was not simply magnificent in its unrelenting scholarship: it was almost unbelievably big—fat, heavy, shelf-bendingly huge—as a monument to the labour of those who fashioned it. A total of 227,779,589 letters and numbers, occupying fully 178 miles of type, had over the 70 years just now ended been corralled into place between the thick blue or red morocco covers of the first editions of this unanswerably monumental book.

Dr Craigie and his staff—and the memories of many who had not lived to see their project finished, not the least of these being the great James Murray and Henry Bradley, whose names will deservedly be rather more intimately connected than is Craigie's with the making of the Dictionary—were all there to bask in their rightly earned glory, and to accept the gratitude of a grateful nation. And Mr Baldwin, more fully aware than most of the special significance of his task, rose to the occasion with an eloquence quite suited to the moment. It was a long speech—though read today, so many decades after its delivery, it seems fresh and interesting and not at all tedious—and there is much to savour in it. Most of all, its closing paragraphs.

Lord Oxford once said that if he were cast on a desert island, and could only choose one author for company, he would have the forty volumes of Balzac.

I choose the Dictionary every time. Like Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones, I should pray for the four winds to breathe upon those words, that they might emerge and stand upon their feet an exceeding great army. Our histories, our novels, our poems, our plays—they are all in this one book. I could live with your Dictionary, Dr Craigie. I choose it, and I think that my choice would be justified. It is a work of endless fascination. It is true that I have not read it—perhaps I never shall—but that does not mean that I do not often go to it.

Let me remind you of those words which Dr Johnson used in his famous Preface about translators in his time, and which I think are apt today: `If the changes that we fear be thus irresistible ¼ it remains that we retard what we cannot repel; that we palliate what we cannot cure. Life may be lengthened by care, though death cannot be ultimately defeated; tongues, like Governments, have a natural tendency to degeneration; we have long preserved our constitution; let us make some struggle for our language.'

It is in that great spirit of devotion to our language as the great and noble instrument of our national life and literature that the editors and the staff of the Oxford Dictionary have laboured. They have laboured so well that, so far from lowering the standard with which the work began, they have sought to raise it as the work advanced. They have given us of their best. There can be no worldly recompense—except that every man and woman in this country whose gratitude and respect is worth having, will rise up and call you blessed for this great work. The Oxford English Dictionary is the greatest enterprise of its kind in history.

And all that was most suitably and appositely said by the Prime Minister on what the newspapers reported the following morning had been, for a thousand other reasons too, one of the happiest of Derby Days of all time. It was the conclusion of a story that properly began on a chill and foggy winter's evening almost 71 years before: the story that is told in the pages that follow.