Finally, but not until 1914, he got what he really wanted. He and Bradley were awarded the degree of D.Litt honoris causa by Oxford University itself. Ada opened the post that morning and simply said what the entire family and all of Murray's friends had been feeling ever since the great dinner of 1897: `At last!'
And all this for a draper's son from the Borders, who left school at fourteen and went off to work in a bank.
But the dinner that night had been to honour the Dictionary, and in truth not the one figure who was already most closely associated with it. The man from The Times summed up the event nicely for his readers the next morning. The production of the Dictionary which the dinner had cause to celebrate was, he wrote,
the greatest effort which any University, it may be any printing press, has taken in hand since the invention of printing. A University Press … might be defined as one which exists, partly at all events, for the production of unremunerative works which, however, will tend to the benefit of posterity and enrich the language and the literature of the country. An exhaustive dictionary … was a labour which was beyond the scope of private enterprise. It will not be the least of the glories of the University of Oxford to have completed this gigantic task.
Man proposes, but God disposes. Even with the finishing line in sight, so the runners began to fall.
Fitzedward Hall was the first of the great men to go. He had worked for twenty years, for four hours every day at least, writing from his East Anglian cottage until almost the day he died, 1 February 1901. He had not wanted to attend the great dinner; he had fallen ill fairly soon thereafter, prompting Murray to depart briefly from his usual formality: instead of ending his letter to Hall with his customary `Yours truly', he instead wrote `Yours very affectionately', and told Hall that he had in recent years looked upon him almost as a senior relative of his own. Hall was one of the firmest opponents of the efforts of men like Jowett and Furnivall as they tried to prompt Murray to lower his standards and to produce more pages more frequently: Hall's support to Murray was irreplaceable, and we all today owe the curiously embittered hermit as great a debt as Murray did.
Henry Hucks Gibbs, without whose solicitous influence, soothing balms—and, quite frankly, his money—the project might well have foundered, died in 1907. Fred Elworthy, who had helped Murray with West Country dialect, died a few weeks later. Walter Skeat went in 1912, Murray's friend Edward Arber was knocked down soon afterwards by a Birmingham taxi, and Robinson Ellis, a great classical scholar, translator of Catullus and a climbing friend and close adviser as well, dropped dead in 1913.
Some weeks before, Ellis had given his final lecture, on Ovid, in the Hall of Trinity College. He was lame and nearly blind, and had to be led in by a younger don who would read his lecture for him. `How many have come?' the old man enquired. The Hall, he was told, was all but empty. `No matter,' said Ellis. `I just thought perhaps Dr. Murray might come.' And of course, he had. Of the seven persons present in the Hall that day, James Murray was one, constant to his friend, who many say died more happily as a consequence, just a few days later.
`Thus one by one they pass away,' Murray told an audience at the Philological Society. `Who is to be the next?'
Of all the deaths, that of Frederick Furnivall on 2 July 1910 was perhaps the most keenly felt. Late in 1909 he had told Murray he was ill—an `internal tumour', he called it—and thought he had six months left in him. He congratulated Murray in the same letter for his definition of the phrase tallow ketch, 4 but went on to mourn how `our Dict. Men go gradually, & I am next. … I wanted to see the Dict. before I die. But it is not to be. However, the completion of the work is certain. So that's all right.' Murray tried to cheer him up, and in a way that both men knew might work: `Would it give you any satisfaction to see the gigantic TAKE in final, before it is too late?'
Cheered or not, Furnivall died peacefully where he had lived and worked, in Primrose Hill, and was cremated in north London. Around the catafalque, said his biographer,
were representatives from the many educational and learned bodies with which he had been connected, including the London Shakespeare League, the Oxford University Press, the English Association, the Board of Education, the Oxford English Dictionary, students, friends, and associates from the British Museum, the New Oxford Street A.B.C. teashop and the London Men's Working College; and a group of young people from the Furnivall Sculling Club at Hammersmith.
He had last been seen sculling three years before: he had done fourteen miles on the day in question, and he had been 82 years old.
And then before too much longer, to universal dismay and lamentation, it was the turn of James Murray himself.
As late as 1914 he was saying publicly that he still hoped to see the Dictionary through to its completion. For most of the previous years he, Bradley, and Craigie published their monthly page totals, to see who was the fastest—and Murray invariably won, month after month, year after year. 5 When Furnivall died Murray was well into the letter T, and with Craigie now a full editor (he had been designated such in 1901) and with Onions similarly exalted since 1914, and with Bradley steaming away at full tilt, there seemed at least a possibility of a swift end to the enterprise: only sixletters to go, and Murray not yet 80 years old. Perhaps he could manage the grand Victorian conjunction he long imagined—his golden wedding anniversary, his four-score birthday, and the finishing of the OED.
The Regius Professor of Medicine, Sir William Osler, once spotted the elderly Murray tricycling his way through town, his long white beard blowing in the wind, and remarked to his companion: `The University pays me my salary to keep that old man alive until his 80th birthday in 1917, when his dictionary will be finished.'
But neither came to pass. James Murray succumbed to cancer of the prostate, and though he bore nobly the fantastic burning pain of the X-rays that in those days were used to treat the ailment, he knew he was fighting a losing battle. He continued to work on the letter T until the very end: 6 there is a photograph of him in the Scriptorium taken on 10 July 1915, his daughters Elsie and Rosfrith to his left and right, and behind him three assistants—a bearded Arthur Maling, wearing his Esperanto star; Frederick Sweatman of possible radium fame; and the littleknown F. A. Yockney, a member of the team since 1905.
James Murray with daughters
It was Murray's final day in the little iron room. The following Monday he contracted pleurisy, and on 26 July, he died. Popular legend has it that he was working on the word turn-down at the end—and certainly this is the last section (Trink-Turn-down) known to be edited by him. But his name also appears on the next section, Turndun-Tzirid, and a note from Bradley states that `eighty-four columns of this section were already in type' at the time James Murray died.
The last word of the 84th column of this section happens to be twentieth. Though there is a presentiment of sleep about the word turn-down, 7 which some might find apposite for a dying man, I like to think that the word that defined the century in which his great work would be published was, in fact, the one for which he would most like to be have been known. He was a nineteenth-century man, and yet the author of what was to be very memorably a twentieth-century achievement.