Murray’s successors

After Murray’s death in 1915, his co-editors Henry Bradley, W. A. Craigie, and C. T. Onions continued to work on the project. Information about this stage in the Dictionary can be found in Brewer 2007b. Here below they are photographed at work at a desk (the same desk, in fact! as you can tell from the other features in the back- and foreground; the desk paraphernalia has simply been moved around between shots). Bradley appears to be looking through slips; Craigie is annotating slips, perhaps taken from the wicker basket placed at the edge of the desk in front of him; Onions looks directly at the camera. His hands are folded, but he has been working on slips: a bottle marked ‘OFFICE PASTE’ is visible to his left, indicating that he has been cutting up and pasting material which presumably relates to the individual slips scattered about in front of him. (On the curled up reverse side of one of these slips is closely written or printed material which may have been cut out from a book. In the early days of quotation gathering, readers would save time by cutting out quotations from books and pasting the scraps on to slips, not by copying them our laboriously by hand). Also in front of Onions is a partially damaged pine cone, whose significance remains mysterious…

This is the only portrait photo of Onions that survives at the Press and his relative youth tempts one to think that these photos were taken soon after Murray’s death, making Bradley around 70, Craigie 48, and Onions himself 42.

Henry Bradley

W. A. Craigie

C. T. Onions

Last updated on 29 January 2019