Stanley Ellis (18 February 1926 in Bradford,

West Riding of Yorkshire The West Riding of Yorkshire is one of three historic subdivisions of Yorkshire, England. From 1889 to 1974 the administrative county County of York, West Riding (the area under the control of West Riding County Council), abbreviated County ...

– 31 October 2009 in

Harrogate Harrogate ( ) is a spa town and the administrative centre of the Borough of Harrogate in North Yorkshire, England. Historically in the West Riding of Yorkshire, the town is a tourist destination and its visitor attractions include its spa w ...

) was an English

linguistics Linguistics is the science, scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure ...

scholar and broadcaster, and an authority on English regional dialects. Born in Bradford,

, he attended Grange Grammar School and obtained a scholarship to study at Corpus Christi College,

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a College town, university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cam ...

. His studies were interrupted by

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...

, during which he was a navigator in the

RAF The Royal Air Force (RAF) is the United Kingdom's air and space force. It was formed towards the end of the First World War on 1 April 1918, becoming the first independent air force in the world, by regrouping the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) and ...

. After

national service National service is the system of voluntary government service, usually military service. Conscription is mandatory national service. The term ''national service'' comes from the United Kingdom's National Service (Armed Forces) Act 1939. The ...

, part of which was spent in

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...

, he read English at

Leeds University , mottoeng = And knowledge will be increased , established = 1831 – Leeds School of Medicine1874 – Yorkshire College of Science1884 - Yorkshire College1887 – affiliated to the federal Victoria University1904 – University of Leeds , ...

, with a master's thesis on the

Lincolnshire Lincolnshire (abbreviated Lincs.) is a Counties of England, county in the East Midlands of England, with a long coastline on the North Sea to the east. It borders Norfolk to the south-east, Cambridgeshire to the south, Rutland to the south-we ...

dialect. He worked as principal researcher under

Harold Orton Harold Orton (23 October 1898 – 7 March 1975) was a British dialectologist and professor of English Language and Medieval Literature at the University of Leeds. Early life Orton was born in Byers Green, County Durham, on 23 October 1898 and w ...

on the four volume ''

Survey of English Dialects The Survey of English Dialects was undertaken between 1950 and 1961 under the direction of Professor Harold Orton of the English department of the University of Leeds. It aimed to collect the full range of speech in England and Wales before loc ...

''. Ellis performed much of the field work this entailed, and many of his recordings and interviews are housed in the Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture. He went on to be a lecturer and senior lecturer in the School of English at Leeds. He was the first person to provide expert evidence for speaker identification in an English court,Jack Windsor Lewis
Obituary: Stanley Ellis
''The Guardian'', 13 November 2009 and in June 1979, he correctly identified that a tape released by police that purported to be from the

Yorkshire Ripper Peter William Sutcliffe (2 June 1946 – 13 November 2020) was an English serial killer who was dubbed the Yorkshire Ripper (an allusion to Jack the Ripper) by the press. Sutcliffe was convicted of murdering 13 women and attempting t ...

was by a hoaxer (nicknamed

Wearside Jack Wearside Jack is the nickname given to John Samuel Humble (8 January 1956 – 30 July 2019), a British man who pretended to be the Yorkshire Ripper in a hoax audio recording and several letters during the period 1978–1979. Humble sent a tape ...

by the press), as the accent was that of someone from an area a significant distance from the crime scene. However, the police disregarded his warning. The hoaxer was finally identified in 2006, and shown to have lived his life in the region Ellis had identified. His colleague on the case and in university, Jack Windsor Lewis, said in November 2012 that Ellis had located the speaker to the Wearside area by comparing his speech with that of a recording made whilst studying the dialect of

Washington Washington commonly refers to: * Washington (state), United States * Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States ** A metonym for the federal government of the United States ** Washington metropolitan area, the metropolitan area centered o ...

, but dismissed the reports that Ellis located him as precisely as Castletown. After taking early retirement from his university post, Ellis continued to provide linguistic expertise as an expert witness in court cases. From the 1980s, he presented a series of programmes on dialect for

BBC Radio 4 BBC Radio 4 is a British national radio station owned and operated by the BBC that replaced the BBC Home Service in 1967. It broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes, including news, drama, comedy, science and history from the BBC' ...

, entitled "Take a Place Like ..." and "Talk of the Town, Talk of the Country", and later was a host of radio phone-ins, discussing dialect and origins of names and placenames with callers, as well as contributing to programmes such as ''The Routes of English''.BBC – Radio 4 – Routes of English
/ref> In ''Talking for Britain: A Journey Through the Nation's Dialects'' (2005), Simon Elmes paid tribute to Ellis: 'Stanley's deep linguistic wisdom and his love of the British landscape – the people who live in it and who describe it in their talk – inspired me to pursue my own long fascination' (p. x). He was awarded honorary life membership of the International Association for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics in 2004.

References

External links

– Daily Telegraph obituary {{DEFAULTSORT:Ellis, Stanley 1926 births 2009 deaths Academics of the University of Leeds Alumni of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge Alumni of the University of Leeds British radio presenters English broadcasters Linguists from England Writers from Bradford Royal Air Force personnel of World War II