Peter Terrell

I first met Iseabail about a year before this photo was taken, when she had invited me to a job interview at St James’ Place in London. That was in April 1972. I remember how she put me at my ease with her introductory words ‘no need to be petrified’. In fact I thought she was more nervous than me during the interview, but later came to realize that that was her nervous energy bubbling away below the surface. After a later trial day in the Collins office on Cathedral Street in Glasgow Iseabail offered me a job and had me flown back down south. Iseabail was my saviour and had taken me away from the temporary world of English language teaching.

Iseabail, I soon realized, was in the process of building a dictionary department. Some people were already there, at the office on Cathedral Street. Richard Thomas, later to become Collins Reference MD, is on the far right in the photo, standing next to Carole Purdon, editorial assistant; Pierre-Henri Cousin from Switzerland, dictionary editor extraordinaire, later to be head of dictionaries at Larousse in Paris, is on the far left. The other two, Anthony and Margaret, were taken on to do work on the Collins-Robert French dictionary, which was in full flow when I, third from the left in the photo, arrived initially to do editorial work on a new English learner’s dictionary, under Iseabail’s guidance, then later, for a full 8 years to work as editor-in-chief on the companion to the Collins-Robert French dictionary, a dictionary of German and English.

Days with Iseabail were eventful. After a few months at Collins on Cathedral Street, Iseabail took me on an editorial trip to London for meetings with the elusive editor of a Yoruba Gem dictionary that was being compiled at the time. This editor was an African chief, who had an office at SOAS. He was an immensely affable and welcoming man, when you finally got to meet him, but had an amazing gift for avoiding an answer to any question that required him to outline some sort of time schedule. During this eye-opening trip I enjoyed, with Iseabail, my first, and (to date) only lunch at Rules. This showed me a different Iseabail. ‘Well’, she said, ‘we don’t often get the chance to come down here, so we might as well enjoy it.’ She obviously had a very generous expense account, and knew how to use it.

The contrast between all this in London and the ramshackle old ruin of a building at the back of Cathedral Street, into which the main dictionary cohort had temporarily moved (Parson Street), was enormous.

I remember dinner parties at Iseabail’s flat on Rosslyn Terrace. The food was excellent, a delight for a solitary newcomer in town. I remember being invited by Iseabail to go along with her and another Yoruba dictionary editor on a Sunday drive out over the Duke’s Pass into the Trossachs. And I remember driving the car back myself, since it has to be said, that dear Iseabail’s driving was making our guest just a little nervous. I remember how Iseabail would often enquire about my social life: was I not too much on my own, why did I not join some clubs, get out and about a bit more. I had never had an employer before who took this sort of interest.

For the first few months of my time in the office on Cathedral Street, when the French dictionary ruled the roost, I was left to edit through the text of the new English Learner’s dictionary. There would be regular editorial sessions with Iseabail, when she would go over what I was doing, and the two of us would sit together and discuss, and finalize, various editorial and lexicographical points. I learnt a lot from this. Iseabail also gave me some responsibilities on the fledging German dictionary, mainly dealing with a small number of freelance editors. Two occasions stand out in my memory. On one occasion I had made an agreement with someone on the telephone, which I realized, as soon as I put the phone down, would be simply impossible to uphold. I don’t recall the details, but what I do recall is that I immediately explained my mistake to Iseabail and that she picked up the phone straight away and smoothly, calmly and with great diplomacy put things right. Another occasion was when Iseabail had asked me to read and comment on some sections of a pretty early typescript of the German dictionary. There was a meeting on Cathedral Street with some of the freelancers to discuss this and I, naively treating this as an academic exercise, tore into my comments, which caused one of the freelancers to explode ‘Do we have to listen to this from this new boy?’ That threw me. I was in a different world. ‘No,’ said Iseabail quite calmly. ‘Let him carry on.’

But mostly, over and above these people skills and management firmness, what I remember is that for Iseabail there was a deeper motivation. She was genuinely motivated by the object of the operation of carrying out a deep and wide-ranging analysis of languages in order to create a new approach to bilingual lexicography. This was something that all the people that she took on in that office shared and was a characteristic that she was able to detect in people. The first in the series of big bilingual dictionaries, the Collins English Spanish dictionary had, as far as I am aware, come from the work of academics working in their own professional environments. The French, under Iseabail’s leadership, started a new methodology: it had its external academics but also full-time employed freelancers and in-house staff. The German continued this shift, which Iseabail had set in motion, by setting up a full in-house team of dictionary editors, working on bilingual dictionary compilation as a full-time job. This was a major, though gradual, change in the modus operandi, putting Collins on a par with the then other big dictionary publishers, Oxford University Press and Chambers. Iseabail had left Collins by the time this work on the German was in full swing, but it was all a logical development of the editorial processes that she had set in motion brought about by the people that she had picked out to do the work she envisaged.