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.