Richard Allsopp enjoyed one of the most significant
academic and intellectual careers in the Commonwealth Caribbean. He was the
leading lexicographer of the English spoken and written in the region and edited
the Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage. Though ill for a number of years he
managed to finish a supplement which is due for publication soon.
He was born Stanley Reginald Richard Allsopp in 1923,
in Georgetown, British Guiana, the eldest of four boys. One brother died in
adolescence, the others had long and distinguished careers in public service. He
won a scholarship to the leading boys’ school, Queen’s College, in 1936.
This began a long relationship with the school, for
he taught there before and after he left to do a degree in England and he became
its acting headmaster. There too he met Forbes Burnham, later Prime Minister,
then President, of an independent Guyana. Burnham would best Allsopp in the
competition for the most prestigious scholarship in 1942.
The region in the 1930s was experiencing political
unrest: the Depression had, as with other agricultural economies, started in the
1920s and by the mid-1930s was leading to strikes. The demand for
self-government and a federation of the British West Indian territories grew.
The intellectual influences were also becoming more favourable to
nationalism.
In the first two decades of the 20th century two
works had been published locally on English and Creole in British Guiana. Norman
E. Cameron, who taught at Queen’s College and was still there when Allsopp
became a permanent member of staff, published his Evolution of the Negro (1929
and 1934) examining the African background to the history of British Guiana. A.
R. F. Webber published his history of British Guiana in 1931, and West Indians
were beginning to publish their writings not only in a growing number of local
magazines but also abroad.
Claude McKay from Jamaica, C. L. R. James and Alfred
Mendes from Trinidad would all have novels published abroad. From British
Guiana, Edgar Mittleholzer would publish his first novel Corentyne Thunder in
1941. Allsopp belonged to a generation shaped and inspired to greater confidence
by these events.
After briefly teaching at Queen’s College before
going to England to take a degree in French at the University of London he
returned to teach there and was also an extramural teacher for the newly founded
University College of the West Indies. At Queen’s he was known for his exacting
style of teaching. His great ability meant that in 1962, when the last British
principal left, he took over the school. Unfortunately, by then British Guiana
had descended into a period of violence and unrest, caused by local political
rivalries and abetted by outside influences. The ethnic tensions invaded even
the school, and the traumas of this period remained with Allsopp as with most
Guyanese who had experienced it.
He was relieved to take up an appointment with the
University of the West Indies as it had become and could not, a few years later,
be tempted by Burnham’s offer to head the University of Guyana, even though
several of his Queen’s colleagues had moved there.
Joining the newly established Barbados campus of the
University of the West Indies in 1963 as its first lecturer in English, Allsopp
was influential in its development, serving as vice-dean and chairing the
division of Survey Courses and Social Sciences. The most significant of its
survey courses was Use of English, which introduced students on both the other
campuses, in Jamaica and Trinidad, to the varieties of Standard English and
Creoles of the West Indies. He became the first public orator of the campus and
served on its council and senate. In 1971 he started his Caribbean Lexicography
Project. By the time he retired he was Reader but was then appointed to an
honorary chair and later honoured with a doctor of letters degree.
The seeds of this project lay in a translation from
French when he was an undergraduate. Allsopp’s “the rain held up” instead of “it
stopped raining” met with no approval from either the lecturer or his fellow
students. When he began to teach French on his return to his old school he
started to collect evidence of the differences between Standard English and
Standard Guianese English to help his pupils. This began his shift from French
to English. He published his first articles on the topic in the new local
literary journal Kyk-Over-Al, founded and edited by the poet A. J.Seymour. His
new interest in language led to further academic work in linguistics: in 1958 he
received a distinction for his London MA dissertation; in 1959 he attended the
first International Conference on Creole languages at the University of the West
Indies in Jamaica and received a PhD from the University of London in 1962. All
this had been accomplished while he taught full-time.
Ambitious plans to produce a West Indian version of
F. G. Cassidy and R. B. LePage’s Dictionary of Jamaican English (1967) which was
based on historical principles, soon disappeared as impracticable. The decision
was made to concentrate on contemporary usage. The project, however, was
directed not at the Creoles of the West Indies (basilects) but the most
prestigious forms of English (acrolect) and the variety intermediate between
that and Creole (mesolect).
What it did share in common with the Creole
specialists was a recognition that much in the way of grammar and syntax had
been inherited from Africa. It was intended to be useful in education at all
levels. The collection of data involved workshops in most of the territories and
was expensive. The Government of Guyana provided US$100,000 from 1975 when it
seemed that the project would founder. Even Allsopp despaired of its ever being
finished. Fortunately, with the support of colleagues and his third wife,
Jeannette, who contributed a supplement on the French and Spanish names of flora
and fauna, it was finally published in 1996.
A supplement, Allsopp’s last academic work, will soon
appear. In 2004 he published A Book of Afric Caribbean Proverbs. The
Lexicography Project continues under the direction of Jeannette and the French
and Spanish supplements continue to appear.
Having contributed much to Caribbean intellectual
life Allsopp was honoured by the Barbados Government and received the Guyana
Literary Prize and a doctorate of letters from the University of the West
Indies.
He is survived by his wife, Jeannette, and his four
children.
Richard Allsopp, lexicographer and teacher, was born
on January 23, 1923. He died on June 3, 2009, aged 86
