Education
Born in Bradford, West Riding of Yorkshire, he attended Grange Grammar School and obtained a scholarship to study at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
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Stanley Ellis
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His studies were interrupted by World World War II, during which he was a navigator in the Royal Air Force. After national service, part of which was spent in India, he read English at Leeds University, with a master"s thesis on the Lincolnshire dialect. He worked as principal researcher under Harold Orton on the four volume Survey of English Dialects. 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, and in June 1979, he correctly identified that a tape released by police that purported to be from the Yorkshire Ripper was by a hoaxer (nicknamed Wearside Jack 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. After taking early retirement from his university post, Ellis continued to provided linguistic expertise as an expert witness in court cases.
From the 1980s, he presented a series of programmes on dialect for British Broadcasting Corporation Radio 4, 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.
He was awarded honorary life membership of the International Association for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics in 2004.
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Born
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Died
October 31, 2009 (aged 83) -
Nationality
English