William Payne (1827–1901), who latterly lived at Hatchlands in Broad Street, Cuckfield made a significant contribution to the Oxford English Dictionary while living in the village. William was credited with sending in 20,000 quotations, mostly from pre-1600 sources, in 1901.

This post is based on an item kindly sent to Cuckfield Connections by Peter Gilliver from his website ’The Makers of the OED': https://themakersoftheoed.wordpress.com/the-quotation-collectors/#w-payne

Below the term 'OEDMaker' describes people who have worked on the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).

William Payne (1827–1901)

William Payne, a barrister, formerly living in London; retired to West Sussex following a breakdown in his health.

You never know where researching an OEDMaker* is going to take you. In the case of William Payne (1827–1901), prolific contributor of quotations to the Dictionary and member of the Philological Society’s Council it introduced me to commercial vinegar-making and the early clinical use of X-rays.

And then there was also his daughter Edith, also an OEDMaker. Sarah Ogilvie writes about her ‘life of service’, her suffragism, her music-making, and her contribution of quotations to the OED in 'The Dictionary People'; but her father’s contribution to the Dictionary was rather greater.

Father had a vinegar-brewing business

At the time of William Payne’s birth, in the London borough of Southwark, his father (also William Payne) was a linen-draper; but within a few years he had bought into the successful vinegar-brewing business run by the Slee family of Bermondsey. By the 1840s ‘Slee, Payne and Slee’ was one of the largest vinegar works in the United Kingdom.

The Payne family was now wealthy enough to allow William to be a student: first chemistry at University College London, and then law at Lincoln’s Inn. He combined his studies with business: by 1855 he was a joint partner with his father in what was now ‘Payne, Slee and Payne’. However, by the time he was called to the bar in 1864 both father and son had parted company with the Slees; there was evidently now enough money for William Payne senior to retire, and he moved to Cuckfield in Sussex.

Was it his acquaintance with Frederick Furnivall — a fellow conveyancing lawyer—that led to William Payne junior becoming a member of the Philological Society in 1873? I suspect so; he also became a founder member of the New Shakspere Society when Furnivall launched it the following year, and in fact agreed to be its treasurer, a role he also took up in the Philological Society at the same time.

As such he will have become familiar with the Society’s projected Dictionary, even though at this time the project was showing hardly any outward signs of life. And unfortunately he himself was soon obliged to withdraw from both treasurerships: early in 1876 he suffered a breakdown in health.

Move to Cuckfield

The details are unclear, but he left London, moving to his father’s house in Cuckfield, Hatchlands (William Payne senior had died in 1870). He also withdrew from some other scholarly activity: the edition of Five Hundred Pointes of Good Husbandrie which he had undertaken to prepare for the English Dialect Society had to be handed over to Sidney Herrtage (a future OEDMaker, whose remarkable story I have written about elsewhere).

But retirement to Cuckfield didn’t mean complete withdrawal from intellectual life. He allowed his membership of the Philological Society to lapse, but he maintained his membership of various literary and scientific societies — including the Folk-lore Society, the Photographic Society (of which I think he had also been a founding member), the Chemical Society, and the Royal Microscopical Society — and he gave lectures locally on a range of subjects.

X-Rays

One of his particular interests seems to have been X-rays: he joined the Röntgen Society, gave lectures on ‘Röntgen Rays’, and in May 1896 it was reported that he had used ‘the Rontgen system of photography’ to locate a fragment of a needle which had been embedded in a woman’s hand, thereby enabling a local doctor to remove it — only a few months after Wilhelm Röntgen had published his first paper on the phenomenon.

However, the next time the Payne family of Hatchlands figures in the annals of the Dictionary, in 1879, it is not William, but ‘Miss Payne’: evidently William’s daughter Edith. She responded to the ‘Appeal’ for volunteer readers which James Murray had issued that year, and in 1884 was credited with having contributed the respectable figure of 500 quotations. That seems to mark the end of her contribution to the Dictionary; but there was more to come from Hatchlands.

Batch of 12,000 quotations

In August 1900 boxes of quotations began to arrive in Oxford, containing thousands of quotations taken from a wide range of texts, drawn mainly from the Early Modern period. The first consignment contained about 12,000 quotations, and by June 1901 the total sent in by ‘Mr Wm Payne of Cuckfield’ had exceeded 20,000. I think we have to assume that these quotations had been accumulating for some time; was it his daughter’s contribution that got him going? I don’t suppose we shall ever know.

As for what prompted him to send them to Oxford at last, sadly that is perhaps rather easier to guess: he may have suspected that he was dying. It seems that he suffered from heart trouble, and during 1900 his family (a wife and three other children besides Edith) had become seriously concerned about his health. Their concerns were well-founded: he died on 18 August 1901.

Frederick Payne

An interesting corollary concerns William's younger brother Frederick, who was deaf and dumb from birth. In the 1841 and 1851 censuses he is recorded as living in Lewes with a cousin; in the 1861 he is living with his father William Payne senior, who appears to have engaged a niece (listed as ‘Companion’) to look after him. Frederick was still living at Hatchlands ten years later; he died in 1877, aged 47. Despite having so little trace in the documentary record, he must have been a significant presence in the life of his family.

Many thanks to Peter for these fascinating insights into the life of the Paynes in Cuckfield.

NOTES: Hatchlands in Broad Street, would later become a school in the 1920s - 1960s. It was then demolished in the mid 1970s and replaced by the Myttens and Hatchlands housing developments.

Edited by Malcolm Davison.

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