From Shaw to Shavian

Towards the end of 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis had just ended, it was still a year-and-a-day until the first episode of Doctor Who would air, and a remarkable book was published. It was not the content of the book that was so astonishing; Bernard Shaw’s play Androcles and the Lion was fifty years old by this stage. This edition of Androcles and the Lion witnessed the birth of an entirely new alphabet, and its publication was a close-run thing.

The Shaw alphabet, which came to be more commonly known by the latinised name of “Shavian”, represented the culmination of a lifetime of advocacy by Irish playwright, writer and wit, Bernard Shaw. It was perhaps the subject on which Shaw wrote most earnestly, often—but not always—casting aside his love of levity to argue on purely rational grounds about the economic inefficiencies of silent letters and absurd spellings, and the failure of traditional orthography to offer any instruction to children (or adults, for that matter) on how to speak English. G K Chesterton wrote with typical caustic wit that Shaw “found himself, led by the…mad imp of modernity, on the side of the people who want to have phonetic spelling”, and “pleasantly surprised innumerable cranks and revolutionists by finding quite rational arguments for them”.

The wit, his hit, and the contested will

Shaw himself never saw the alphabet that would bear his name; he died in 1950, 12 years before the alphabet’s creation by Kingsley Read. Instead Shaw decided to leave money in his will for the establishment of trust to create and propagate a ‘Proposed British Alphabet’. Shaw’s will specified that the alphabet was to contain at least forty letters that allowed English to be written with one symbol for each sound, without indicating single sounds by groups of letters or diacritical marks.

Shaw made his motivation clear in typical style. His will specified (and take a deep breath for this) that the advocacy work of the alphabet trust must not have regard to “the views of professional and amateur phoneticians, etymologists, spelling reformers, patentees of universal languages, inventors of shorthand codes for verbatim reporting or rival alphabets, teachers of the established orthography, disputants about pronunciation, or of the irreconcilables whose wranglings have overlooked and confused the single issue of labour saving and made change impossible during the last hundred years”.

Unfortunately for Shaw’s wishes, his will became more famous after his death (and known to every law student) for the battle to overturn it. After death duties, over £100,000 (approximately £2.3 million in today’s terms) was to be dedicated to the new alphabet. And the value of Shaw’s estate continued to grow after his death to millions of pounds due to royalties from the hit musical My Fair Lady, which was based on Shaw’s play, Pygmalion. The stakes were high.   

Shaw’s will was too unusual to go unchallenged. Two of those who were to receive any money left over after the alphabet trust had finished the work, the British Museum and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, successfully contested the will. In 1957, the alphabet trust was ruled to be invalid.

Undeterred, two prominent supporters of Shaw’s alphabet reform—James Pitman MP, grandson of the inventor of Pitman shorthand, and Barbara Smoker of the Shaw Society—urged an appeal. The matter was settled out of court, with the British Museum, the Royal Academy and the National Gallery of Ireland (which had not challenged the will), agreeing to £8,300 being used to carry out Shaw’s wishes.

Kingsley Read: the man who invented the alphabet

With money finally secured, the process of designing the new alphabet could begin. A competition with a prize of £500 was announced and 467 entrants from all over the world put their mind to the audacious task of inventing a whole new way of writing English. Of these, four winners were chosen to share the prize; S L Pugmire, Pauline M Barrett, Kingsley Read and J F Magrath.

Despite there being four winners, none of their alphabets alone fully satisfied the judges. Peter MacCarthy of Leeds University’s Department of Phonetics, who was tasked to undertake a transliteration of the Androcles and Lion as soon as the new alphabet was ready, urged the judges to work with one or more of the winners to finalise the design.

Each winner was invited to submit revisions to their designs. Of these, Kingsley Read’s alphabet was found to best meet the requirements of the judges and he was appointed the official designer to complete the work. 

Read was no stranger to the cause. He had, unusually, won praise from Shaw himself during his lifetime for earlier attempts at alphabet design, and had worked closely with James Pitman to promote the competition. It is little surprise, then, that just one month after his appointment as designer, on 18 August 1960, he had completed his work. The result was the Shavian alphabet.