The end of the third term of the 2005-2006 session at University College London saw Professor John Christopher Wells relinquish the chair of phonetics previously occupied by A. C. Gimson, D. B. Fry and the venerated Daniel Jones.
Professor Wells was born in Lancashire the eldest son of a vicar from southeast England and a teacher from Leeds on the 11th of March 1939. He has described himself as "a northerner ... by birth and upbringing" but even so he was sent south to a prep school and after that to a "minor" public school, St John's at Leatherhead in Surrey. From there he proceeded to Trinity College Cambridge where he obtained a degree in classics but found that he had acquired, notably under the influence of John Trim (who had previously been a highly valued member of Daniel Jones's staff at UCL), an abiding interest in linguistics and especially phonetics. It was on Trim's recommendation that he was accepted to work for an M.A. on A study of the formants of the pure vowels of British English (noteworthy enough to be quoted by Gimson in his Introduction to the Pronunciation of English) at the UCL Department of Phonetics for the next two years and remained there ever afterwards energetically pouring out an endless series of high-quality publications.
Immediately after completing his studies he was taken on as an Assistant Lecturer and began work on his doctoral thesis on Jamaican Pronunciation in London (1973), though its progress was held up to some extent while he worked on his Esperanto Dictionary (1969) and his collaboration with drama teacher Greta Colson to produce an excellent short book on Practical Phonetics (1971). In 1970 he published a substantial article (over 20 pages) 'Local accents in England and Wales'. This proved to be the germ that grew during the following dozen years into his magnum opus in which he set himself to "bring together all [he] could find on the pronunciation of English as a first language and present it in a unified framework". This he did with signal success in the awesome three volumes (673 pages plus tape) of Accents of English (1982) unlikely to be superseded for at least another generation.
His other most staggering achievement was to produce single-handedly in 1990 the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary eclipsing anything of the kind written before. It incorporated in effect a concise textbook on English pronunciation (including admirable vowel diagrams). It dealt not only with the traditional south-of-England type of accent but embodied northern and midland educated usages as well as a record of General American pronunciations superior to anything in print even in the USA. It provided numerous IPA transcriptions of original-language pronunciations of loanwords from 51 foreign languages and opinion-poll-based information on the pronunciation preferences of nearly two thousand respondents to questionnaires illustrated in the 80,000-entry 2000 edition with striking coloured graphs.
He has long been a major figure in the International Phonetic Association having been its Secretary and editor of its Journal from 1971 to 1987, contributing to it articles, specimens, reviews etc, and in 2003 being elected to the Association's Presidency. He has also contributed frequently to a great variety of collections, journals and dictionaries etc. He was president of the World Esperanto Association from 1989 to 1995. He has been President of the (Simplified) Spelling Society. Besides his admired teaching and lecturing in the Department of Phonetics and Linguistics he directed from 1983 to 2006 the University College Summer Courses in English Phonetics with the greatest success in their history. Besides his work at UCL, where he headed his department for a decade (1990-2000), he has travelled worldwide to lecture and has made frequent radio broadcasts and television appearances.
There are very many other possible illustrations of his tireless productivity. One thing is certain: he won't sit back and rest on his laurels now that he has left the post in which he has for so long been so successful. In particular he's already keeping up a stream of stimulating comments and discussions in his daily (weekdays only) Phonetic Blog, accessible via his homepage that he began in March 2006 and had reached well over 150 varied regular items by the time he, with characteristic reluctance, closed it down over the 2006 Christmas holiday period. He resumed it with characteristic indefatigability on the 15th of January 2007.