William Burley Lockwood

[1] After leaving school and spending some time working and travelling in England, Germany, Austria and the Balkans, he went to Manchester University and obtained First Class Honours in German in 1942, followed by a DipEd and M.A.

In 1961 he received an invitation to the Chair of Comparative Philology at the Humboldt-Universität in East Berlin, the capital of the German Democratic Republic.

He settled in Dublin, intending to devote himself to his philological studies, including German and Germanic languages (especially Faroese) as well as Roman, Hellenic, Slavonic and Celtic (especially Welsh) languages.

A year later, however, he was invited to take up a specially established readership in Germanic and Indo-European philology at Reading.

This readership was converted into a chair in 1968, and he remained at Reading until his retirement.