Introduction

This website provides freely downloadable transcripts of many of Eugene Halliday's talks. If you haven't already listened to the original audio files, you can download them for free from the Eugene Halliday Archives.

Halliday's talks were given by him at meetings held in the Liverpool and Manchester areas of the UK, sometime between the late 1950's/early 1960's, up until his death in 1987. You may want to read some material about Halliday if you are not already familiar with his life and work.

This website is far from complete and I will be continuously adding and updating material to this site as it becomes available. To view the latest changes to the site, please have a look on this forum thread.

Some notes on transcripts

As far as I am aware, most of the transcripts are verbatim. However, some of Margaret Littler's early transcripts are not verbatim. They were originally intended for her own private study and not for publication, and she has paraphrased some of Halliday's words, so please be aware of this and check the text against the audio if you want the exact words. Even verbatim transcripts vary a little from transcriber to transcriber because different people actually hear different words, especially when the audio is unclear.

Nuances of timing and tone, audience noise and so on is lost in the transcripts. The punctuation chosen by transcribers also affects the meaning. Therefore I recommend listening to the audio as well as downloading transcripts of the talks.

These transcripts are not Halliday's lecture notes. As far as I am aware, he rarely, if ever, prepared his talks. Alan Roberts attended many of these meetings, and says of them:

Eugene's talks were invariably un-scripted, indeed you can hear him replying not only to written questions presented to him at the beginning of a meeting, but also to spoken questions put to him as these meetings progressed.

During his lectures Halliday drew many pictures and diagrams on rolls of backing wallpaper and, later, on rolls of acetate for use on an overhead projector. Most of the originals of these drawings are lost or languishing somewhere. Even if they were to be found, it would not be a simple job to match them up to the audio. John Bailey and Margaret Littler have both included diagrams in their transcripts. John Bailey's diagrams are his own best guess. Margaret said her diagrams are mostly taken from notes taken by her at the lectures themselves, so I think there is a fair chance that they resemble Halliday's original drawings. Margaret's reproductions may be as close as we're going to get to the original drawings.

Joshua Hennessy
September 2011