Sir Richard Arthur Surtees Paget, 2nd Baronet was a British barrister and amateur scientific investigator, who specialised in speech science and the origin of speech. Following the publication of his book on these topics, Human Speech, in 1930, Paget worked for the remaining decades of his life on a new type of signing system for the deaf, which became the Paget Gorman Sign System.
Educated as a chemist and having worked as a physicist, Paget held a deep interest in various fields of science. He was also well-versed in music and the arts, but his reputation was that of an "eccentric amateur" scientist. Sir Richard's daughter, Pamela Paget, was often a subject of his experiments. Pamela's son and Sir Richard's grandson, Alexander Chancellor, wrote in his "Long Life" column in The Spectator that Pamela had broken her arm when Sir Richard encouraged her to throw herself backwards from the open platform of a London bus on Park Lane to demonstrate his theory that, due to air currents, one could fall horizontally from a bus travelling at a certain speed and land safely on the road. According to Lady Glenconner's obituary in The Telegraph, Sir Richard had also filled his daughters' ears with treacle while testing his sign language system.
Speech and sign language
Sir Richard's most enduring legacy was his research into the nature of human speech and communication. While he made contributions to several branches of the field from phonetics and vocalisation to linguistics and vocabulary, it was his theories on the origin of speech and the "pantomimic action" of the lips and tongue being related to the speaker's senses and emotions that led to his central thesis that hand signs and gestures were the original form of human communication, and that humans had evolved to communicate vocally as their "hands full". His book on these ideas, Human Speech, was published in 1930, and was re-issued in 1964 due to its connections with later developments in communication engineering. The Irish author James Joyce was a close follower of Paget's research, and his works and those of Marcel Jousse were influential in Joyce's study and use of language. In the 1930s, Sir Richard began developing a manually coded sign language system. He collaborated with the librarian at the Royal National Institute for the Deaf, Pierre Gorman, to develop the system further. Upon his death in 1955, his widow, Lady Grace Paget, continued the work with Gorman, and the resulting Paget Gorman Sign System was widely used in the education of deaf children in Britain from the 1960s to the 1980s.
Marriage and children
Paget was married twice. His first marriage was to Lady Muriel Evelyn Vernon Finch-Hatton on 31 May 1897; they had three daughters and two sons. His youngest child, John Starr Paget, succeeded him in the Paget Baronetcy as the 3rd Baronet. Lady Muriel died in 1938 of cancer and exhaustion. On 22 July 1939, Sir Richard married Grace Hartley Glover; they had no children.
