William James Entwistle was born on 7 December 1895 at Cheng Yang Kuan; educated by his father and at the China Inland Mission's school at Chefoo (Yantai), until 1910; attended Robert Gordon's College, Aberdeen for a year; entered the University of Aberdeen with a bursary, obtaining a first class in classics, with distinctions in Greek history and comparative philology, 1916; joined the Royal Field Artillery, transferring to the Scottish Rifles and was seriously wounded in 1917.
Entwistle was awarded the Fullerton classical scholarship at Aberdeen, 1918; spent 1920 in Madrid, after receiving a Carnegie grant; married Jeanie Drysdale, 1921; became lecturer in charge of Spanish at Manchester, 1921.
Entwistle wrote his first book, The Arthurian Legend in the Literatures of the Spanish Peninsula , 1925; became first Stevenson Professor of Spanish at Glasgow, 1925; became King Alfonso XIII Professor of Spanish studies at Oxford, 1932; awarded a fellowship at Exeter College, 1932. Whilst at Oxford Entwistle wrote over sixty articles, including work concerning Spanish, Portuguese, and South American literary, linguistic, and historical themes; his first major work at Oxford was The Spanish Language , 1936, a descriptive account of the languages of the Iberian peninsula.
Entwistle worked a draft of the Chronicle of John I of Portugal , by Fernão Lopes (1380-1459). Fernão Lopes was a Portuguese chronicler, appointed by King Edward I of Portugal to write the history of Portugal, including Crónica de el-rei D. João I (Chronicle of King John I), first and second part.
Enwistle was joint editor of the Modern Language Review , 1934-1948, general editor of the Year's Work in Modern Language Studies , 1931-1937 and of the Great Languages Series , 1940-1952 and general editor of the linguistic contributions to the new edition of Chambers's Encyclopaedia ; was educational director of the British Council, 1942-1943; made honorary LLD of Aberdeen, 1940, Glasgow, 1951 and LittD of Coimbra and Pennsylvania and was president of the Modern Humanities Research Association, 1952. Entwistle died in St Edmund Hall, Oxford, on 13 June 1952.
Publications notably include: The Arthurian legend in the literatures of the Spanish Peninsula (London, Toronto, Dent, New York, Dutton, 1925), The Spanish language: together with Portuguese, Catalan and Basque (Faber & Faber, London 1936), European balladry (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1939), Cervantes, the exemplary novelist (Hispanic Review, 1941),) Russian and the Slavonic languages by W. J. Entwistle & W. A. Morison (Faber & Faber, London, 1949) and Aspects of language (Faber and Faber,London, 1953).
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