Author. Linguistic. He received notoriety as an Irishman for his love of the English and Welsh Gypsy language and lifestyle. In 1926 he published “The Dialect of Gypsies of Wales,” which is still in print, and made him an academic celebrity in Europe. His text has been credited in allaying the persecution of gypsies. He became to be an authority on the Romany language and culture, and adopted their lifestyle wandering through the countryside with gypsy families. He was called “The Rai” or the Gentleman Gypsy. Although his father, James, was an engineer and chemist and his younger brother, Ralph Allen Sampson an astronomer, his talents were more to the arts than science. When the banks fail in Ireland in 1873, his father brought the family to Liverpool, England. At the age of fourteen years old and the eldest son, he left school when his father died to support the family, but studied in night classes. He became an apprentice to an engraver and lithographer, and at the age of twenty-two had his own business. He began to study the “Shelta” language, which was an Irish dialect spoken in Britain and the United States. His research on this language was eventually published in 1937 in R.A. Stewart Macalister's “The Secret Languages of Ireland.” At the age of thirty he became the first librarian at the University of Liverpool, and years later, a plaque was placed in the library to honor him for this. Two years later on a trip to Wales with other colleagues from the university, he had a chance meeting with Edward Wood, a descendant from Abrahm Wood, who had been the 18th century leader of the Welsh gypsies and a fluent speaker of the Welsh-Romani dialect. It was at this point that Sampson became interested in a study of the language and preserving the culture of the people who spoke it, thus began his thirty-year project. In 1891 in the “Journal of Gypsy Lore Society,” he published “English Gypsy Songs and Rhymes,” which had 18 Anglo-Romani pieces. For his detailed linguistic studies, he was award an honorary degree of Doctrine in Letters from the University of Oxford in 1909. He edited and published first in 1911 then revised in 1913, a collection of poems of English poet William Blake in “Blakes's Political Works,” which included the poem “The French Revolution.” Sampson's book has been reprinted numerous times with the last in the 21st century and the earlier copies are now a collector's piece. While at the University of Liverpool, he was a close colleague of painters, Albert Lipczinski and Augustus John, while participating in a Bohemian lifestyle with social gatherings of scholars, artists, scientists, politicians, trade union activists, and anarchists. Dr. Sampson retired from his librarian position in 1928 and died three years later. Receiving front-page coverage with a photograph in the newspaper, the “Daily Mirror,” his funeral was non-religious. Augusta John led the funeral procession and gave the oration with gypsies playing fiddles and harps before his cremated ashes were scattered on Foel-goch, a mountain in northern Wales. In 1894 he married a very conservative wife and had a daughter and two sons, with the youngest in the Royal Air Force and being killed in action during World War I. His grandson, Anthony Sampson, published his biography, “Scholar Gypsy: The Quest for A Family” in 1997 but this author may have received more notoriety for the award-winning, “Mandela: The Authorized Biography” in 1999. By the 1960s, the use of the Romani language had declined within Britain, yet with the 21st century influx of Eastern European refugees to the British Isles, there has been a surge of a dialect of the language being used. Many of these gypsies speak a broken English with Romani words as slang.