A book titled "Bad Language" was written in England in 1945 by Mr. W. Barkley. In 1961 Mr. Barkley updated his ideas on spelling reform in another book called "A Last Word".
Mr. Barkley attended meetings of the Simplified Spelling Society, and his system is a modification of New Spelling.
He did not like the idea of spelling 'kat' with a 'k', so he retained the 'c' in most words where a 'k' sound is represented by 'c' - as in 'cat' and 'clok'. But the 'k' in 'King' stayed, and final 'c' changed to 'k' in 'publik' (public) and 'politik' (politic). But 'political' amazingly reverted to the 'c'.
'x' is retained by Mr. Barkley since he likes the "shorthand" - however the spelling 'cs' is inconsistently retained in 'acses' (access) and 'sucses' (success) (he doesn't specify his spelling of 'excess').
'th' is retained for both the voiced and unvoiced sounds (whereas New Spelling was more complicated, with 'dh' and 'th').
The treatment of the long 'u' sound seems to be rather confused. Mr. Barkley uses the spelling 'oo' to represent the short sound as in 'good', as well as the long sound in food, rool (rule), cool, soop (soup), moov (move) and froot (fruit). But on other occasions he uses 'u' to represent the long 'u' sound, as in impetuus (impetuous).
The spellings ir, er and ur are retained as in the traditional spelling, because Mr. Barkley maintains that Scottish people pronounce them differently - for example in the words firm, fern and furl.
So "A Last Word" seems to be a rather interesting mixture of minor improvements to New Spelling,
together with some other more bizarre changes.
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