What’s New: September 2024
September 19, 2024
Welcome to the 114th update of the Oxford DNB, which marks the twentieth anniversary of the Dictionary’s first publication in September 2004.
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford DNB) offers biographies of 63,023 women and men who have shaped the British past. 12,232 biographies include a portrait image of the subject—researched in partnership with the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Most public libraries across the UK subscribe to the Oxford DNB, which means that you can access the complete dictionary free of charge via your local library. Libraries offer ‘remote access’ that enables you to log in at any time at home (or anywhere you have internet access). Elsewhere, the Oxford DNB is available online in schools, colleges, universities, and other institutions worldwide. Full details of participating British public libraries, and how to gain access to the complete dictionary, are available here.
Introduction by David Cannadine: the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography twenty years on
The challenge to a generation
In 1994 Colin Matthew, the founding editor of the Oxford DNB (or New DNB as it was then known), set out the dictionary’s aims in the notes circulated to the thousands of authors who undertook to contribute its articles. Colin’s introduction, ‘Writing for the New DNB’, concluded: ‘The preparation of the New DNB puts a generation on its mettle. Let that generation show itself liberal, firm, and just!’ (New Dictionary of National Biography, Notes for contributors (1994), 1). Now, twenty years on from the first publication of the Oxford DNB (ODNB) in September 2004, there is an opportunity to view the Dictionary in the round, and an occasion to take stock.
I was among the thousands of authors who received these instructions when writing on G. M. Trevelyan; as General Editor I subsequently faced the challenge of appraising Margaret Thatcher, and I shall shortly begin writing the entry on Queen Elizabeth II.
Authors’ assessments of their subjects are vital elements of ODNB articles, since the latter are signed memoirs, and Colin Matthew’s challenge remains as pertinent now as it was in 1994. So, too, the structure of ODNB articles, ‘necessarily in part formulaic in the presentation of information’, as Colin put it, to achieve consistency. An article for the dictionary, he wrote, ‘should be accurate, informative, clear and interesting to read. Its purpose is to give a complete and balanced account of the life and work of its subject by supplying both detailed personal information and a lively assessment of the subject’s significance’ (Notes for contributors, 2).
The outcome in 2004 of this collective effort by several thousand authors was a published record of just under 55,000 lives. Since then, online publication has enabled regular updates to be released, three times a year (in January, May, and September) from 2005 to 2016, and monthly since 2018. This, in turn, has enabled the addition of further lives, numbering 8,000 between 2005 and 2024, taking the total to roughly 63,000 lives. The additions cover all periods from Roman rule in the first century to individuals active in the early twenty-first century. The majority (58 per cent) of those newly-added biographies are of subjects who died between 2001 and 2020.
Biographies of the recently deceased: annual releases covering 2001-2020
From its first publication in 1885, the Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB’s forerunner) included articles on the recently deceased, initially within the sixty-three original alphabetical volumes up to 1900, and then in the Supplements published from 1901 to 1996, which took the coverage of recent deaths up to the end of 1990. Those from 1991 to the end of 2000 - some 1900 lives - were added by the ODNB in 2004. Subsequently the coverage has been continued though, in a significant publishing departure, the new lives have been added annually, three or four years after subjects’ deaths, starting in 2005 when 195 biographies of noteworthy individuals who died in 2001 were published. As of September 2024, twenty annual releases have added some 4,600 biographies comprising those who died from the beginning of 2001 to the end of 2020.
Taken together, these entries represent a remarkable and possibly unique curated record of recent lives, covering virtually every aspect of recent British history. They include three prime ministers (Jim Callaghan, Edward Heath, and Margaret Thatcher) and thirty-four Nobel prize-winners, as well as thirty-six Oscar winners and twenty musical chart-toppers. They also include eleven Olympic gold medal winners (and eight captains of the England cricket team).
Most (60 per cent) of the subjects in this cohort were born between 1920 and 1939; about 24 per cent were born before 1920 and 16 per cent were born after 1939. The oldest was Henry Allingham, born in 1896, who on his death in 2009 was the last surviving airman from the First World War. The youngest was the artist Khadija Mohammadou Saye, born in Hammersmith in 1992; she died in the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017. The first, chronologically, was the intelligence officer Sir Michael Bowen Hanley, who died on 1 January 2001, having ‘lingered in the shadows throughout his long career’; the latest was the football manager Tommy Docherty, born in Glasgow in 1928, who died on 31 December 2020.
The key criterion for inclusion in the dictionary is notability, or impact on national life – which of course can take many forms, in many different fields, whether as an astrophysicist or a television celebrity, a religious leader or a darts player. To assist in the selection across such a vast range of activities, the dictionary has been fortunate to count on the advice of (by now) more than a thousand experts, who have been asked individually to comment on the respective claims of (by now) more than 20,000 potential subjects, arranged in around forty-five broad occupational areas. The advice is then collated in-house and the resulting entries have been written by more than 2,000 authors, many of them themselves leading figures in their own fields. They have been backed up by intensive in-house research, providing for instance, for this cohort, some 3,664 birth certificates, 3,702 marriage certificates, and 3,789 death certificates.
Adding biographies from earlier periods: themes and coverage
In addition to the 4,600 biographies of those who died 2001-2020, over 3,400 biographies of individuals active in earlier periods have been added, supplementing existing coverage. Among these additions is the administrator, print collector, and antiquary, Sir William Musgrave, sixth baronet (1735–1800), whose omission was noted by the chairman of the New DNB’s Supervisory Committee (1992-2004), Sir Keith Thomas, in his Leslie Stephen lecture, delivered shortly after the dictionary’s publication (Changing conceptions of national biography: the Oxford DNB in historical perspective (2005), 49). Musgrave, as Thomas pointed out, was one of the principal contributors to the eighteenth-century ‘fashion for collecting portrait engravings as visual exemplars of the British past’, and within a survey of others in that field his name was seen to warrant inclusion in the ODNB. It has been mainly through systematic reviews of particular periods and areas of activity, undertaken in consultation with specialist advisers, that the ODNB’s coverage of pre-2000 lives has been extended. At the same time, Colin Matthew’s aim that dictionary entries should ‘offer an all-round treatment of a subject’ continues to be carefully observed.
Some of the releases of pre-2000 lives have focused especially on the nations that comprise or comprised the United Kingdom: Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and subjects active in what is now the Republic of Ireland prior to 1949. Lives from those nations have of course also been included in releases of lives connected with particular occupations. Such releases have included architects, artists, astronomers, cartoonists, geriatricians, nurses, opera singers and recitalists, photographers, soldiers, and urban planners. Other releases have organized lives around an activity or industry, covering several occupations: equestrianism (riders, authors, broadcasters), gardening (gardeners, landscape designers, plant collectors, horticulturists, and country house owners), coal mining (miners, trade unionists, engineers, inspectors, coal-owners), motoring (manufacturers, designers, racing drivers), philanthropy (for example, school founders), policing (chief constables, detectives); and working-class poets (who pursued a variety of occupations). Branches of learning have also been systematically reviewed: Assyriologists, geographers, lexicographers, mathematicians, and modern linguists among them. Status, whether by occupation (servants), nationality (exiles and refugees), life cycle (childhood), the law courts (lawyers and litigants), and even membership of an order (Companions of Honour) has been another organizing principle.
Religion over all periods, from pre-Reformation religious houses to the modern churches, has been the theme of several releases, as have Jewish lives (including new entries on Jewish scholars, religious leaders, and community leaders). A project spanning several releases added the lives of ninety-five English medieval bishops, completing the coverage of the pre-Reformation episcopate. Anniversaries and events have informed other updates: Magna Carta, the Civil Wars, the First World War centenary, and the London Olympic Games. Lives with strong regional connections have been the subject of regular updates, some having a special focus: Birmingham and the Black Country (including a collective article I contributed on the Calthorpe family who for 200 years maintained a territorial link with England’s ‘second city’ through ownership of their Edgbaston estate), and Hull and Coventry (the latter two in connection with UK City of Culture Years). There have also been London lives, ranging from early-modern lord mayors to a Pearly King.
At the same time, the global or transnational dimensions of biographies – always an element of DNB entries, as the Introduction to Volume I of the Oxford Dictionary of Biography pointed out in 2004 (p. viii) – have been expanded. Early examples include the officers drawn from the Batavian aristocracy who commanded the Roman garrison at Vindolanda c.97. The foreign origins of many pre-Reformation English bishops illustrate the international dimension of the medieval church (see the feature article by Henry Summerson, ‘Born to rule? The origins of the medieval English episcopate’). Other releases have documented, in later periods, the lives of Britons in Japan, Latin America, the Middle East, and South-East Asia.
Another long-term project has been to extend the ODNB’s coverage of people who shaped the British empire and early Commonwealth. The Victorian DNB routinely included colonial subjects, especially from what in Edwardian times would become the ‘dominions’ (Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa) though with the occasional entry from elsewhere. Partly since it had been agreed that no-one in the DNB would be left out of the ODNB (and therefore these lives would continue to be included in the dictionary), partly making a virtue out of a necessity, the 2004 edition extended the coverage of other parts of the empire, including in the Caribbean, Africa, South and South-East Asia, and the Pacific – particularly of people who, in Colin Matthew’s words, were ‘known to Whitehall’. Since 2004 specialists in each country or region have helped to fill in many gaps, of colonial officials and of local political, community, trade union, and religious leaders, but also of notable philosophers, writers, artists, and others whose lives and work reflected on the colonial experience and the transition to independence.
Drawing on much recent scholarship, a perennial concern has been to improve and extend the dictionary’s coverage of people of Black or Asian descent who have left their mark on the UK in some important way, whether as activists, actors, artists, authors, or as musicians, scientists, sportspeople, or in many other fields, but with a particular emphasis on community leaders and campaigners. Since 2004 regular annual updates have included the lives of more than 250 people of Black or Asian descent notable for their activities in and impact on the UK from Elizabethan times onwards, making the ODNB the largest curated collection of such lives.
The centenary of women’s suffrage in 2018, and of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act in 2019 were the occasion for a series of releases of women’s lives, beginning with members of both Houses of Parliament, researched and organized in collaboration with the UK Parliament Vote100 project. Other updates focused on women in professional and other occupations, including architecture and art, engineering, journalism, the law, and the theatre, in consultation both with professional bodies and researchers in those fields. In addition, there have been releases of lives of women active from the tenth century, including the Mercian noblewoman Wulfrun (fl. 943–994) and the Danish noblewoman Gytha (b. c. 1010, d. after 1068), whose marriage to the English Earl Godwine was arranged by Cnut, king of England. Women account for 524 (61%) of the 865 ‘non-recent’ lives added to the ODNB since 2018.
Updating ODNB articles
Keith Thomas pointed out that one task for the ODNB was ‘to ascertain and express the role played by wives, mothers, sisters, daughters and servants in what historians write up as the story of a man’s career, but which, more often than not, was a joint enterprise’ (Thomas, Changing conceptions, 47). Many such lives have now been added as entries in their own right; the author, social campaigner, and fundraiser Janet Trevelyan (1879-1956), a Companion of Honour, is now the subject of an ODNB article, like her husband, George Macaulay Trevelyan, as is their daughter Mary Moorman, which I also contributed. Others have been added as ‘co-subjects’ and are therefore searchable and discoverable. The largest challenge, though, is to name and identify female relatives of ODNB subjects, a task that has become more possible now that genealogical resources such as parish registers and census records have been digitized. Inserting their names and any further life details has represented a significant element of the work of updating existing ODNB articles.
On average 1,000 updated articles have been loaded annually since 2005, representing updates to about one-third of the ODNB’s '2004’ entries. In total around 80,000 changes have been made. Mostly these consist of new information (from censuses and parish registers, etc.), but some are also corrections. For both of these types of amendments we are grateful for notifications from numerous keen readers of the dictionary.
New article formats: Reference Groups, Lists, and Features
Colin Matthew’s original plans for a New DNB identified the need, and opportunity, once the individual biographies were in place, to link together those figures who formed some of the groups, coteries, clubs, salons, and other collectivities, formal and informal, which were significant in the national past. He envisaged articles which would ‘navigate’ the reader around the people who came together for some common purpose, literary, artistic, scientific, political, or intellectual, or pursued some common aim, or took part in a shared endeavour, such as a campaign or an expedition. Over 300 such articles have now been published, ranging from the Gregorian mission, the Benedictine reformers, and the Enforcers of Magna Carta, to the Bloomsbury group, the Bluestocking circle, the Bounty mutineers, the Clapham Sect, the Cliveden set, and the Desert Rats.
Nearly 200 reference lists have been published, offering a finding aid for office-holders or those with other types of formal standing included in the ODNB. They range from the archbishops of Canterbury from 597, poets laureate from 1668, and astronomers royal from 1675, to holders of the Victoria Cross, Nobel prize-winners, and Oscar winners. Holders of high offices of state and heads of national institutions are among the lists. Rulers of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms (to 924), high-kings of Ireland (c.452-1172), Viking and Scandinavian kings, monarchs of Scotland (from 842 to 1707), monarchs of England (to 1707), and monarchs of Great Britain and the United Kingdom (from 1707) form a continuous series. Looking beyond the British Isles and Ireland, lists have been provided of the governors and chief ministers and premiers under responsible government of the countries which made up the British empire.
Feature essays, of which there are now sixty-eight, offer overviews of areas of the ODNB’s coverage, providing background information enabling the reader to contextualise and link together individual lives. Often these are arranged around ‘events’ (such as the Gunpowder Plot, the charge of the Light Brigade, or the 1906 election) or places (for instance Berwick, the Isle of Man, or Trafalgar Square), but others take particular themes (including childhood, myths, and courage) and explore changing historical perceptions through the biographical material in the dictionary.
ODNB’s links and partnerships: portrait images and national institutions
New to the ODNB was the addition of 10,000 portrait images, researched and obtained in partnership with the National Portrait Gallery, which provided the curatorial insight and expertise as well as 5,000 of the actual images.
The NPG is just one example of many national institutions with which the ODNB has partnered successfully over the years, in different ways. We have worked on joint promotional activities with the National Trust, National Archives, English Heritage Blue Plaques, British Academy, Royal Society, and Historic Royal Palaces; and we provide links to many related online resources – as well as those already listed, these include the Bibliography of British and Irish History, History of Parliament, Art UK, Early Modern Letters Online, BBC film and radio archives as well as Desert Island Discs and In Our Time recordings, Electronic Enlightenment, and Hansard. Discover our list of links and partnerships here.
We’re proud to have connected with other biographical dictionaries too, as part of a national biographies conference panel alongside representatives from the American National Biography, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Australian Dictionary of Biography, and Dictionary of New Zealand Biography; and to have participated in digital humanities projects with academic institutions all over Europe to establish a standard for biographical data.
ODNB Academic Advisory Board
With twenty years between the close of the editorial project which resulted in the 2004 edition and its continuation as a flourishing online project, we took the decision in 2023 to establish an academic advisory board, and invited a distinguished group, representing key areas of coverage for the ODNB, to participate. Meet the advisory board members here. Their input both collectively and individually has already been valuable in providing an external, informed view on our activities, and we look forward to working closely with them in the future.
Twenty years on
Has the generation risen to Colin Matthew’s 1994 challenge? No doubt that is for others to decide, but the foregoing account provides abundant evidence of extensive, wide-ranging and creative activity.
Professor Sir David Cannadine is General Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
APPENDIX: EXPLORING THE ODNB’s CONTENT
The ODNB to date: content by occupation and geography
ODNB Lives from 1 to 2020: Occupations
These five pie charts show the changing composition of the ODNB by broad occupational category over two millennia. Every ODNB biography has in its opening sentence a brief descriptor of its subject’s occupation or occupations. Since these are intended principally to identify the subject, they are not in themselves definitive as occupational statements. They are nevertheless useful for identifying broad trends.
Individual occupations (‘poet’, ‘barrister, ‘physician’) can be discovered in the online ODNB by using the Advanced Search facility, filtered by ‘Statement of Occupation’. This will deliver the biographies with that occupation in the headword, arranged alphabetically or chronologically.
Occupations can therefore be traced over time: the subjects of 1,985 ODNB biographies have the occupation ‘poet’, ranging from Dubthach maccu Lugair, said to have been active in Ireland about 432, to Mahmood Jamal (1948–2020), born in Lucknow, India, and who came to London in 1967. By contrast, numerically, the ODNB has nineteen hermits, all but two of whom were active between the seventh and fourteenth centuries. The ODNB’s judges (1,089) become numerous from the fifteenth century, though the Reference Lists for the offices of Lord Chancellor and Master of the Rolls record earlier lineages. Other professional occupations begin to be identified as such in ODNB headwords from the early sixteenth century, including architects (815) and engineers (996). Actors (781) date from the late sixteenth and actresses (490) from the late seventeenth centuries. Occurrences of physicians (1,493) mainly date from the thirteenth century; surgeons (613) from the fourteenth century.
For the purpose of creating a bigger picture, the individual occupations have been grouped into larger categories, as illustrated in the diagrams below. Since dates of death are not known for significant numbers of the people in the ODNB before 1500, the occupations for that period are organized by the dates for which any life event of the subject is known, and therefore when the subject can with certainty be said to have been active. From 1550 the occupations are arranged by the date of death of the ODNB subject. In the earliest period, rulers of the various kingdoms which comprised the British Isles and Ireland, and religious occupations (bishops, heads of religious houses) account for over 80 per cent of the occupations of subjects in ODNB. The pie charts show the periodization of the subsequent broadening out of occupations. For those ODNB subjects who died between 1900 and 2020, the most numerous occupational categories were: education, scholarship, and writing; art, architecture, music, and sport; politics, law, and government; science and medicine; and business and manufacturing. Royalty and religion accounted by then for only just over five per cent of occupations.
ODNB Lives from 1 to 2020: Geography
Biographies in the ODNB include, where known, their subjects’ place of birth, baptism, education, residence, death, and burial. These are all discoverable under ‘Life event’ using the advanced search facility on the online ODNB. For those subjects from earlier periods (generally before 1500) all this information is not always available, but what is known can be captured by a search on ‘Any’ life event in the period in question.
There is an opportunity to explore the overseas connections embedded in the ODNB’s collection of biographies whose chronological span, as the Introduction to the 2004 edition pointed out, ‘encompassed periods of Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Danish, Norman, and Angevin dominion’ as well as the ‘subsequent dramatic expansion and contraction in British rule overseas’. Other overseas connections, whether through trade, diplomacy, conflict, or cultural exchange, for example, as well as exile, immigration, and emigration are recorded in the ODNB’s lives.
The line graph below illustrates these trends in relation to six countries and one region over 1000 years, based on ‘Any life event’ data. The association might, therefore, be through any of birth, education, residence, or death. France was of course by far the strongest overseas connection among subjects in the ODNB active over the five centuries after 1000. The importance of the Netherlands in the early modern period is evident, and the rise of Indian links from about 1750 equally so. Among these examples, the USA emerges as the strongest single connection by the twentieth century, through people from Britain and Ireland who went to the USA either permanently or temporarily, or those Americans who settled in the British Isles and were included in the ODNB on the basis of their activities here.
The Oxford DNB is updated regularly throughout the year, giving you access to the most up-to-date and accurate information available. Nearly all public libraries in England, Scotland, and Wales—and all in Northern Ireland—subscribe to the Oxford DNB. This means you can access tens of thousands of biographies, free, via your local library—anywhere, anytime. Full access to all biographies is also available by individual subscription.
Discover a full list of entries added this year.