What’s New: February 2025
February 13, 2025
Welcome to the 119th update of the Oxford DNB which comprises four new and nine updated articles, adding the lives of eight women and men active from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, accompanied by two new portrait likeness.
From February 2025, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford DNB) offers biographies of 63,087 women and men who have shaped the British past, contained in 65,330 articles. 12,257 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.
February 2025: summary of new content
Born in Camberwell, south London, the architectural model-maker, Richard Day (bap. 1816, d. 1891) was the son of a stone carver who had worked at Buckingham Palace and who himself had set up as a model maker. He took over his father’s work, including commissions from the architects Lewis Vulliamy, William Wilkins, and William Tite. His correspondence with Vulliamy reveals the relations between architect and model maker in developing designs.
A farmer’s son from Ringmer, Sussex, the architectural model-maker John Brown Thorp (1862-1939) went into practice as an architect, but he achieved success making architectural models for use in legal disputes. His most notable models included the proposed Charing Cross bridge in London (1930) and Edwin Lutyens’s design for the Liverpool Roman Catholic cathedral (1934).
The journalist and nurse, Grace Mary Ellison (1880-1935), born in Gravesend, Kent, the daughter of a ship’s pilot, attended school in England and France, and university in Germany, before making a career as a continental correspondent for British newspapers and periodicals. Periods of residence in Istanbul between 1908 and 1914 gave her material for her most important writings, on the position of women in the Ottoman empire following the Young Turk revolution.
Among the revisited lives included in this update, the travel writer, playwright, and society hostess Elizabeth, margravine of Brandenburg-Ansbach-Bayreuth [Lady Craven] (1750–1828), the daughter of the fourth earl of Berkeley, was unhappily married to the sixth baron Craven, who did not share her wide-ranging literary and artistic interests. Following the breakdown of her marriage she travelled widely in Europe and married a Prussian prince, settling with him in Fulham, where she pursued her interest in theatricals. Her son from her first marriage, the traveller (Richard) Keppel Craven (1779-1851), accompanied her on her travels, took part in her theatricals, and settled in southern Italy, where he wrote accounts of his tours in the region.
The biographer, playwright, and artist Prince Hoare (1755-1834), born in Bath the son of a portrait painter, is the subject of a new article, which traces his career as an artist in Italy (1776-9), and exhibitor at the Royal Academy (1781), his writings for the stage including musical comedy and opera, his period from 1799 as secretary for foreign correspondence to the Royal Academy, making connections with foreign academies and lobbying for greater state support for the arts in Britain, and finally as biographer of the anti-slavery campaigner Granville Sharp.
The Welsh publisher Owen Rees (1770-1837), born in Gelli-gron, Glamorgan, is the subject of a new article (having previously been a co-subject of his brother, the Unitarian minister and writer on theological history Thomas Rees (1777-1864)). He formed a partnership in London with Thomas Norton Longman, injecting new energy into the Longman business. His particular contribution to the success of the business was his alertness to changes in the market, establishing connections with leading literary figures of the Romantic age.
Five noteworthy relations of figures who are already the subjects of ODNB articles are added as co-subjects, so that they are discoverable in their own right, and their known life details set out. For three centuries the name of the benefactor Lady Eleanor Holles (d. 1708), daughter of the landowner and politician, John Holles, second earl of Clare (1595-1666), has been perpetuated in the name of the school for girls founded from the proceeds of her estate by her executor and first cousin once removed Anne Watson. The school opened in London in 1710.
Another benefactor, Anne Kennicott (bap. 1748, d. 1830), the daughter of a Norfolk clergyman, founded two Hebrew scholarships at Oxford University in memory of her husband, the biblical scholar, Benjamin Kennicott (1718-1783), compiler of a definitive text of the Old Testament. She herself had learned Hebrew in order to assist him in this work.
Mary Anne Fallows (1796-1838), born in Bridekirk, Cumberland, the daughter of a clergyman, accompanied her husband, the astronomer Fearon Fallows (1788-1831) to the Cape of Good Hope, where she took part in his work, and herself recorded observations, including in 1830 of a comet. Their joint papers were published posthumously.
The author Gertrude Mary Townshend Mayer (1839-1932), the daughter of an excise officer in Thornbury, Gloucestershire, where her father was involved in a controversy over access to pews in the parish church, married Samuel Ralph Townshend Mayer (1840-1880), who was also involved in the campaign. In financial difficulties after her husband’s death, she took to literary work to support herself, notably contributing to the periodical Temple Bar.
The South-African born medical practitioner and broadcaster, Winifred May de Kok (1893-1969), studied medicine in London and married the short story writer Alfred Edgar Coppard (1878-1957). She became a school medical inspector and medical writer, advocating family planning. As a television broadcaster in the 1950s she answered viewers’ questions on ‘delicate’ matters of family health, and caused controversy in 1959 with a book which discussed unmarried motherhood and pre-marital sex.
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.
