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2006 updates: introductions

January 2006

New online update, January 2006

Welcome to the fourth online update of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Each January we publish the biographies of individuals who died a few years previously. Last January we added entries on those who died in the year 2001. In this update we include 202 biographies of men and women who died in the year 2002.

Our latest update illustrates very well the purposes and the range of the Oxford DNB. The dictionary is a compendium of notable lives, but notability is understood in the broadest terms to include not merely the leaders of our society but those who have shaped the way we live now. The lives chosen for inclusion will present to future generations a record of the issues and problems as well as the achievements of our age. The great and the good find their places besides the popular, and also, sometimes, the bad and the infamous. In this way the dictionary seeks to represent national life in all its variety and significance.

Some lives define national experience. Queen Elizabeth, the queen mother, who died in March 2002 and who is now added to the dictionary, was one such person. Born in 1900, a child of the Edwardian aristocracy, her life was bound up with the great events of Britain in the twentieth century—among them two world wars, the transformation of an empire into a commonwealth, and the decline of the imperial, governing class from which she came. She is remembered for her remarkable spirit in adversity, above all during the blitz on London in 1940 and 1941, her fidelity to the monarchy, and also for her endearing personal qualities and charm. Very few figures in British history can have ended their lives as admired and loved as she was. She is joined by her daughter Princess Margaret, who predeceased her by a matter of weeks, and whose life embodied the transformation of the monarchy itself from a remote institution at the apex of state, church, and society to an aspect of our everyday culture.

Shapers of the 1960s

Another woman, the fiery Labour MP and minister Barbara Castle, leads the list of recent political lives added to the dictionary in January 2006. She was the most notable female politician of the 1960s and was involved in some of the most controversial issues of that time, including the attempted reform of trade unions. Remembered as the minister of transport who introduced the breathalyser test, she also lived on to become a much loved elder stateswoman.

She is joined by other shapers of Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, among them the social innovator Michael Young, a pioneer of the Open University; Brian Simon, the educationist known for his advocacy of comprehensive schooling; Karel Reisz, the film director remembered above all for Saturday Night and Sunday Morning; Lonnie Donegan, the 'king of skiffle' who became the first artist to go straight to number 1 in the British charts with the inimitable 'My Old Man's a Dustman' in 1960; and John Entwistle, bass guitarist of the Who. Kenneth Wolstenholme was the voice of football commentary in the 1960s and for that alone might have been included in the dictionary. But, above all, he will be remembered for his words—that are forever 1966—as Geoff Hurst scored England's fourth goal in the world cup final: 'Some people are on the pitch, they think it's all over . . . It is now!' The Oxford DNB usually records achievements amassed throughout a lifetime, but some of its subjects are remembered especially for a single action or line, as Wolstenholme may be.

National achievements: science, humour, and enterprise

In contrast our new update also includes three chemists and one biologist who were awarded the Nobel prize for their painstaking research over many years: the chemists Archer Martin (1952), Max Perutz (1962), and George Porter (1967), and the molecular biologist César Milstein, who won the prize for medicine in 1984. Together they are a salutary reminder of the great strengths of British science in the mid-twentieth century and, in the case of Perutz and Milstein, of the contributions made to it by the influx of political and religious refugees at that time. In quite another aspect, the national talent for humour is represented by the addition of two great comedic lives: Spike Milligan completes the dictionary's coverage of the Goons, and Dudley Moore is reunited with Peter Cook in one of the most famous of comedy pairings. Respectively at their peaks in the 1950s on radio, and in the 1960s on television, Spike and Dud remind us of a great age of post-war comedy to which we still refer and which is still part of national life.

The post-war era of mass consumption and rising living standards was also an era of mass leisure. Alongside the leaders of science, industry, and politics we therefore remember Erna Low, the tour operator and pioneer of skiing holidays who in 1948 began selling two-week winter holidays in Mürren for £38; Sidney De Haan, the founder of Saga Holidays; and Sam Alper, the caravan manufacturer and founder of the Little Chef roadside restaurant chain. John Russell, duke of Bedford, is remembered for his pioneering development of his ancestral seat, Woburn Abbey, as a tourist venue. That this peer of the realm 'did the twist' on television was also a sign of the times. The enterprise of men and women like Low and De Haan is also evident in the entries on Arnold Weinstock, who built GEC into one of the most successful British companies only to see it decline spectacularly after his retirement; on Lawrence Batley, the pioneer of cash-and-carry; and on Gerald Whent, who as chief executive of Vodafone was a key player in the early stages of the mobile phone revolution.

The oldest entrant to the dictionary in this release is the queen mother, who was born on 4 August 1900. To get a sense of perspective, note that on her fourteenth birthday war was declared against Germany. In total some sixty-three entrants (31%) were born before the outbreak of the First World War. Seven (3%) were born after the end of the Second World War, of whom Andrew Blake, the medical research campaigner who was born in 1963, is the youngest. Forty-two of the new subjects (21%) are women.

In some cases, where the subject died young or achieved much in old age, the biographies in this update focus on very recent history and contemporary achievements. One example is the author Mary Wesley, who only became known in the 1980s for novels written towards the end of her life. The actors Richard Harris and John Thaw were likewise working up to their deaths, and their films and television series are still current. So too is the music of Joe Strummer whose band, the Clash, gained a new generation of listeners during the late 1990s. In general, however, those who died in 2002 made their most notable contributions to British life in the years after 1945. The memoirs contained here will remind us of Britain more than a generation ago, when television and pop music were in their infancy; The Guardian's women's page had just been reinvented by the journalist Mary Stott; 'Professor' Stanley Unwin was mangling the English language to such comic effect on the radio; and the 'breath test' was a hated innovation rather than the accepted aspect of public safety it has since become.

New online resources

We have added links from 10,400 biographies to the corresponding records of sitters in the National Portrait Gallery's online database. Many of the NPG's portraits are illustrated online, and so these links provide both further iconography and, in many cases, illustrations of our subjects.

Our next online update

Our next online update, to be published in May 2006, will extend the dictionary's coverage of noteworthy men and women from the earliest times to the year 2000. In particular May's update will add to the dictionary's existing biographies in three areas: early modern lawyers and litigants; social reformers; and Britons in and people connected with South Africa between 1806 and the country's departure from the Commonwealth in 1961. Other lives record regional figures who gained national prominence between the twelfth and twentieth centuries.

May's update will also include new reference materials for the 'themes' area of the online edition. As well as feature essays and reference lists the update will add our second set of 'reference group' articles. Reference groups—of which thirty were published in October 2005—highlight connections between men and women (many of whom have their own entries in the dictionary) who were members of well-known groups or associations in British history.

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May 2006

New online contents, May 2006

The appearance of every update to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is, I hope, a noteworthy occasion. However, our May 2006 update is particularly noteworthy as it was 'published' by her majesty the queen during her visit to the dictionary's offices in St Giles, Oxford, on Friday 5 May. On that day the queen met in-house editors and external advisers who helped to prepare the 2004 edition of the dictionary and continue to research, commission, review, and publish the new content we have included in regular online updates since January 2005. The royal visit culminated in the 'making live' by the queen of this fifth update of the online edition, to which I welcome you now.

Here we offer new biographies of 127 men and women who left their mark on British history between the twelfth and the late twentieth century, and also 53 new theme articles (comprising 29 reference group articles, 15 reference lists, and 9 feature essays) for quick reference and ways into the dictionary. In this update we focus on three areas in which new subjects shared a common interest or identity: modern social reformers; lawyers and litigants from the twelfth to the eighteenth century; and men and women active in South Africa since Britain's permanent settlement of Cape Colony in 1806. Our remaining biographies cover noteworthy people in fields ranging from policing, film-making, and medicine to science fiction, exploration, and circus entertainment; chronologically our 127 lives range from the litigant Richard of Anstey (c.1137-1194/5) to the psychiatrist Felix Post (1913-2001).

Modern social reformers

There will be a cause dear to many readers among our new collection of reformers' lives: from dietary campaigners and champions of civic pride to advocates of health and lifestyle reform. Common to all was a determination to challenge perceived wisdom or practice. Some, like the campaigner for the blind Thomas Rhodes Armitage, had their work recognized in national institutions. In 1868 Armitage established the British and Foreign Blind Association and as its secretary worked to promote the Braille system and to improve working opportunities for blind men. After Armitage's death the association evolved to become the National Institute for the Blind. Similar institutional recognition was achieved by the architect John Dower, who campaigned for a network of national parks in England and Wales, which was established (after Dower's early death) following legislation in 1949.

Other activists promoted causes that have since become established practice or from which we continue to benefit. In the field of dietary reform, for example, Mary Corkling formed the Bread Reform League in 1880 to promote the health benefits of brown bread, while Wilfred Buckley set up the National Clean Milk Society in 1915 to call for higher standards in dairy produce (then unpasteurized). In his Sanitary Ramblings (1848) the London physician Hector Gavin provided a street-by-street account to highlight the squalid conditions experienced by those living in the East End. In Leeds Gavin's contemporary John Heaton dedicated himself to improving the city's physical and moral condition; Heaton was also a leading advocate of a town hall for Leeds, which was opened by Queen Victoria in 1858. Viewed collectively lives such as these remind us both of the vibrancy of Victorian associational life and of the importance of voluntary reform movements in an age before mass party politics and the welfare state.

By contrast later reformers included in this update tended to be found on the fringes of society, typically working alone on causes for which they are now remembered (often affectionately) more as eccentrics than serious advocates of change. Good examples include William Margrie, who, as the self-styled Sage of Peckham, established the London Explorers' Club in 1930 and encouraged citizens to ramble across the capital. An enthusiastic Darwinian, Margrie also argued that government ministers should be chosen for their sporting prowess, and identified himself as an example of a new stage in human evolution, which he labelled Peckham Man. Another Londoner—whom you may have seen parading with his banner in Oxford Street—was Stanley Green, the Protein Man. In a twenty-five year campaign Green urged passers-by to lead less sexually oriented lives with his memorable slogan 'Less passion from less protein'.

Legal lives

Law, in all its manifestations, was well covered by the original Dictionary of National Biography, the thematic and geographical range of which was further extended in the 2004 edition of the Oxford DNB. This process is continued in the current release, with a set of new articles on medieval and early modern legal lives. The earliest of these is that of Richard of Anstey, whose well-documented travels in pursuit of justice through England and France in the 1150s and 1160s have made him one of the best known of medieval litigants. Other new subjects are included primarily in the interests of completeness, with space now being given to nine of the eleven English medieval chief justices omitted from the DNB (the other two will appear in the autumn).

This is not to say that their lives are only of value as items in a list. Those of Robert de Briwes and Sir Robert Charleton, for instance, illustrate the difficulties judges could face in times of political crisis. The same is true of early modern lawyers like Sir Bennet Hoskins, whose continuous tacking to the prevailing wind in the 1640s and 1650s earned him the reputation of a weathervane. As might be expected, occasional glimpses of idiosyncrasy add colour to sober records of professional success, literally so in the case of Philip Jermyn, who insisted on wearing his scarlet judge's robes at his daughter's wedding, to the intense embarrassment of his son-in-law, who recorded the event.

The experience of eighteenth-century subjects in this area suggests a society in which growing numbers had recourse to the legal system. Joseph Knight was a west African-born slave whose struggle in the courts with John Wedderburn established the principle that slavery was not recognized in Scotland, building on the English ruling of Lord Mansfield in the Somerset case of 1772. Edmund Tew was a co. Durham clergyman whose diary offers an insight into the administration of justice by a magistrate in an area where agricultural, maritime, and manufacturing concerns intermingled. Important in the demystification of the legal process in England and Wales was the parliamentary act of 1731 that replaced Latin with English as the official language of the law; it was piloted through the Commons by Sir George Savile, a Yorkshire squire representing the interests of his manufacturing constituents.

Shapers of South Africa

2006 marks the bicentenary of Britain's permanent settlement of Cape Colony. Our third set of new lives extends the dictionary's coverage of men and women active in South Africa before the country's departure from the Commonwealth in 1961. Entries include Du Pre Alexander, second earl of Caledon, one of the first governors of Cape Colony (1807-11), and the colonial administrator Sir Godfrey Lagden who, as chairman of the South African Native Affairs Commission (1903), recommended territorial and political segregation between Africans and whites—a policy that can be seen as a forerunner of apartheid.

A particularly interesting feature of work on this subject is the opportunity it offers to look back from the perspective of a post-apartheid, democratic South Africa, and so record a national history evolving in the wake of late twentieth-century political change. This update consequently includes entries on leading black politicians who were early advocates of democracy—including Pixley ka Isaka Seme, a prominent force behind the South African Native National Congress (later the African National Congress), the educationist Davidson Jabavu, who founded the All-African Convention, and the convention's vice-president and later the leader of the ANC, Alfred Xuma. Seme and Jabavu remind us of the close ties that exist between native South Africans and Britain. Seme was educated at Oxford and Jabavu at the African Training Institute in Colwyn Bay, while Yusuf Dadoo—a leading representative of the Transvaal Indians and subsequently a communist politician—trained as a doctor at Edinburgh, later lived in exile in Muswell Hill, London, and was buried in Highgate cemetery.

Others travelled from Britain to South Africa. The Scottish army officer John Graham, for example, took part in the British defeat of the Dutch in January 1806; thereafter he remained in the colony to command British forces in the Cape Frontier War 0f 1811 12 and to establish a settlement at what became Grahamstown. Other Scots now noted for their contribution to South African life include the missionaries James Laing and Jane Waterston, the social reformer and suffragette Georgiana Solomon, and the politician Margaret Ballinger, who, as parliamentary representative of the Eastern Cape, became a critic of segregation and apartheid during the 1940s and 1950s. While politics is a necessarily important theme in this new content, many first-time biographies also highlight the diversity of South African society, illustrating for instance sporting life (the black cricketer Krom Hendricks), cultural life (the artist Irma Stern), and conservation (Abel Chapman, the co. Durham-born naturalist and lobbyist for the Kruger National Park).

An island's story

Diversity and internationalism are characteristics shared by many other subjects in the May 2006 update. New overseas visitors to Britain include the Italian ropeslider Signor Violante, the Palau islander Lee Boo, who settled in Rotherhithe in 1784, and Francisco de Miranda, the campaigner for Spanish American independence who promoted his cause in British political circles in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. It is fitting that an update published 'by royal approval' also includes the life of Henry IV's councillor John Doreward, as well as that of the children's writer Henrietta Marshall, whose Our Island Story (1905) gained recent coverage in debates on schools history and modern historical knowledge. And while Henrietta Marshall looked to the past, the science-fiction writer Olaf Stapledon made his name by looking forward in works like First and Last Men (1930), a projection of the next two billion years of human evolution.

New themes: groups, lists, and features

In addition to new biographies May's update continues to supplement the Oxford DNB's 55,684 lives with a range of reference materials located in the 'themes' area of the online dictionary. Published and developed since September 2004, the themes pages now provide almost 300 essays and reference lists that show connections between individuals covered in the main dictionary, and collectively offer readers an online companion guide to British history.

In this update we publish our second instalment of 'reference group' articles that explain well-known historical networks through which individuals came together to shape our past. The new groups, gangs, sets, and associations added in May 2006 cover 700 years of co-operation, and begin and end with science: from the Merton calculators—arly fourteenth-century Oxford mathematicians and natural philosophers—to the Tube Alloys directorate that developed the British atomic bomb. Along the way we encounter groups active in the arts (the composers of the Eton choirbook or founders of the Royal Academy), in literature (Dr Johnson's Ivy Lane and Literary clubs), politics (the ejected five members or the red Clydesiders), war ('the few' of Fighter Command), and business or settlement overseas (the South African Randlords or the Canterbury Association, which sent migrants to New Zealand). As we extend our group coverage it becomes clear how key historical events led to the formation of rival factions—a theme evident in a series of new essays covering the late 1930s through the actions, and perception, of the 'guilty men', the 'glamour boys', and the Cliveden set.

Further links are established in themes with the addition of 16 new 'reference lists' and nine 'feature essays' in which authors reflect on historical anniversaries or forthcoming events from a biographical (and personal) perspective. Among the features in this update are commemorations of Scottish dynastic struggle in 1406, English opera in 1656, and a look ahead to the 2006 world cup finals through the dictionary's existing coverage of British footballers and officials, including the occasional referee.

Website developments: public access

In addition to our new academic content this update includes significant developments in the dictionary's availability and usefulness. Following an agreement between OUP and the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, the Oxford DNB (along with other Oxford reference works) can now be consulted by 48 million residents in England and by all residents of Northern Ireland through their public libraries; further extensive public library access is available to readers in other parts of the United Kingdom, and worldwide. (You can consult a full list of subscribing British public libraries here.) If you are a registered reader at a subscribing library you should be able to log on at home using your library's subscription. Ask your librarian about this.

It's also easy to keep up with Oxford DNB news and features by signing up for our new RSS ('really simple syndication') web feed, which will send you our daily biography, and details of new and free content as it becomes available. More information on signing up to RSS is available here. Librarians may find that promoting this feed is a convenient way of reminding their patrons of their subscription.

We have also added more links from Oxford DNB biographies to the Royal Historical Society's bibliographies—bringing the total number of deep links to partner websites to almost 40,000—and we continue to improve the dictionary's indexes.

Our next online update

Our next online update will be published in autumn 2006. This release will extend and develop the dictionary's coverage of photographers and early film-makers, school founders and benefactors, and men and women who are remembered for a life in service. In addition to new biographies the autumn update will offer topical features on the Suez crisis, and a third set of reference group articles that happily includes not just the Wise but also the Nonsense Club—along with their kindred spirits the Goons.

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October 2006 preface

New online contents, October 2006

Welcome to the sixth online update of the Oxford DNB, which appears shortly after the second anniversary of the dictionary's publication in September 2004. In this update we continue to extend and develop the dictionary's coverage of men and women who shaped the British past worldwide, from the earliest times to the year 2002.

Our latest update adds biographies of 144 men and women who left their mark on British history between the thirteenth and the late twentieth century, as well as 26 new theme articles (comprising 20 reference group essays and 6 features) located in the ‘themes’ area of the online edition. In this update we focus on three areas in which new subjects shared a common interest or identity: photographers and early film-makers, school founders and benefactors, and those who are remembered for lives in royal and domestic service. Our remaining biographies record, among others, coffee-house keepers, merchants, poets, a river pilot, surgeons, and a tunnel-builder; chronologically our 144 new lives range from the abbot Richard of Ware (d.1283) to the servant Margaret Powell (1907-1984), whose memoirs prompted the popular television series Upstairs, Downstairs. Extracts from the new update are available in the ODNB reading room for October.

Photographers and early film-makers

If you use the online dictionary's ‘image’ search (to look through the dictionary's 10,300 portraits) you may already be familiar with the names of Bassano, Coster, Stoneman, and Vandyk. They appear in the captions of hundreds of nineteenth- and twentieth-century portrait photographs reproduced to illustrate subjects in the Oxford DNB. The work of the photographers Alexander Bassano, Howard Coster, Walter Stoneman, and the father and son partnership of Carl and Herbert Vandyk is now preserved in the National Portrait Gallery, London, whose curators were responsible for selecting the likenesses in the Oxford DNB. It is therefore fitting that, in the year of the NPG's 150th anniversary, the dictionary's latest update adds entries on the photographers whose work is central to the NPG's photographic collection (started in 1917) but about whose lives and careers relatively little has previously been written. Moreover, at a time when mobile phones and digital cameras make it ever easier to record people and places, these new biographies recall a time when photography enjoyed its first boom. In 1851 there were 12 commercial photographers in London; by 1857 there were 155. Among them was Alexander Bassano, who built up a fashionable firm with studios in London's Regent Street, Bond Street, and the King's Road where he photographed the leaders of late Victorian and Edwardian society. Fashionable figures from later generations were recorded by, among others, Horace Nicholls (1867-1941), famous for this studies of Edwardians at play, Howard Coster (1885-1959), the pre-eminent photographer of British literary figures in the interwar period, and Walter Stoneman (1876-1958), whose archive of 40,000 negatives forms the cornerstone of the NPG collection.

Others included in this update are remembered as pioneers of photography beyond the studio. The Scot William Carrick was brought up in St Petersburg and specialized in recording nineteenth-century Russian folk scenes; Cecilia Glaisher (1828-1892) is known for her beautiful prints of British ferns, while Francis Mortimer (1874-1944) developed an expertise in marine photography, securing himself by a lifeline to cliffs and boulders in order to capture crashing rocks. Between 1914 and 1918 Horace Nicholls set aside his society portraits and undertook an official record of female munitions workers. It was a similar combination of studio and documentary work that shaped the career of the Liverpool photographer Edward Chambré Hardman, whose day-to-day work was portraiture but who is best-known for his land- and cityscapes, including the image of the Ark Royal rising from the Birkenhead shipyard. Social documentary was also a favoured subject of such pioneer film-makers as Birt Acres (1854?-1918), whose film of the Oxford and Cambridge boat race of March 1895 is thought to be Britain's first news film, and the partnership of Sagar Mitchell (1866-1952) and James Kenyon (1850-1925), whose recently rediscovered films of industrial Lancashire, shown last year by the BBC, have introduced a modern audience to a previously lost world.

School founders and benefactors

Schools and charitable institutions affect countless lives, making it appropriate that their founders should always have been well represented in the dictionary. They are joined in this latest update by a number of men and women whose posthumous influence, local and national, even international in some cases, is given a personal quality by the attachment of their names to their benefactions. By the fifteenth century, as Nicholas Orme shows in his new schools feature article, such munificence was no longer confined to nobles and bishops, but was also the work of lawyers and knights, often acting together with their wives, and this trend continued in the sixteenth century and afterwards. John Cooke (d. 1528), who with his wife Joan (d. 1544/5) founded the Crypt School in Gloucester, was a mercer, while Agnes Mellers (d. 1513/14), honoured today as the effective founder of Nottingham high school, was the widow of a successful bell-founder. Religion was often the motivating spirit behind the endowment of schools. During the reformation the generous piety that created a school could be either backward-looking, like that of John Roysse (d. 1571) at Abingdon, concerned to maintain the standards of the Catholic past, or inspired by protestant ideology, promoting education to ensure that the young received an appropriately godly upbringing. Thomas Alleyne (c.1488-1558), a clergyman who founded no fewer than three schools, falls into this category.

Works of charity, whether strictly educational or not, could be established anywhere, and by women as well as by men. In some cases wives supported or completed projects initiated by their husbands, but others—Lady Dorothy Pelham (d. 1613) is a good example—acted independently. Radcliffe College at Harvard in New England bears the maiden name of Ann Moulson, Lady Moulson (1576-1661), whose gift of £100 created Harvard's first scholarship fund. Several of the new subjects, Ann Moulson among them, lived in or near London; others were active far from the capital, like Thomas Ellis (d. 1562) at Doncaster and Sir James Smith (c.1621-1681) at Camelford in Cornwall. Some passed quiet and useful lives, while others were men of the world, among them the London financier Francis Bancroft (1667-1728), who appears to have left a decidedly equivocal reputation as well as a fortune, while George Watson (1654-1723) of Edinburgh was both politically alert and a financial wizard, as one might expect of the first accountant to the Bank of Scotland.

Servants and lives in service

The popular image of the servant in history is of a life ‘below stairs’ in which the individuality required for biography was subordinated in the service of better-known masters. This is indeed the case for the great majority of servants, valets, and butlers whose lives go unrecorded. Others, however, are remembered and increasingly studied in histories of work, youth, and domestic life, and are known to us through several routes. In the middle ages and the early modern period—when traditional values based on lordship still carried much weight—service did not necessarily bring with it later associations of low social standing. As a result royal maids, including Katherine Knollys, Lady Knollys (d. 1569) and Katherine Howard, countess of Nottingham (d. 1603), were themselves prominent women of standing. Other royal servants—among them the saddler Thomas Cure and the tailors John Skut and Walter Fish—are studied for their contribution to the material culture of the Tudor court.

A second set of servants are known through their association with celebrated masters. As well as providing a record of the Restoration élite Samuel Pepys's diary gives a remarkable account of the lives of a group of predominantly young men and women who served (as well as taxed and exasperated) their master, and who are now brought together in an essay on the ‘Servants of Samuel Pepys’. The hazards and humour of master-servant relations are likewise evident in the life of Henry Moat, the spirited butler of Sir George Sitwell and a popular figure in the memoir of Sir George's son Osbert. Finally there are those servants we remember for their own words. The eighteenth-century accounts of John Harrower and William Moraley, for example, provide rare insight into the lives of indentured servants who sold themselves into service to gain work in the American colonies, while Margaret Powell gained prominence with Below Stairs (1968), her unsentimental account of a career from kitchen maid to cook. As with the school founders, these biographies are accompanied by a new feature essay, ‘Lives in service’, surveying the dictionary's coverage of historically significant servants.

Local heroes and ‘lives from below’

Memoirs and journals also feature in a number of new lives with strong regional associations, though they are also the subject of wider historical study. The Windsor police officer John Pearman (1819-1908) is today remembered for his remarkable account (posthumously published in 1988 as A Radical Soldier's Tale) of life in India during the Anglo-Sikh wars. Another rare commentary on life in the ranks came from the Dublin-born soldier Roger Lamb, whose journal of the American War of Independence was published in 1809 and later formed the basis of Robert Graves's two novels Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth and Proceed, Sergeant Lamb. In Glasgow William Cameron, popularly known as Hawkie, was celebrated as a beggar and pedlar of songs and is known to historians of Victorian street culture from his posthumous Autobiography of a Gangrel. It was also a memoir that brought Victoria Hughes (1897-1978) unexpected fame at the age of eighty. Between the 1930s and 1960s Hughes worked as a lavatory attendant in an area of Bristol frequented by prostitutes, to whom she gave support and whose lives she candidly described in her Ladies' Mile; in 1993 Hughes's contribution to Bristol civic life was commemorated with a blue plaque on the facilities she supervised for over thirty years.

Other local figures owe their fame to deeds rather than words. The Sunderland sailor Jack Crawford (1775-1831) was a man of action who climbed the broken mast of Admiral Duncan's flagship at the battle of Camperdown (1797) to restore the fallen blue squadronal standard. Crawford's bravery in ‘nailing the colours to the mast’ made him a popular hero on his return to Britain and more recently a prominent figure in Sunderland's heritage. Other lives defy easy categorization. In 1569 Agnes Bowker of Market Harborough, Leicestershire, was associated with a monstrous birth, bringing her to the attention of the bishop of London, and providing her with an appearance in a later medical treatise as ‘one Bowker ... which of late, God wot, is brought to bed of a cat’.

New themes: groups and features

In addition to new biographies October's update continues to supplement the Oxford DNB's 55,828 lives with a range of reference materials located in the themes area of the online dictionary. Here we publish our third instalment of reference group articles that explain well-known networks that brought together leading figures from the past. The new groups, gangs, and associations added in October 2006 cover 1500 years of human interaction—from the early Welsh poets known as the cynfeirdd to the Inklings of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkein. Along the way we encounter the Jacobean writers who met at London's Mermaid tavern and the X Club scientists; further afield are groups central to early American history, including the Pilgrim Fathers and the trustees for the colony of Georgia. Three more groups in this update are connected by the theme of knowledge, and its absence: the Aberdeen Philosophical Society or ‘Wise Club’ of enlightenment thinkers, their contemporaries in London's Nonsense Club, and those modern masters of idiocy and eccentricity, the Goons.

November 2006 sees the fiftieth anniversary of the Suez crisis, to which Michael Thornhill provides a guide in the first our new feature essays. In addition to our essays on school founders and servants this release includes features by Paul Addison on the shapers of the home front, 1939 45, and Stephen Porter on the impact of the great fire of London, 240 years on.

Our next online update

Our next online update will be published in January 2007 and, like previous January releases, will extend the dictionary's coverage of men and women who have died in the early twenty-first century. In January 2007 we will add some 200 biographies of people who died in the year 2003. January's update will also include new features on prominent anniversaries, including the Act of Union (1707) and the abolition of the slave trade (1807).

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