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2007 updates: introductions

January 2007

New online contents, January 2007

Welcome to the seventh online update of the Oxford DNB, in which, as every January, we extend the dictionary's coverage further into the twenty-first century. Our latest update adds biographies of 202 men and women who died in 2003, along with three feature essays, two of which mark the forthcoming anniversaries of the abolition of the slave trade (March) and the Act of Union (May). Selected biographies from the new update are available in the Oxford DNB reading room for January.

Of the 202 new lives added here, some 59 (29%) were born before the outbreak of the First World War and 9 (4%) were born after the Second World War. The majority were, therefore, born between the wars and flourished from the 1950s until the 1990s, though the activities of some new additions, such as Diana, Lady Mosley, took place in earlier decades. The wife of Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, she attained her significance through marriage in the 1930s. The oldest of the group, the biochemist Walter Morgan, was born in 1900; the youngest, the opera singer Susan Chilcott, was born in 1963. In the case of the nutritionist Doris Grant, who lived to be 98 and advocated the consumption of organic vegetables and wholemeal flour, it might be said that she practised what she preached. The inventor of the ‘Grant loaf’, she advised British women that ‘if you love your husbands, keep them away from white bread ... If you don't love them, cyanide is quicker but bleached bread is just as certain, and no questions asked.’ Among other things, the mathematician Donald Coxeter attributed his longevity to an abiding fascination with his subject and standing on his head for fifteen minutes each morning. Of the new subjects added in this update 46 are women, while 29 were born outside the British Isles, fourteen of them in the then British empire and five in Germany. Among the latter, the life of Sir Bernard Katz, the Nobel prize-winning physiologist whose entry has been written by another Nobel prize-winner, Sir Andrew Huxley, reminds us of the great infusion of intellectual talent brought to Britain by refugees from central Europe during the 1930s.

Poetry, art, and architecture

Among the most notable additions in this update are the cluster of poets and their editors who died in 2003. Three poets—Charles Causley, Kathleen Raine, and Peter Redgrove—were winners of the queen's gold medal for poetry. Four others join them: F. T. Prince, C. H. Sisson, Peter Russell, and William Cookson, the editor for nearly forty years of the poetry journal Agenda. Taken together this group is nothing if not diverse. Contrast the life of Charles Sisson, a senior civil servant in the Ministry of Labour (who ‘did not reach the top after all / Because I had not the right sort of mind’) and who wrote a style of fiercely honest, simple, and direct verse, with that of Kathleen Raine, a famous undergraduate beauty who had several marriages and complex affairs, and whose poetry focused on the mythic, transcendental, and eternal. Raine's life was marked by several deeply unhappy and unfulfilled romantic attachments. Peter Redgrove, on the contrary, enjoyed a tremendous burst of creative energy after meeting his second wife, the novelist Penelope Shuttle. Charles Causley, who was born in Cornwall and who taught in a primary school there for thirty years, was inspired by his childhood and that of his pupils. Redgrove also celebrated ‘the numinous seascapes and landscapes of Cornwall’. But F. T. Prince, though he wrote poetry throughout his life, is usually remembered for one remarkable poem set in Italy in 1942, ‘Soldiers Bathing’, one of the most famous literary works of the Second World War. Several of the group—Causley, Sisson, Russell—saw active service overseas between 1939 and 1945, and Prince spent the war cracking codes at Bletchley Park. Peter Russell, meanwhile, found a vehicle for his verses in his creation of Quintilius, an invented Latin poet of the fifth century whose poetry Russell supposedly translated: ‘he particularly enjoyed one pompous review, which declared that the translations were not a patch on the originals’.

The visual arts and architecture are also well represented in the January 2007 update. The sculptors Lynn Chadwick and Daphne Hardy Henrion are joined by the painters Patrick Procktor and Sir Terry Frost, the potter Michael Casson, the wood-engraver Monica Poole, and by Terence Parkes, the cartoonist ‘Larry’. Two entrepreneurial arts administrators are also included: Jeremy Rees, who founded the Arnolfini arts centre in Bristol, and Joanna Drew, director of the Hayward Gallery on London's South Bank, who was for many years ‘unquestionably the most powerful individual in the British art scene’. Several eminent architects now join their former partners in the pages of the dictionary: Sir Philip Powell of Powell and Moya joins Hidalgo Moya; Neville Conder of Casson, Conder & Partners joins Sir Hugh Casson; and Peter Smithson joins his wife Alison. Another architect, the idiosyncratic Cedric Price, is now best known for his design of the Snowdon Aviary at the London Zoo but his remarkable unbuilt projects—a Fun Palace designed for the theatre director Joan Littlewood, the Potteries Thinkbelt, and an early proposal for ‘a great wheel-like structure of observation cars’ on the South Bank, prefiguring the London Eye—are also notable.

History, politics, and public service

Among the scholars who died in 2003 are some very notable historians whose influential work formed the historical consciousness of the post-war era. Christopher Hill made the study of England in the seventeenth century his life's work, adding not only to our knowledge of the politics and religion of the age but introducing a generation of readers to the radical groups which emerged during the civil war in a ‘world turned upside down’. Robert Blake's biography of Disraeli made him a doyen of modern political history, an expert on the constitution, and a Conservative grandee in his own right. John Roberts, trained as a historian of modern Europe, wrote a magisterial and very well-received History of the World. Hugh Trevor-Roper ranged freely across the ages, from the rise of Christian Europe to the last days of Hitler, lighting upon remarkable and interesting characters from Archbishop Laud to Sir Edmund Backhouse and entertaining readers with his wit, insight, and penetration. All four were educated and taught in Oxford. They are joined by two notable historians of the United States, Esmond Wright (who was also a Conservative MP) and Frank Thistlethwaite, later vice-chancellor of the new University of East Anglia. John Terraine took an unfashionable view of the Great War, contesting the prevalent view that brave British lions were led to their deaths by commanding donkeys; he lived to see his defence of the officers vindicated by more recent scholarship. Len Garrison was a pioneer black historian; John G. Hurst was a specialist in medieval archaeology; Marjorie Reeves wrote popular histories for children; and Alan Davidson and Elisabeth Lambert Ortiz were both pioneers of a historical sub-discipline that has now achieved its maturity, the history of food.

The January 2007 update also includes another historian, and one whose biographer, Tony Howard, believes will be remembered as much for his books and historical essays as for his place in national political life. Roy Jenkins, the subject of our longest new entry, may be said to characterize the post-war era. A Labour MP under Clement Attlee, home secretary and chancellor of the exchequer under Harold Wilson in the 1960s, president of the European Commission in the 1970s, and then a founder and leader of the breakaway Social Democratic Party in the 1980s, Jenkins probably had more influence over British public life than many post-war prime ministers. Though he did not reach the very apex of politics, to which he aspired, his legacy—including the liberal social legislation of the 1960s, the orientation of Britain towards the European Union, and the transformation of the old Labour Party—has shaped public and private life in the present. Jenkins embodied an older and now dying tradition of the scholar-politician, and his biographies of Gladstone, Asquith, Churchill, and Truman, among many other books he wrote, would have ensured his place in the Oxford DNB even had he not had a political career. He is joined in this release by another scholar who brought distinction to public life, the moral philosopher Sir Bernard Williams, whose writings on ethics brought him not only academic success and international repute but a role as a public intellectual in the 1960s and 1970s and an adviser to government.

In addition to Roy Jenkins this update adds three further politicians born in Wales: Aubrey Jones, a Conservative; the nationalist and member of the Welsh assembly Phil Williams; and Gareth Williams, Baron Williams of Mostyn, leader of the House of Lords in the Blair administration, whose memoir has been written by the current lord chancellor, Lord Falconer. The contrasting character and careers of two Labour MPs, Renee Short ‘the red-headed firebrand’ as the tabloid newspapers always described her, and Don Concannon, the unfortunate representative of the Nottinghamshire coalfields, provide evidence of the diverse political traditions within the Labour movement. George Younger, secretary of state for Scotland, and Sir Denis Thatcher provide two faces of Conservatism in the 1980s, with Thatcher's support and counsel instrumental in his wife's early career as an MP and her rise to political power. He also provided the nation with a stock of jokes for more than a decade; there are fewer higher accolades in British public life than to have a regular page about oneself in the magazine Private Eye.

This release also includes the lives of Sir Charles Kerruish, probably the leading Manx politician of the twentieth century, and Max Nicholson, a pioneer environmentalist. If these names are relatively unfamiliar, the name of another new entrant to the dictionary, that of David Kelly, weapons inspector, will resonate with readers. Kelly's death by suicide, which followed his exposure as the possible informant of a BBC journalist accused of misinformation, led to the Hutton inquiry into the corporation's reporting of the origins of the war in Iraq, and subsequent unprecedented resignations of senior executives of the BBC. Although he was made famous in this tragic manner, it is worth remarking on Kelly's significant achievements as a biochemist, toxicologist, and leading expert on chemical and biological weapons. These would have made him a candidate for inclusion in the Oxford DNB independent of the events of 2003.

Laboratories, courts, classrooms, and boardrooms

Among scientists and engineers now added to the dictionary the work of Sir Bernard Katz is pre-eminent. Born in Leipzig, where he took a medical degree, Katz came to Britain in the 1930s and spent much of his career at University College, London. There he investigated the functioning of nerves and muscles, especially at those points where a nerve impulse is transferred from nerve to muscle fibre, work recognized with the Nobel prize for physiology or medicine in 1970. In another field the aircraft designer and executive Sir George Edwards enjoyed a long and creative career which saw him involved in all types of project, from the manufacture of wartime minesweepers to the development of Concorde. He is justly described in his Oxford DNB article as ‘the most widely accomplished and highly regarded British aircraft designer and industrial leader after the original pioneers’. January's update also includes three pioneers in computing: Arthur Humphreys, the managing director of ICL, Britain's flagship computer manufacturer in the 1960s; Sir John Fairclough, head of development at IBM UK, who became chief scientific adviser to Margaret Thatcher and reorganized science funding in Britain; and Roger Needham, who designed cryptographic controls for authentication, and after a career at Cambridge University became the first managing director of Microsoft Research Ltd. They are joined by a number of important medical scientists: the epidemiologist Roy Acheson; the rheumatologist Eric Bywaters; Ross Taylor, the pioneering transplant surgeon based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne; and two biochemists who worked together on the blood system, Walter Morgan and Winifred Watkins.

In its new coverage of legal lives January's update highlights many different facets of the law through the lives of its practitioners. Lord Wilberforce is accounted, in an article by Lord Neill, one of the foremost judges of the twentieth century; Sir John Smith was one of its most eminent legal scholars. Sir Stephen Tumim became a nationally known figure for his stern criticisms of the prison system and the conditions in which prisoners were held during the 1990s. Peter Carter-Ruck was a celebrity libel lawyer, a flamboyant figure who made a career out of defamation and slander. And if Hartley Shawcross failed to achieve his full potential in either the law or politics, for a moment immediately after the Second World War, as one of the prosecutors at the Nuremburg trials of Nazi war criminals, he was a figure of international renown. Among educationists a very notable feature of this release is the number of founding vice-chancellors of new universities. Frank Thistlethwaite at the University of East Anglia is joined by Jack Butterworth, the controversial vice-chancellor of the new Warwick University, Bertrand Hallward, who presided over the transformation of University College, Nottingham, into Nottingham University, and Walter Perry, a pioneer of the Open University. Their collective presence is evidence of one of the most striking aspects of cultural and intellectual life in the late 1950s and 1960s, the first planned expansion of the university system. Staying with education, January's update also includes the leading comprehensive school headmistress Dame Helen Metcalf.

Those who made their careers in business, and who now appear in the dictionary, include the fashion designer Hardy Amies; Jennifer d'Abo, who revitalized the stationers Ryman; the property developer Max Rayne; and Sir Roland Smith, who was chairman of the House of Fraser and of Manchester United. Tony Cattaneo, the advertising executive, developed a distinctive, folksy style for television, and was responsible for both the Tetley tea men and the Homepride flour graders.

Screen, stage, and studio

The actresses added to the dictionary in this release are certainly diverse: Patricia Roc was a pin-up of the 1940s; Dame Wendy Hiller was a stage actress beloved by Shaw; while Dame Thora Hird—a familiar figure on television a generation ago, and an especial favourite of the playwright Alan Bennett—had by then enjoyed virtually a lifetime in films and theatre, having made her first stage appearance in 1911, aged eight weeks. Both Alan Bates and David Hemmings emerged in the 1960s. But if Hemmings, the star of Blow-Up, was always associated with this film's famous and controversial opening, Bates was a star in a host of films over forty years, though for many he will always be remembered as Rupert Birkin in Women in Love. They are joined by two men with quintessential 1960s reputations, John Schlesinger, the director of A Kind of Loving, Billy Liar, and Sunday Bloody Sunday, and Jeremy Sandford, the scriptwriter of Cathy Come Home, the 1966 docu-drama about the plight of the homeless, regularly voted the most influential of all television programmes. The theatre director Clare Venables, who worked at the Royal Court in London and the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield among other venues, is joined by the impresario Sir Peter Saunders, responsible for the famous production of Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, an ageless fixture of the London stage.

From the early days of television the Oxford DNB now includes Michaela Denis, who presented wildlife documentaries in a singular style with her husband Armand and was famed for putting on her lipstick before confronting an animal, and Barry Bucknell, the early TV DIY man. We also include the scriptwriter Peter Tinniswood and the entertainer and comic—indeed the comic's comic—Bob Monkhouse. Though his career occasionally plumbed such depths as Sunday afternoon's The Golden Shot, Monkhouse reinvented himself many times for new audiences, and his voluminous collection of jokes gave him plenty to work with.

Adam Faith, a star of the early 1960s, reminds us of a cheeky, home-grown variety of domesticated rock and roll then in vogue. Robert Palmer left his singing roots in white blues to become a successful 1980s crooner and lounge lizard. Maurice Gibb was a member, with his brothers, of one of the most successful and long-lasting bands of the age, the Bee Gees. And Mickie Most was a legendary producer of hit records from the 1960s to the 1980s who worked with many of the most memorable pop stars of that era, notching up thirty-seven ‘number one’ singles in either Britain or the USA. The dictionary also finds room for two jazz singers, Maxine Daniels and the great Elisabeth Welch, whose mellifluous voice made such songs as ‘Love for Sale’ and ‘Stormy Weather’ her own. Among sportsmen and sportswomen in this release are the motorcyclist Barry Sheene and the middle-distance runner Chris Brasher who, in a long career, was variously the pacemaker for Roger Bannister's four-minute mile, the co-founder of the London marathon, a sports journalist and administrator, and a businessman. The darts player Leighton Rees and the shot-putter Arthur Rowe are the first people recorded in the Oxford DNB for their contribution to these sports. Vernon Pugh oversaw major changes in the organization of rugby union; Peter West's voice was heard commentating on matters as varied as cricket, the BBC programme Come Dancing, and horseracing; while John Banks made money out of the latter as a successful and widely known bookmaker.

Finally, and as with all Oxford DNB updates, some contributions to British history are defined by their singularity. So here we publish too the lives of Alan Nunn May, the spy; of the man who introduced acupuncture to Britain, J. R. Worsley; of Sidney Bloom, the founder of the eponymous kosher restaurant in Whitechapel, the scene for a thousand Jewish jokes; and of the first female foreign legionnaire, Susan Travers. All human life is here, the eccentric alongside the respectable; the comic as a counterpoint to the highly serious. These two hundred biographies present a record of recent national life in all its features and we commend them to our readers.

Our next online update

Our next online update will be published in May 2007 and will focus on men and women active from the ‘earliest times’ to the later twentieth century. In May we begin two long-term projects, the first to extend the dictionary's coverage of people who shaped the British empire and early Commonwealth, and the second to provide a complete biographical record of the post-conquest medieval episcopate. May's update will also see a considerable expansion in our reference group project, which provides essays on well-known historical clubs, gangs, and sets—with new articles ranging chronologically from the companions of William the Conqueror to Labour's St Ermins group of the 1980s, and geographically from Lincolnshire's Spalding Gentleman's Society to the crew members of Australia's first fleet.

Back to top of January 2007 preface

May 2007

New online contents, May 2007

Welcome to the eighth online update of the Oxford DNB, in which, as every May and October, we extend the dictionary's coverage of men and women active 'from the earliest times' to the twentieth century. In this update we publish the first sets of biographies from two new research projects we are running at the Oxford DNB. The first will extend the dictionary's coverage of people who shaped the government, politics, economy, society, and cultural life of the British empire and the early Commonwealth. Our second project adds biographies of bishops of English and Welsh sees between the Norman conquest and the Reformation, thus extending our coverage to provide a full record of every archbishop and bishop in this period. Work continues on both projects and we will publish the full list of new lives (approximately 150 imperial and Commonwealth subjects and 100 post-conquest bishops) in periodic updates over the next two years.

As well as 73 new biographies May's update adds a further 50 'reference group' articles—essays on well-known historical clubs, sets, gangs, and networks in which noteworthy individuals came together to shape aspects of national life in the British Isles and overseas. Publication of this latest set of group essays continues our project to write a history of associational life from the early middle ages to the late twentieth century, and so trace a series of connections between individuals covered separately in the Oxford DNB. In addition to these new groups May's update includes eight 8 'reference lists' for quick fact checking and two 'feature essays' that set our new imperial and episcopal lives in historical context.

As ever, full details of the update are available from the New online contents page. Extracts from the update are available through the June issue of the Oxford DNB's free monthly magazine. Free access to the complete Oxford DNB is available worldwide through college and university libraries and through nearly every public library in Britain, many of which provide their members with easy home access. Click here for details of your nearest public library in the UK.

Imperial and Commonwealth lives

Globalization is a relatively new term, but the processes and interconnections it is used to describe are of course far from new. Britain was a 'globalized' country from at least the sixteenth century, and it would be impossible to write a history of modern Britain without dwelling at length on the history of the British empire, both formal and informal, and on the interactions between Britain and other parts of the world that both underpinned and resulted from Britain's global role. The Victorian DNB, written at the height of empire, made little distinction between Britons at home and Britons overseas, especially in the various colonies of settlement. The DNB's later supplements continued this process by including leading figures from the Indian subcontinent, Africa, the Caribbean, south-east Asia, and the Pacific. The Oxford DNB as published in 2004 included several hundred imperial and Commonwealth lives overlooked in the compilation of the earlier dictionary, and in May 2007 we publish a further 50 memoirs consolidating and extending our coverage in this important area—the first of several sets we will publish over the next few years.

Colonial administrators are already well represented in the dictionary (as a look at the lists in the themes area will show), but some important figures have yet to be included. In this update we publish the life of Lucius Cary, tenth Viscount Falkland (1803-1884), a man 'so far as can be judged, of no great intellectual endowments' , who nevertheless served as governor successively of Nova Scotia and Bombay at crucial periods in their history. Sir Geoffrey Colby (1901-1958) was a markedly progressive governor of Nyasaland, committed to African landownership and development; Sir Henry Belfield (1855-1923), by contrast, presided over the alienation of much African-farmed land in Kenya. Allan Marwick (1877-1966) was a mentor to King Sobhuza, a crucial figure in the development of Swazi 'traditionalism', and the author of the 'best-documented and most damning indictment of British colonial policy ever written by a long-serving official'.

Other Europeans travelled to distant parts of the empire not to govern but to trade, like the brothers John Moir (1851-1940) and Frederick Moir (1852-1939), founders of the African Lakes Company, which at one point rivalled Rhodes's British South Africa Company. Others travelled to learn, among them Jacob Schön (1803-1889), the Baden-born missionary and Hausa scholar of whom David Livingstone remarked: 'This man's name will live generations after mine has been forgotten.' Margaret Noble (1867-1911) became a well-known writer on Hindu culture and a follower of Swami Vivekananda, who gave her the name by which she is remembered, Sister Nivedita. In a later generation Bede Griffiths (1906-1993) influentially bridged Hinduism and Christianity without forsaking his vocation as a Benedictine monk.

Colonial politicians and nationalist leaders form an important group in this update, building on the significant numbers already included in the dictionary. Joey Smallwood (1900-1991), who led the movement to incorporate Newfoundland into Canada, now joins the other fathers of Canadian confederation, while Michael Savage (1872-1940) becomes the twenty-fourth premier of New Zealand to be included in the dictionary. From Burma we now include a trio of important nationalist politicians, Aung San (1915-1947), Ba Maw (1893-1977), and Ne Win (1911-2002); from Malaya, Dato Sir Onn bin Jaafar (1895-1962), founder of the United Malays National Organization, and Tun Sir Tan Cheng Lock (1883-1960), founder of the Malayan Chinese Association; and from India Sir Sikander Hyat-Khan (1892-1942), premier of the Punjab, and A. K. Fazlul Haq (1873-1962), chief minister of Bengal and later a governor of East Pakistan. Other important politicians now added to the dictionary include Dunduzu Chisiza (1930-1962) from Nyasaland/Malawi, Simon Kapwepwe (1922-1980) from Northern Rhodesia/Zambia, Vere Bird (1909-1999) from Antigua, and Milton Cato (1915-1997) from St Vincent.

The relationship between British rulers and colonial subjects was by no means always antagonistic. George Ekim Ferguson (1864-1897) was a colonial surveyor of Fante descent who received honours from the Royal Geographical Society and whose early death was described by a British army officer as an 'irreparable loss'. James Johnson (c. 1836-1917), of Yoruba descent, became assistant bishop of Western Equatorial Africa and an important influence in the development of Anglicanism in west Africa. Rokeya Hossain (c. 1880-1932) was encouraged in her efforts to promote education for Indian Muslim women by the wife of the viceroy, Lady Chelmsford. Prince Frederick Duleep Singh (1868-1926), the third son of the deposed maharaja of Lahore, was a 'thorough Englishman' whose most notable legacy was to the preservation of historic buildings in his beloved Norfolk. These and other lives illustrate the multifarious ways in which people from Britain and its empire interacted, and the impact of Britain's imperial connections in both directions. If you would like to read more on this subject you may be interested in A. J. Stockwell's feature essay on Britons in south-east Asia, which is also published as part of this update.

Bishops and the pre-Reformation church

Our second project—to provide biographies on every bishop active in an English or Welsh see between the Norman conquest and the Reformation—begins with publication of 12 lives, ranging chronologically from John the Chanter (d. 1191), bishop of Exeter, to Richard Young, who became bishop of Rochester in 1404.

Completion of this project will see an extra 100 biographies added. Once in place, a complete list of more than 500 archbishops and bishops will provide scholars and students with a unique resource to study commonalities, differences, and developments within the make-up and activities of the pre-Reformation episcopate. From the complete sequence readers will be able to investigate issues relating to social status and education, the roles of the English monarchy and the papacy in episcopal appointments, individual bishop's contribution to diocesan life, and the biographical complexion of different dioceses. Even in this first set of 12 biographies several of these themes are apparent in the biographies of men like Simon of Apulia (d. 1223) and Richard Blund (d. 1253). Like John the Chanter both were bishops of Exeter, though Simon was a native of southern Italy and—close to the king—actively sought to restore royal authority in the south-west, while Bishop Richard was Exeter born and bred and was principally remembered as a 'mild spirited man stowte in his church's cause'. To accompany the start of this new project May's update includes a feature on the church in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by Henry Summerson.

New groups in British history: First Fleeters to Sunday Tramps

The 50 essays on groups added in May 2007 continue our project to provide a history of significant networks, clubs, and associations in which men and women came together to shape Britain's past. As befits the dictionary, the range of groups now added is broad, extending chronologically from the Norman companions of William the Conqueror to the experimental dramatists and actors of Theatre Workshop, and—geographically—from the Dublin-based Monks of the Screw to the first fleeters who settled in Australia in 1788.

None the less, several common themes are discernible in many of the groups covered in this new set of essays and, more generally, in the full list of more than 125 groups currently available in the themes area of the online edition. One such theme is the importance of war (to combatants and non-combatants alike) in the development of groups and networks, beginning of course with that circle of longstanding associates who accompanied William to England in 1066. Later military groupings include the fifteen Royal Navy captains who under Lord Nelson defeated the French fleet at the battle of the Nile in 1798. It is as Nelson's band of brothers that these officers are now best known, following Nelson's reference to Shakespeare's Henry V ('We few, we happy few, we band of brothers') to highlight a spirit of collective action and homogeneity that, in truth, existed only as a rousing figure of speech. Retrospective labelling is again evident in another military association, the British expeditionary force, or BEF, who fought in France in 1914 and whose identity as a group owes much to members' later self-identification as the Old Contemptibles following alleged comments by Kaiser Wilhelm II. War and its aftermath also brought civilians together in this period. The Romney Street group, for example, took its name from the London residence where members met from 1917 to discuss post-war reconstruction, while the British empire delegation to the Paris peace conference (1919-20) played a major political and diplomatic role in shaping the post-war settlement.

New groups formed during the Second World War include the Moot, a gathering of mainly Christian intellectuals who met during the 1940s to discuss educational and social reform, and panellists on the Brain's Trust, the BBC's hugely popular radio discussion programme. First broadcast in 1941, the Brains Trust was intended to provide servicemen and women with a stimulating discussion programme. In weekly episodes it brought together a diverse set of panellists, guided by regular contributors, to comment on questions submitted by the public. The result was a network of performers (rather like the Goons—a subject in a recent update) whose existence as a group became known to their 10 million listeners through the medium of broadcasting. The importance of a different mode of communication is also seen in two earlier science and engineering groupings, the eighteenth-century Lunar Society of Birmingham and the late nineteenth-century North British network, both of which combined meetings with active correspondence between members. Well-known associations like the Lunar Society also remind us of the importance of place as a means of creating and defining historical networks—be this place a house (Romney Street), an artistic community (the Ancients group of painters), a town (the Spalding Gentlemen's Society), a new world (the first fleeters or the founders of the Virginia Company, whose 1607 settlement of Jamestown we remember in May 2007), or in the case of the Bounty mutineers a single ship. Or on occasion it was the very absence of place that might define a group. Leslie Stephen's Sunday Tramps, for example, were a group of Victorian intellectuals who met fortnightly for discussion in the course of 20-25 mile walks.

As their name suggests, Stephen's Tramps purposefully eschewed religious worship in favour of, quite literally, intellectual pursuits. This desire to go against the grain offers a final common theme that links many of the new groups in May's update. Contributors to the Freewoman (1911-14), for example, sought to change prevailing attitudes to women's roles through publication of their 'weekly feminist review'; in literature the New Apocalypse poets of the 1940s actively sought to reject thirties modernism in favour of an 'organic' vision of the 'wholeness of man', while in art circles the creators of the Society for Painters in Water Colours (along with other art groups) were drawn together partly in reaction to the perceived élitism of one of the dictionary's existing groups, the founders of the Royal Academy of Arts. May's update also sees the addition of a number of more formal campaigning groups, including the eighteenth-century Friends of the People, which advocated franchise reform, and the Society for the Purpose of Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade; the mid-nineteenth-century Kensington Society, which campaigned for the extension of women's rights in marriage and work, the Labour Representation Committee, which sought to increase the labour interest in parliament (and became the Labour Party in 1906), and the men and women of the National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage.

Our next online update

Our next online update will be published in October 2007 and will continue to extend and develop the Oxford DNB's coverage from the 'earliest times' to the later twentieth century. October's update will focus on men and women with strong regional connections across the British Isles, now deserving of national recognition. Particular attention will be paid to industrialists and manufacturers, as well as women in sport and religious life. October's update will also include our next set of bishops and of clubs, gangs, and associations as we move to a final list of about 350 group essays in 2008/9.

Back to top of May 2007 preface

October 2007 preface

New online contents, October 2007

Welcome to the ninth online update of the Oxford DNB in which, as every May and October, we extend the dictionary's coverage of men and women active 'from the earliest times' to the twentieth century. This update also coincides with the third anniversary of the Oxford DNB's publication in 2004. In the three years since then updates have added new biographies of some 1300 people, as well as more than 300 'theme' articles for quick reference and research.

The October 2007 update adds biographies of 111 men and women, active between the twelfth and the late twentieth century. In addition to new biographies the update includes a further 35 'reference group' essays—our expanding selection of well-known groups, clubs, and networks in the British past, available (for people with subscriber access) in the themes area of the online edition. October's update also includes one new feature essay to mark the anniversary of another (this time fictional) historical gathering, William Walker's 1862 engraving of distinguished men of science, 1807/8—an early contribution to the creation and conceptualization of the 'industrial revolution'.

The principal focus of our new biographies in October 2007 is on regional lives: people with a close association with a particular region of the British Isles whose achievements gained them national attention and today make them subjects of interest for archivists, librarians, teachers, and students. In keeping with this focus, part of this update continues our project (begun in May 2007) to provide biographies of every pre-Reformation English bishop. October's selection adds a further seventeen episcopal lives, from Chichester to Ely to Carlisle, between the twelfth and sixteenth century.

As well as recording regional lives in a national context the Oxford DNB—and especially its online edition—is increasingly being used to see 'national figures' in their local context. Here Britain's public libraries and record offices play a crucial role as centres for local history, helped since 2006 by the Oxford DNB's availability online in nearly every English public library, all those in Northern Ireland, and many more in Wales and Scotland. Online technology means that most public libraries now offer remote access, allowing library members to log on to the dictionary for free from home (or from anywhere else). Combined with the Oxford DNB's geographical search facility, this excellent (and all too little known) library service now provides everyone with the potential to learn more about the shapers of town, city or county, as well as national, life. More information on free access to the complete Oxford DNB via your local library is available here.

As ever, full details of the October 2007 update are available from the New online contents page. Extracts from the update are also available here or from the October issue of the Oxford DNB's free monthly magazine.

Regional lives: beer and skittles

New entries on eighteen brewers extend the Oxford DNB's existing coverage of almost 100 men and women included principally as drink manufacturers. All our new subjects—several of whom are presented in family articles charting the rise of brewing dynasties—were responsible for nationally recognized brands. But, as is common with this industry, all are strongly associated with the places where they founded their businesses: in Yorkshire John Smith (1824-1879) of Tadcaster and Joshua Tetley (1778-1859) of Leeds; Manchester's Henry Boddington (1813-1866); the Simonds family of Reading and the Meux of London; Samuel Brain (1850-1903) in Cardiff; and the Tennent family of Glasgow. Alongside brewers October's update adds a life of Bessie Williamson (1910-1982) who—as the head of the Laphroaig distillery on the isle of Islay—was Scotland's only twentieth-century female distillery owner. Completing the set is the Hereford MP Charles Radcliffe Cooke (1840-1911), who promoted his county's local beverage so energetically that he was labelled the 'member for cider': he ensured that it was stocked in House of Commons' bars and advised a daily consumption of six apples and a pint of cider before bed.

Collectively the brewers highlight some common themes in the history of nineteenth-century manufacturing, taste, and social mobility. All were able to respond to the developments that created the mid- to late Victorian 'beer boom': a growth in demand born of rapid population increase and rising disposable income among the working class, use of the railways to establish national products (when many predicted the industry's decline with the end of the coaching inn), and the popularity of lighter pale ales at home and overseas. Collectively our new lives also suggest some interesting biographical themes. One is the importance of marriage in establishing their businesses: the rising fortunes of most of our brewers can be traced to their early connection with wealthier and more established families. Equally the extraordinary life of Valerie, Lady Meux (1852-1910), a Devon butcher's daughter and one-time actress who became one of the country's wealthiest women through marriage to the heir to the London brewing family's fortune, shows the other side of this relationship. Secondly, our new lives show both the rapid social elevation of these brewing dynasties, of whom the Meux are the prime example, and a readiness to become prominent benefactors in their localities, as shown in the activities of Brain in Cardiff, Boddington in Manchester, or the Tetleys of Leeds.

Benefaction and civic pride were characteristics shared with other individuals included in October's update. An extremely prosperous cloth merchant, William Browne (d. 1489), applied much of his accumulated wealth to finance works of charity in his native town of Stamford, Lincolnshire; the almshouse he endowed still survives, as do memorial brasses to his family in the parish church. To commemorate the elevation of Leeds to city status in 1893 a local industrialist, Walter Harding (1843-1927), financed the ambitious bronze sculpture scene that continues to dominate City Square, having previously helped to fund a public art gallery in the city.

Alongside beer, our skittles (of a kind) are provided in new entries on popular entertainers. From the mid-1940s to the late 1970s the clown Charlie Cairoli (1910-1980) was the main attraction at the Blackpool Tower circus, well known for his slapstick routines with their abundant use of soapy water. Originally from northern Italy, Cairoli became a British subject in the 1950s and is now commemorated by a permanent exhibition at Blackpool Tower. During the 1940s the town also played host to another clown, Nicholai Polakovs (1900-1974), better known as Coco, who began a forty-year involvement with the Bertram Mills circus in the late 1920s; Cairoli and Coco are joined in this update by a third performer, Adrien Wettach (1880-1959), who as Grock entertained British audiences between 1912 and 1924. New regional entertainers of a different kind include the Northumberland piper and rogue Jimmy Allan (1734-1810), whose name and legend live on in an eponymous pipe tune, and the Newcastle songwriter and ballad singer Joe Wilson (1841-1875). A librarian at the British Museum, Theo Marzials (1850-1920), was responsible for a string of popular songs and ballads in the 1870s and 1880s, as well as collections of verse (one of his compositions has been claimed as 'the worst poem ever written'). The financial backers of Teddy Solomon (1855-1895) were meanwhile disappointed in their hopes that his prolific output of operettas would rival the popularity of Gilbert and Sullivan. Music of a higher brow was the life's work of the concert pianist Benno Moiseiwitsch (1890-1963)—a favourite of Churchill—whose performances to wartime audiences included the lunchtime concerts held in the National Gallery.

Early twentieth-century Blackpool life is again recalled in the biography of the swimmer Lucy Morton (1898-1980), one of three Olympic gold medallists now added to the dictionary. Morton's talent was nurtured by Blackpool corporation and she was a double world record holder by 1920; four years later she became the first British woman to win an Olympic swimming gold. Her success came nearly three decades after that of the weightlifter Launceston Elliot (1874-1930), Britain's first Olympic gold medallist in the inaugural games of 1896. Elliot later became a music-hall strongman who concluded his act by supporting a troupe of sixteen men on his back. The Essex cricketer and all-round sportsman Johnny Douglas (1882-1930) also won gold in 1908 as a middleweight boxer. However, he is better remembered as the captain of the England cricket side that suffered a 5 0 whitewash at the hands of the Australians in the ill-fated Ashes tour of 1920-21, a margin of defeat unequalled in that fixture until 2006-7. Untimely death links Douglas (who perished in a shipping disaster) with other sporting figures included in October's update. Possibly the most gifted British racing driver of the interwar years, Dick Seaman (1913-1939), died in his mid-twenties after crashing in the Belgian grand prix in June 1939, his reputation rapidly fading on account of his tenuous association with the Nazi state (Hitler sent a wreath to his funeral). The Munich air disaster claimed the former Manchester City footballer Frank Swift (1913-1958), the first goalkeeper to captain England. The showjumper Caroline Bradley (1946-1983) overcame the disappointment of being omitted from the British team at the 1972 Olympics to become one of the most skilled riders in the world at the time of her sudden death.

Examples of sporting excellence are matched by lives devoted to widening participation in physical recreation. Irene Marsh (1875-1938), the founder of the Liverpool Physical Training College, belonged to the generation of women educators for whom physical exercise was a cornerstone of female emancipation. A representative of the succeeding generation, Gladys Wright (1891-1980), first principal of Nonington College of Physical Education in Kent, promoted gymnastics in the 1930s with a view to creating 'a fit nation: a people beautiful in body and sound in mind'. Acting on his doctor's advice to take open-air exercise, the St Albans businessman Samuel Ryder (1858-1936) became a keen golfer; his addiction to the sport led him to offer a gold trophy, the Ryder cup, for a competition between British and American professionals.

Independent spirits

Among those now added to the dictionary a number owe their noteworthiness to a readiness to challenge the conventions of their times. Demands for political reform in the 1840s galvanized the Ashton-under-Lyne schoolmaster William Aitken (1812?-1869) and the Croydon printer Thomas Frost (1821-1908), who produced some of the best-known recollections of the Chartist movement; Aitken endured a period of imprisonment and, like many other British radicals of the time, travelled to the USA. At the end of the nineteenth century Britain became a refuge for opponents of tsarism in Russia, including Felix Volkhovsky (1846-1914), who fled from Siberia and settled in west London, where his home became a meeting place for the community of Russian émigrés. Born in the Ukraine, Volkhovsky is one of three people in the update (Polakovs and Moiseiwitsch being the others) to have been born in the territories of the Russian empire.

A trio of women asserted their personal independence through changes in religious affiliation. Twenty-two-year-old Emily Loveday, born in Hammersmith in 1799 but schooled in France, scandalized opinion in the early 1820s by publicly defying her father's wishes and embracing Roman Catholicism. Later in the century the court of probate upheld the will of a wealthy widow and convert to Catholicism, Jane Weld (1806-1871), a significant benefactor to Westminster Cathedral, whose bequests to Roman Catholic causes had been challenged by her surviving family. Lady Evelyn Cobbold (1867-1963), who had married into the Suffolk brewing family, converted to Islam, and became the first British Muslim woman to make the hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca), her diary of which she published in 1934. Alongside this trio, the biographies can now be written of two Essex religious writers, Cicely Johnson and Rose Thurgood, following the discovery of conversion narratives that provide a fascinating insight into the life of puritan women in the early seventeenth century.

In keeping with this quintet, other new subjects are remembered for following a variety of religious trajectories. A prosperous skinner in the city of London, John Claydon (d. 1415), made his house a centre of heterodox activity, which brought him to the notice of the authorities. Recantation of heretical views was followed by relapse; his possession of books in the English language was considered suspicious, associating him with the Lollard movement, and he was executed by burning at Smithfield in September 1415. Moses Levy (1782-1854), a Jewish slavery abolitionist and the founder of a colony in Florida, came in the mid-1820s to London, where his cause was taken up by millenarian protestants, but he resisted their attempts at conversion. The writer and artist Peter Anson (1889-1975) was among the majority of the Anglican Benedictine community on Caldey Island who entered the Roman Catholic communion in 1913; he settled in north-east Scotland where he took a special interest in mission work among fishermen. Having drifted towards the Church of England over some two decades, the cultural critic Philippe Mairet (1886-1975) was received into the Anglican communion in 1943. Another wartime change of affiliation was that of the England rugby international and Fleet Street columnist Peter Howard (1908-1965), who was drawn to the revivalist Moral Re-Armament movement. Perhaps the most unconventional figure was Beatrice May Baker (1876-1973), the progressive, internationalist headmistress of Badminton School between the wars, whose sources of religious inspiration ranged from Plato to Marx; in chapel 'Jesus often had to share the stage with Lenin'.

Other notably independent women in the update include the diarist Betsey, Lady Fremantle (1778-1857), whose memoir provides a detailed record of life on board her husband's Royal Navy ship during the Napoleonic war, travels in continental Europe, and the raising of nine children. Lady Fremantle's life at sea brought her into close contact with her husband's commanding officer, Horatio Nelson, whose biographer, Carola Oman (1897-1978), is also added to the dictionary, together with the feminist writer Emily (Micky) Hahn (1905-1997). With the patronage of royalty, noblewomen, and bishops, Lady Isabella King (1772-1845), an aristocratic socialite in regency Bath, formed the Ladies Association to establish a conventual home for parentless single gentlewomen. Although dismissed by some contemporaries as a 'transient resting place for young ladies speculating on their advancement in life', her institution was inspired by the idea of reviving female religious communities in England.

Lives of invention

An abundance of independent spirit is also found in a new set of biographies on inventors and technical innovators. Many of these are again noteworthy for their strong regional connections, as in the case of George Bennie (1891-1970), whose prototype 'railplane'—a self-propelled passenger car intended to travel at 200 m.p.h. along an overhead rail—offered a vision of the future in 1920s Glasgow. Visitors to Brighton who today travel on the city's electric railway (the world's oldest) owe their experience to the local electrical engineer Magnus Volk (1851-1937); Volk's other creations for his home town included a 'seashore electric tramroad' that offered passengers a 'sea voyage on wheels' in a car running along a track on the seabed. Attempting to understand the tides over which Volk's tram ran was Edward Roberts (1845-1933), who designed and had built a mechanical tidal predictor, two metres tall and weighing more than two tonnes, which he and his son used to compute tides commercially. Roberts's machines constitute a pioneering family of analogue computers; his predictor is now on display at the World Museum, Liverpool.

Effective, if unorthodox, inventions also feature in the career of the paper manufacturer John Dickinson (1782-1869), whose first patent was for a non-smouldering, non-explosive cartridge paper and who followed this with, among other creations, the pre-paid and the gummed envelope for use in the new postal system. Ingenuity was likewise a characteristic of the submariner and recipient of the Victoria Cross Martin Nasmith (1883-1965), whose tactics included a fake periscope—comprising an oar and tobacco tin mounted on a raft—which he used as a decoy while patrolling in the Sea of Marmara in 1915. Finally, Geoffrey Pyke's contribution to naval warfare almost resulted in an even more unlikely structure in the early 1940s. Pyke proposed a fleet of ice ships (made from a composite of ice and powdered wood, known as Pykecrete) to be used in the north Atlantic as mobile airports and freighters. Having gained Churchill's approval, Pyke worked on plans with the Austrian chemist and later Nobel prizewinner Max Perutz.

It was with the aim of fostering innovation through financial awards that a well-connected group of individuals came together in 1753 to create the Society of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce. Alongside those already included we now add biographies of three more of its founding members: Jacob Bouverie, first Viscount Folkestone (bap. 1694, d. 1761), who chaired the society's first meeting; Robert Marsham, second Baron Romsey (1712-1793), who preferred practical science to the luxury and formality of high society; and John Goodchild (1697-1756), the proprietor of a linen drapery, who administered the society's finances. A century on, others made their mark as champions of new academic disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. A controversial appointment to one of the new university chairs in English in the late nineteenth century, and an early fellow of the British Academy, Arthur Sampson Napier (1853-1916), took a narrowly philological approach to his subject matter, excluding matters of literary criticism and taste. By contrast the gentleman amateur Edward Hutton (1875-1969) ranged widely in the field of Italian studies, which he did much to promote. Another amateur scholar, Victor Verasis Branford (1863-1930), applied the wealth he accumulated from his business interests in Latin America to promote the new discipline of sociology.

A final set of innovations was the responsibility of a trio of government advisers and civil servants now added to the dictionary. Despite failing to persuade governments to adopt commercial methods of bookkeeping, and spending his later years in disgrace for his own financial misconduct, the pioneering public accountant Peter Abbott (1774/5-1850) undoubtedly helped to pave the way for closer links between central government and the accounting profession. A private secretary to two Edwardian prime ministers (Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith), Vaughan Nash (1861-1932) used his influence to attempt to revitalize English village life during a period of agricultural decline. In between Abbott and Nash came the career of George Graham (1801-1888), the second head of the General Register Office, which organized the registration of births, marriages, and deaths, and the decennial population census. Graham gained the position through outright nepotism—his brother, the home secretary, appointed him—but his ruthless administrative ability purged inefficiency and turned the GRO into a highly effective collector of the data essential for government. His quiet achievement continues to benefit the thousands of people who can now locate their ancestors in the census records, and registration certificates, which his department created.

Groups in British history: prigs, rats, and steamboat ladies

The thirty-five reference group essays added in October 2007 continue our project to offer a history of significant networks, clubs, and associations in which men and women came together to shape Britain's past. Chronologically our latest selection ranges from the mid-thirteenth-century Montfortians—the followers of Simon de Montfort—to the 1950s when the Movement saw the emergence of a set of writers, nominally led by Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, who rejected modernism for realism. In part the Movement's importance, and to critics its offensiveness, derived from its members' celebration of their non-metropolitan upbringing. As with our new biographies, a number of October's groups also highlight aspects of regional history—be this religious practice (Cambridgeshire's Little Gidding community of the 1640s), intellectual life (the Great Tew circle), extra-parliamentary reform (the Birmingham Political Union), or academic debate (the Associated Prigs of Oxford). Our new essay on Cromwell's major-generals highlights a comprehensive regional network of nineteen officials whose purpose was to extend the protectorate's reach into every corner of the land. Essays on two further groups—the St John's Wood clique of nineteenth-century painters, and the writers, artists, and drinkers in 1930s and 1940s Fitzrovia—show the diversity of social networks within London's many districts.

Groups constructed by warfare take us overseas. The 'forgotten army' was the name adopted by British soldiers who believed that their campaign against the Japanese in Burma and north-east India received insufficient recognition from military leaders and the British public. In north Africa the soldiers of the 7th armoured division became known as the 'desert rats' after their commander's wife likened their skills to a jerboa (or desert rat) she observed in Cairo zoo; it was she too who was responsible for sketching the animal insignia that soldiers of the division came to wear with pride. A more diffuse military network is that of the war poets of 1914 18, who from the late 1920s were often regarded as a homogeneous group with shared experience of the western front. Subsequent studies have led to broader definitions of the war poets, with attention given to the work of non-combatants and of women writers who served. Even so, the literary and military connections between such authors as Graves, Sassoon, and Owen remain central to any discussion of a grouping that retains strong resonances in the popular imagination.

Like the writers of the First World War, the 'metaphysical' poets of the seventeenth century formed a network whose shared identity owes as much to scholarly debate over anthologization and style as it does to writers' face-to-face encounters. However, other new groups drew on more tangible connections. Several—including the contributors to the sixteenth-century anthology The Mirror for Magistrates, to the controversial Yellow Book of the 1890s, or to The New Age review—were connected by their involvement in a shared literary project. Some, like the members of the London Revolution Society (in the 1790s) or the MARS group (from the1930s), joined organizations to effect reform—be this in franchise extension or architectural taste—while others came together to establish new recreations, as did the Victorian founders of the Alpine Club, who promoted mountaineering. Finally, the 'shared journey' experienced by members of a network, though in most cases metaphorical, was very real for those involved with two more groups included in this update: the Jesuit missionaries who came to late Tudor England and the 'steamboat ladies', the 700 former students of Oxford and Cambridge who, denied a degree at their own institutions, sailed to Trinity College, Dublin to graduate between 1903 and 1907. A third group, the Providence Island Company, sought to colonize the New World in the 1630s, though its members and projectors remained on this side of the Atlantic.

If you'd like to read more about the groups project you may be interested in the online essay here and in my recent article 'Group analysis' in History Today (July 2007). Readers with access to the complete Oxford DNB (and this includes almost every member of a British public library) can also browse in the current set of 160 groups available in the themes area of the online edition. A selection of existing group essays is also freely available, along with some highlights from the new groups in the October 2007 update.

Our next online update

Our next online update will be published in January 2008 and will continue the Oxford DNB's coverage of recent and contemporary history with biographies of men and women who died in 2004. Our next set of group essays will appear as part of the next-but-one update, to be published in May 2008.

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