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2008 updates: introductions

January 2008

New online contents, January 2008

 

Welcome to the tenth 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 211 men and women who died in 2004, as well as entries on five people who died before this date, included within new articles. A selection of biographies from the new update is also freely available along with a full list of the new lives. Of the 211 new subjects who died in 2004 forty-four are women, fifty-seven were born before the outbreak of the First World War, and five were born after the conclusion of the Second World War. The oldest of the new set, the harpist Sidonie Goossens, was born in 1899; the youngest, the rock musician John McGeoch from the band Siouxsie and the Banshees, was born in 1955.

Lives in science

The January 2008 update includes five Nobel prize-winners: Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins (1962, physiology or medicine) for the discovery of the structure of DNA; Sir Godfrey Hounsfield (1979, physiology or medicine) for the development of the CT or CAT scanner; Sir John Vane (1982, physiology or medicine) for research into prostaglandins; and Sir John Pople (1998, chemistry) for advances in computational methods in quantum chemistry. The collaboration of Crick, Wilkins, and James D. Watson in uncovering the double helix structure of DNA has been the subject of extensive discussion and controversy ever since. At the time it required more than a little good fortune. As our articles explain, Crick and Watson in Cambridge almost gave up work on DNA after Sir Lawrence Bragg tried to move them to what he thought would be more fruitful fields, and Wilkins at King's College, London, was temporarily sidelined in consequence of a disagreement with the crystallographer Rosalind Franklin, who died in 1958. Had she lived, she might have shared the Nobel prize with them. Godfrey Hounsfield was the archetypal British eccentric who developed the idea for the CT scanner on long walks in Burnham Beeches in Buckinghamshire. He worked throughout his career at the EMI laboratories in Hayes. The Beatles recorded with EMI, ensuring that the company was flush with funds for research during the 1960s. The first clinical trial of a CT scanner took place in 1971, and whole-body scanners were launched in 1975. John Vane's work was immensely important for the development of anti-inflammatory drugs. John Pople's research made widely available computer programs to aid research in quantum chemistry.

These five are joined by other notable figures from the worlds of science and medicine. Norman Heatley was a key figure in another legendary British scientific breakthrough, the development of penicillin in Oxford during the Second World War. His genius for improvisation, using a Heath-Robinson style of contraption, allowed him to solve the problem of extracting and purifying penicillin. As Sir Henry Harris has put it: 'without Fleming, no Florey or Chain; without Chain no Florey, without Florey no Heatley, without Heatley no penicillin'. Frank Pantridge developed the portable defibrillator in the 1960s while working at the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast , and reflecting there on the appalling mortality caused by myocardial infarction. In consequence, during the 1960s Belfast was described as 'the safest place to have a heart attack'. Katharina Dalton coined the term 'premenstrual syndrome 'in 1953 and did much through her career to raise awareness of the physiological and behavioural effects associated with menstruation. The virologist Fred Brown elucidated the structure of the foot-and-mouth virus, distinguishing it from other infectious agents causing similar symptoms, and then led in the development of vaccines to fight the disease. He was highly critical of the control procedures used by the British government during the 2001 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, which did not include vaccination.

Among engineers included in this update are the space scientist Sir Robert Boyd; the telecommunications pioneer John Bray, who worked on the first transatlantic television broadcasts; and Jack Pateman, whose contribution was to aviation electronics, or avionics as it became known. The astrophysicist Thomas Gold worked with Fred Hoyle in Cambridge in the development of steady-state cosmology during the 1950s and 1960s, a theory of the universe subsequently discarded. John Maynard Smith was an evolutionary biologist with a talent for explaining his subject to the uninitiated. Charles Pereira was a hydrologist and expert in tropical agriculture. Frank Farmer made important contributions to medical physics.

Broadcasters to a nation

This remarkable constellation of scientific and medical experts, most of whom were at the height of their powers in the 1950s and 1960s, is joined by a very distinguished group of journalists and broadcasters, pioneers in many cases of new styles of communication using new media. That many of them became famous in their own right, rather than for what they told us or played to us, is evidence enough that in our age 'the medium is the message'.

The measured and mellifluous tones of Alistair Cooke, who, according to Simon Jenkins, 'never wrote a dull sentence', entertained and interested listeners to BBC radio for more than half a century. His Letter from America, started in 1946, was due to last for only thirteen weeks but carried on for fifty-eight years and 2869 episodes and was a vital source of information and reflection on the remarkable events in post-war America. Cooke's broadcasts set a standard and model for the radio essay as a genre. Bernard Levin was another household name of this period through his columns in The Times. His fame dated from his appearances as an upstart interviewer on the iconoclastic BBC television programme That Was The Week That Was in 1963-4. He found a most effective way to deal with irritating correspondents, beginning his replies, 'I felt I should let you know that an unregistered lunatic has obtained a supply of your notepaper'. Anthony Sampson began his career as the editor of Drum, a pictorial magazine for non-whites in South Africa, and remained attached to that country and an observer of its politics for the rest of his life. But he made his name in 1962 with the book The Anatomy of Britain, subsequently updated several times and always compelling, which caught the mood of the early 1960s exactly: 'young socialists saw it as a dissection of the ruling class and young conservative careerists used it as a route map to the top'. Compared with this trio of high-minded and intellectual columnists Lynda Lee-Potter was a very different type of writer who aimed at, and usually reached, the mind of middle England. Born in Leigh, Lancashire, in her own words she 'got on a train at Warrington Bank Quay Station with a Lancashire accent and got off at Euston without it'. Paul Foot followed an opposite trajectory. He was the son of a peer who had been governor of Jamaica and Cyprus; he was educated at Shrewsbury School and Oxford. But he was converted to Trotskyism on leaving university and he remained committed to the Socialist Workers Party for the rest of his life, editing Socialist Worker as well as writing regularly for Private Eye and the Daily Mirror. A 'steadfast beacon of integrity', he was the pre-eminent campaigning and investigative journalist of his generation who defended the innocent, among them the Guildford Four, the Birmingham Six, those convicted of killing Carl Bridgewater, and Colin Wallace.

John Peel began his career as a disc jockey in the American south in the 1960s when anyone from Liverpool, sounding like one of the Beatles, could be sure of an audience. He went on to educate the musical tastes of diverse British listeners on a nightly basis for much of the rest of his life as a fixture on Radio 1—but a fixture whose interests and enthusiasms were always developing, changing, and challenging. Remarkably, he also became a highly skilled and much loved general broadcaster with a devoted audience among the middle-aged and middle-class for his reflective Radio 4 magazine programme on family life and personal experience, Home Truths. His self-deprecating wisdom and humour made him a celebrity despite himself, and one whose sudden death was felt keenly by all ages. A similarly unerring eye for popular taste characterized Andrea Wonfor's career as a television producer and executive, responsible for The Tube, Byker Grove, Eurotrash, and The Big Breakfast . Fred Dibnah, from Bolton, Lancashire, the son of a bleacher's beetler, was Britain's most famous steeplejack, whose 'discovery' in 1978 by the BBC catapulted him to celebrity in more than one sense. His enthusiasm for the nation's industrial heritage, and for steam engines in particular, conveyed in several series of television programmes, helped to reignite popular interest in a world of work that seemed to have been lost. Milton Shulman, the flamboyant theatre critic of the Evening Standard for nearly forty years up to 1991, savaged many a London production. He had an equal passion for gambling, at which he was 'notably unsuccessful', though he had the satisfaction of taking his bookmaker to court and winning.

Sporting lives

A third group of significant deaths in 2004 comprised figures from the world of association football, more than ever the national sport despite the repeated failings of the national teams. Among players of the game now included in the Oxford DNB the great centre-forward (and centre-half) John Charles was a hero in three countries— Wales, England, and Italy. Born in Swansea, he played for Leeds and then for Juventus, where he was much loved and admired by the discerning Italian fans, who named him 'il Buon Gigante'. In 1956-7 he scored thirty-eight goals for Leeds, a haul only exceeded once since then in the top division. Sadly his career in business after retiring from football was much less successful. George Hardwick was a hero in Middlesbrough and captained England in a 10-0 victory over Portugal in Lisbon in 1947. He also dated Ava Gardner, Kay Kendall, and 'the Wicked Lady' Margaret Lockwood. Emlyn Hughes was another England captain, who led the team out on 23 occasions and won 62 caps in all. He was spotted by the Liverpool manager Bill Shankly at nineteen, and became a fixture for Liverpool and England in the late 1960s and 1970s. He was nicknamed Crazy Horse for his 'arm-flapping, head-down, all-action running style', itself a figuration of the enthusiasm he brought to the game as both player and pundit.

Two utterly contrasting but equally successful football managers are paired in this release: the self-effacing Bill Nicholson, who managed Tottenham Hotspur for sixteen years, during which they won eight major trophies including the first 'double' (winning the football league and the FA cup in the same season). Nicholson would not allow his wife and daughters to attend a match and looked askance at the money and fame given to a more recent generation of players. Brian Clough, on the other hand, revelled in self-publicity ('I wouldn't say I was the best manager in the business, but I was in the top one'). His own highly promising career as a footballer cut short by injury, he specialized in taking unfashionable clubs like Derby County and Nottingham Forest to the very top of the football league and added victory in the European cup in 1979 and 1980 while manager of the latter. Always at the heart of controversy, Clough's ego was legendary: 'We talk about it for twenty minutes and then we decide I was right'. Nicholson and Clough are joined by a far less successful manager, Ally MacLeod, whose boasts and then travails as manager of Scotland at the 1978 world cup in Argentina (for which England did not qualify) were the stuff of personal and national humiliation.

Our release also includes two writers on football, Percy Young and Arthur Hopcraft. Young's Football Facts and Fancies (1950) and The Appreciation of Football (1951) 'began the sport's long day's journey into art'. Hopcraft's The Football Man (1968) captured the spirit of 'a sport still rooted in the class relations and attitudes of an earlier age now confronting a new age of affluence and media-driven glamour'. These various footballing lives, and the contrasting personalities and fortunes of these players, managers, and writers, present a fair reflection of the strengths and weaknesses of the 'beautiful game' as played in Britain.

They are joined by several representatives of other sports: Fred Winter, the jockey and trainer, and Robert Sangster, the racehorse owner, from the world of racing; Cyril Kieft, who designed, made, and drove racing cars; Vivian Jenkins, who played and wrote about rugby union; Vernon Bell, the sometimes controversial founder of the British karate movement; and Buzzer Hadingham, a figure from Wimbledon's past.

Public lives

As always, those who made their careers in politics and public life feature prominently in our additions to the dictionary. The Labour politicians John Diamond and Hugh Jenkins are balanced by the Conservatives Peter Emery and Sir Anthony Meyer, the so-called 'stalking horse' who challenged Margaret Thatcher, then prime minister, for the leadership of her party in 1989. Joe Cahill, the IRA's chief of staff, and Harry West, the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, who was central to events in the province in the 1970s, show contrasting faces of the history of Northern Ireland. A clutch of notable trade unionists who were national figures in the different politics of the 1960s and 1970s—Len Murray, general secretary of the TUC, Hugh Scanlon (engineers), Frank Chapple (electricians), and Sid Greene (railwaymen), all of them ennobled as life peers—now figure in the Oxford DNB. A group with strong royal connections has also been added: Princess Alice, duchess of Gloucester, aunt of Elizabeth II; Sir Angus Ogilvy, the husband of Princess Alexandra; and Frances Shand Kydd, the mother of Diana, princess of Wales. From the legal profession the January 2008 update includes a group of leading figures: lords Scarman and Hobhouse; Sir Robert Jennings, who served at the end of a distinguished academic career as president of the International Court of Justice; Sir William Wade, who brought administrative law to prominence; the barrister Sir David Calcutt, who was associated with the investigation and regulation of the press; and Allan Levy, the advocate of children's rights. From the voluntary sector we include Dame Sheila McKechnie, who worked for Shelter and the Consumers' Association, David Kinnersley from Water Aid, and Tony Smythe, who worked for the National Council for Civil Liberties and the mental health charity Mind.

From the worlds of business and commerce the dictionary now includes James Hanson (Lord Hanson) of the Hanson Trust, who joins his former business partner Gordon White in our pages; Sir Julian Hodge of the Bank of Wales, who was personally associated with the leadership of the Labour Party in the 1970s; Kenneth Keith (Lord Keith of Castleacre), a key figure in the City of London at the bankers Hill Samuel; and Sir Alastair Morton, who led the development of the channel tunnel. The inclusion of entries on Eleanor Macdonald and Dame Hilary Cropper highlight two who did much to change the face of business in the late twentieth century. In 1951 Macdonald became one of the first women appointed to the board of a British company and later led Women in Management, while as the chief executive of F International (later Xansa) Cropper created one of Europe's most successful computer services firms and was twice named Britain's highest-paid businesswoman.

Literature, the arts, and scholarship

In the areas of the arts and music the dictionary's range is similarly broad. From the various visual arts this update includes the sculptors Frank Martin and Don Potter (who taught many leading artists of our age); the painters Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and Peter Coker; the 1960s 'happening artist' Jeff Nuttall; the cartoonists Norman Thelwall and Stanley Franklin; and the architects Lionel Brett, Raglan Squire, and Patrick Nuttgens (whose books and articles were especially influential). Sidonie Goossens, the harpist, is joined by the violinist and conductor Iona Brown. The musicologists Cyril Ehrlich, Eric Sams, and Denis Stevens also now appear in the dictionary. From the worlds of popular and rock music John Peel and John McGeoch are joined by the highly successful record producer Norman Newell. The ballet dancers Dame Alicia Markova, Sally Gilmour, and Maude Lloyd are joined by the songwriter Sydney Carter, whose 'Lord of the Dance, based on a Shaker melody, was written in 1963.

In literature Thom Gunn, whose poetic talent burnt so brightly in the 1950s and 1960s, is joined by the novelist Bernice Rubens, the pulp-novelist Arthur Hailey (author of Airport and Hotel), and the creator of those hapless schoolboy heroes Jennings and Darbishire, Anthony Buckeridge. Buckeridge's 'gift was for the affectionate portrayal of the nearly extinct educational ecosystem of the English boys' preparatory school'. The playwrights David MacDonald, Peter Barnes, and Jack Rosenthal (whose best work was written for television) are included and are joined by the pioneer of theatre studies, Glynne Wickham. The update includes the Welsh writers Islwyn Ffowc Elis and Alun Richards and the Indian authors Mulk Raj Anand and Dom Moraes. Mollie Kaye, the author of the immensely popular Far Pavilions, is also included. Frances Partridge reminds us of the long and continuing influence of the Bloomsbury group, which she chronicled, over English letters, while Nigel Nicolson wrote perceptive studies of his famous parents, Sir Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, as well as co-founding the publishers Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Historians of contrasting types are also added to the dictionary in this update. Alan Bullock was a modern historian who analysed the most heinous abuses of power in his biographies of Hitler and Stalin and who combined the highest scholarship with institutional leadership and innovation. Conrad Russell brilliantly illuminated the politics of the early seventeenth century, and Ben Pimlott charted public life in the late twentieth century. The update also includes the ancient historian Michael Grant and the cartographic historian David Woodward. Robert Burchfield, the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, and the philosopher Stuart Hampshire are added. The sociologists Meg Stacey, famous for community studies, and Bryan Wilson, who worked on the sociology of religion, join Margaret Simey, an active campaigner for many causes in Liverpool and the co-author with her husband (who now enters the dictionary as a co-subject) of a biography of the Victorian social investigator Charles Booth. The recent religious life of the nation is represented by the Scots preacher Murdo Ewen Macdonald and the biblical scholar William McKane, the expert on medical ethics Gordon Dunstan, and the rabbi Albert Friedlander.

In notable contrast this update also includes diverse figures from the worlds of entertainment. Margaret Kelly danced with, led, and directed the Bluebell Girls of Paris, combining glamour, courage during the Second World War, and steely determination in business. The theatre producer Helen Montagu collaborated with Cameron Mackintosh, the author of her Oxford DNB article, to bring Stephen Sondheim's music to the West End. Max Geldray played the harmonica and took several smaller parts with the Goons on the radio Goon Shows of the 1950s. The actresses Judy Campbell, Anna Lee, and the star of silent films Joan Morgan are also newcomers to the dictionary, as are the Scottish entertainers Rikki Fulton, a hogmanay institution, and Molly Weir, best known as Hazel the McWitch in the children's series Rentaghost. But final billing must go to a man who could have entered the dictionary in any one of several guises: as playwright, actor, raconteur, conversationalist, comedian, writer, or cultural ambassador. Take a bow, Sir Peter Ustinov—you made us laugh for more than half a century.

Our next online update

Our next online update will be published in May 2008 and will focus on men and women active from the 'earliest times' to the later twentieth century. May's update will have a special focus on creators of well-known British country houses and on landscape architects, as well as continuing our two long-term projects—started in 2007— to extend the dictionary's coverage of people who shaped the British empire and early Commonwealth, and to provide a complete biographical record of the pre-Reformation English episcopate. May will also see publication of the next set of reference groups, which provide essays on well-known historical clubs, gangs, and sets— with new articles ranging chronologically from the ninth-century scholars at King Alfred's court to the Kitchen Sink artists of the 1950s, and geographically from the literary Cockney School to the Chindits who fought in Japanese-occupied Burma during the Second World War.

Back to top of January 2008 preface

May 2008

New online contents, May 2008

Welcome to the eleventh online update of the Oxford DNB in which, as every May and October, we extend the dictionary's coverage of men and women 'from the earliest times' to the twentieth century.

The May 2008 update adds biographies of 91 individuals, active between the first century and the late twentieth century. In addition to new biographies the update includes a further 45 '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.

The new biographies in May 2008 highlight men and women who shared one of three common pursuits. We begin with those who achieved note as garden designers and landscape architects, or who were closely associated with the building of well-known country houses in Britain. Future updates (to be published in October 2008 and May 2009) will develop this theme with articles on prominent horticulturalists, plant hunters, and botanists. Our two other sets this May—shapers of the empire and early Commonwealth and pre-Reformation bishops—continue research projects we began last year to extend our coverage of British imperial history and to provide a complete listing of the English and Welsh episcopate in the middle ages.

The remaining biographies published this month include Roman army officers and their wives, a Scottish saint, the philanthropic widow of one of Elizabethan England's richest men, and a Yorkshire woodcarver whose work is now sold worldwide. Chronologically the subjects now added to the dictionary range from the garrison commander Flavius Genialis (fl. AD 97 105) to Ratu Sir Kamisese Kapaiwai Tuimacilai Mara, prime minister and president of Fiji, who died in 2004.

As ever, full details of the May 2008 update are available from the new online contents page and extracts are available here. I am delighted that, following an agreement between OUP and the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council in April, the online edition of the Oxford DNB will continue to be available in nearly all English public libraries, as well as many others across Britain. In nearly all cases library members have access to the ODNB remotely from home (or any other computer), which means direct access to all our new biographies and the 56,400 existing subjects. More information on reading the Oxford DNB through your local library is available here.

Landscapers and country house founders

The garden designers and architects included in May 2008 range from those responsible for some of Britain's best known (and now most visited) landscapes and private gardens to the creators of city parks, seaside resort gardens, and children's playgrounds.

Before the development of an architectural profession, landscape design was often the work of gentleman landowners, many of whom had observed French and Italian styles during the grand tour. In the mid-1750s, and after seven years overseas, Thomas Kennedy returned to the family seat at Culzean Castle, Ayrshire, to begin a programme of improving his vast 250,000 acre estate, in part financed by the family's vigorous smuggling enterprise. Kennedy's work at Culzean (which included the building of a Palladian villa and the planting of exotic fruit trees) was extended after his inheritance of nearby Cassillis House and the title of ninth earl of Cassillis. The work was continued by his successor David Kennedy, who, with the assistance of Robert Adam, refashioned Culzean and its estate to create a setting that is today the most visited site owned by the National Trust for Scotland. English landscapers from the same period now added to the dictionary include William Aislabie (d. 1781), who is best known for the remodelling of his seat, Studley Royal, near Ripon in Yorkshire, and the purchase and landscaping of the ruined Fountains Abbey, which bordered on his estate. Aislabie's work to secure the ruins, to open the grounds for the public, and to regulate access is today seen as anticipating modern standards of visitor management. Like Culzean in Scotland, Studley Royal is now the National Trust's most visited pay-for-entry property in England.

Few eighteenth-century landscapers were as altruistic as Aislabie. A very different approach was that of Thomas Coke, an acquisitive and ambitious Norfolk landowner who—having taken the grand tour and secured his coveted earldom in the 1730s—set out to transform his seat at Holkham into an estate to rival that of the prime minister, Robert Walpole, at nearby Houghton. Once believed to be the work of William Kent, the Palladian mansion at Holkham—acknowledged as the finest English example of its kind—in fact owed much of its design to its owner. Of course the movement of styles and talents was not only from continental Europe to the British Isles. In the lives of the father and son John and Joseph Busch, for example, we see designers who left their nursery in Hackney to become landscape gardeners for Catherine the Great of Russia, while Edinburgh-born Thomas Blaikie, with his jardin à l'anglais, became the doyen of ancien regime garden design in France. Later, as Citizen Blaikie, he cultivated seed potatoes in the Tuileries for the French revolutionary government. Nor was landscaping necessarily the preserve of the élite, as new biographies of the Wiltshire grotto-builders Joseph and Josiah Lane reveal.

A century later the common route of entry into landscape design was no longer the continental tour but a professional training in architecture. Those who came to garden design from architecture, often under the influence of the arts and crafts movement, include Charles Mallows, Harold Peto, and Philip Tilden, who undertook a series of commissions at such country houses as Tirley Garth, Cheshire, Port Lympne, Kent, and (for Lloyd George) Bron-y-de, Surrey. Charles Paget Wade (1883-1956) was another architect turned designer, though he is now best known as an eclectic (and eccentric) art collector and the owner, from the 1920s, of Snowshill Manor in the Cotswolds. Guided by the motto Let nothing perish, Wade assembled an extraordinary medley of objects, from reliquaries and spinning wheels to seven suits of samurai armour. His 100 clocks were each set to strike at a different moment so that he might better appreciate their chimes, though this prevented him from knowing the correct time.

The economic difficulties of the interwar years led to the consolidation of the profession (the Institute of Landscape Architects was established in 1929 by another new addition, Richard Sudell) and also prompted members to diversify from private to public clients. Such pressures are well illustrated in the career of Edward Prentice Mawson (1885-1954), who emerges not only as an influential contributor to the work of his father—the better-known landscape architect Thomas Hayton Mawson—but also as a prominent interwar designer of public spaces, whose commissions included Stanley Park, Blackpool, the seafront gardens at Southend-on-Sea and Hastings, and Ruislip Lido, Middlesex. For women designers the impediments to professional progress were even more severe. After working as a lowly assistant for Richard Sudell, Mary Mitchell left Britain in the late 1940s to gain experience in South Africa. On her return Mitchell's dedication and persistence gained her a job in Birmingham's architecture department, where she pioneered children's playgrounds, providing play facilities for every block of flats, and later became a leading advocate of the adventure playground movement. Those who enjoy London park life owe much to another female designer, Fanny Wilkinson (1855-1951), who received her first commission in the 1880s and went on to plan, prepare, and supervise more than seventy-five public gardens in the capital, including Red Lion Square Gardens, Holborn, and the churchyard at St John, Smith Square, Westminster.

It is another metropolitan space, the Festival of Britain Gardens at Battersea Park (1951), that stands as one of Russell Page's finest achievements in a successful international career. Faced with a shrinking budget and a site prone to flooding, Page combined a mass planting of shrubs (including 10,000 hostas) with 'frivolous planting' in free-flowing beds in a design that was restored for a new audience in 2004. Page's appointment at Battersea was made by another new subject, Frank Clark, who as the festival's chief landscape architect inspired the modern fashion for indoor planting in corporate settings. London is also the location for perhaps the most glamorous garden to feature in this update. In the early 1930s the Cardiff-born landscape architect Ralph Hancock (1893 1950) created his Garden of the Nations on the eleventh floor of the RCA building at the Rockefeller Centre, New York (a project that required 3000 tons of earth to be raised via the service elevator, with large trees winched up on the outside of the building). Hancock's experience led to an invitation to create a garden at the top of the Kensington department store Derry and Toms. Hancock's garden (1938) comprised three separate areas—Spanish, Tudor, and woodland—which, at one acre in size, make this Europe's largest roof-top garden. Having fallen into neglect in the 1970s, Hancock's garden has recently been restored and now provides the setting for a restaurant and club owned by Richard Branson's Virgin Group.

Shapers of empire and Commonwealth

It is difficult to overstate the impact of the British empire either on those countries, now independent, which once formed part of it, or indeed on Britain itself. Our latest update, building on that of last May, includes a further 35 biographies extending our coverage in this area. Colonial governors and administrators are once more well represented, and include William Burt, a governor of the Leeward Islands in the late eighteenth century, who spent more than £7000 of his own money improving the defences of St Kitts against the French; William Pritchard, the first resident British consul in Fiji, in the mid-nineteenth century, who played an important part in the prelude to Britain's annexation of the islands; and Sir Brian Marwick (1908-1992), commissioner of Swaziland, who fought a long and ultimately unsuccessful battle for a more democratic constitution for that country.

Nationalist politicians are also well represented in this update, with a clutch of prime ministers of newly independent states including, in the Pacific, Solomon Suna'one Mamaloni (1943-2000), the colourful and controversial prime minister of the Solomon Islands; Walter Lini (1942-1999), the equally controversial prime minister of Vanuatu (and Anglican priest), who had to deal with a separatist movement in Espiritu Santo; and Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara, prime minister of Fiji, whose career was ultimately blighted by ethnic tensions in the islands. From south-east Asia we now include David Marshall (1908-1995), the first chief minister of Singapore, and Tun Hussein Onn (1922-1990), prime minister of Malaysia. The African politicians already included in the dictionary are now joined by Chief Leabua Jonathan (1914-1987), prime minister of Lesotho, at first an ally and then a fierce opponent of apartheid South Africa, and several politicians who, though never holding the highest offices, played important roles in the pre-independence politics of their countries: Lawrence Katilungu (1914-1961), a rival of Kenneth Kaunda in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), Orton Chirwa (1919-1992), a rival of Hastings Banda in Nyasaland (Malawi), and Ambrose Zwane (1924-1998), a leading opponent of royal autocracy in Swaziland. The influence of the media in politics is reflected in the lives of three journalists: John Robson (1870-1945) in Malaya; Sir Leopold Moore (1868-1945) in Northern Rhodesia, a thorn in the side of the British South Africa Company and the Colonial Office; and in Antigua Tim Hector (1942-2002), who fulfilled a similar role with regard to his own government. In the field of business May's update adds entries on Sir Ronald Prain (1907-1991), chairman of RST, with its extensive copper mining interests in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), noted for his links with African nationalists, and once described as 'the acceptable face of British capitalism', and Kwamina Tandoh (c.1877-1932), a west African businessman active in Britain early in the twentieth century.

More intellectual concerns are reflected in memoirs of scholars whose work was shaped by the existence of empire, including Vincent Harlow (1898-1961), a once influential historian of the empire; Sir Norman Anderson (1908-1994), an eminent scholar of Islamic law; Oskar Spate (1911-2000), geographer; Hilda Kuper (1911-1992), anthropologist; Victor Purcell (1896-1965), historian of the Chinese in south-east Asia; and William Shellabear (1862-1947), Malay scholar. Both Anderson and Shellabear started their careers as missionaries, a vocation shared by another important set of new subjects in this update, including George Brown (1835-1917), William Bromilow (1857-1929), and Charles Abel (1862 1930), all of whom played key roles in introducing Christianity to what is now Papua New Guinea. Brown's entry relates how a party of Fijian missionaries under his leadership were attacked, killed, and consumed on the orders of a local chief for encroaching on trade routes in the Gazelle Peninsula; in a controversial move Brown then led a retaliatory expedition, which resulted in the deaths of between ten and a hundred of the 'guilty villagers'. Undoubtedly the most gruesome entry in this release, however, is that on Yagan (c.1800-1833), an Australian Aboriginal warrior whose severed head was taken to England, where it was widely exhibited before being deposited with the Liverpool City Museum. In 1997 the head was returned to Australia, though as a result of a dispute between rival factions of the Nyungar people it remains, at the time of writing, unburied.

Episcopal and regional lives

Our project to publish biographies of every pre-Reformation bishop adds eighteen new lives this May, with a special focus on the dioceses of Exeter, Bath and Wells, Salisbury, Winchester, Worcester, and Norwich. A common feature in a number of these lives is the often uneasy relationship between church and royal authority, with different bishops serving as papal ambassadors or peacemakers. The decision of John XXII, for example, to appoint Rigaud de Asserio (c.1290-1323) rather than Edward II's candidate to the vacant see of Winchester was prompted by papal hopes of moderating the king's behaviour and securing reform of the royal household. In turn Bishop Rigaud became Edward's choice for what proved an unsuccessful expedition to Scotland to treat for peace with Robert Bruce. Diplomacy was also an attribute of William Middleton, who as bishop of Norwich found himself at centre stage in late thirteenth-century disputes concerning crown and church jurisdictions. Middleton's resolution of the conflict, proposing to fine but not imprison wayward clerks, is regarded by his biographer as evidence of 'a gift for thoroughly practical reconciliation', a talent that had previously seen him arbitrate in disputes between combinations of warring bishops, archbishops, deans, and Scottish kings.

If some brought stability, others are remembered for the material benefits they gave to their diocese. Among these is Robert of Bingham (d. 1246), bishop of Salisbury, who markedly improved the city's prosperity by building a bridge (still partially extant) that improved access for traders at times of flooding. And while Bishop Robert's legacy lived on in stone, figures like James Berkeley, bishop of Exeter, gained prominence as objects of veneration—in Berkeley's case following his sudden death in 1327. Cathedral records show that offerings to Berkeley's tomb reached £20 by the following year, mainly by local lay people, who were the cult's chief supporters. Evidence of Berkeley's posthumous following can be seen in the fact that the next Exeter bishop to attract such veneration was buried in an identical tomb to Berkeley on the opposite side of the choir.

The local associations of these two bishops bring us to a final selection of lives that also combine strong local resonance with a wider scholarly or popular interest. The Scottish island of Lismore, for example, remains closely associated with St Moluag, a sixth-century holy man who was said to have travelled there from Ireland on a stone 'quite unlike the rest of the rocks of that island'. Similarly, to many owners of his work, the woodcarver Robert Thompson (1876-1955) is simply known as the Mouseman of Kilburn, a sobriquet derived from Thompson's practice of marking his work with the figure of a mouse and his lifetime association with the North Yorkshire village of Kilburn. He was originally a carver of church memorials, but oak furniture is now exported worldwide from a factory on the site of his original workshop. Finally, May's update also goes behind the scenes of the Roman fort at Vindolanda, now a popular attraction at Chesterholm, Northumberland. That so much is known of life at Vindolanda is due to the discovery in the 1970s of a series of wooden tablets that provide information on the day-to-day existence of the fort's officers. From these tablets it is possible to recreate biographies of Vindolanda's commanders, Flavius Genialis and Flavius Cerialis, as well as Cerialis' wife, Sulpicia Lepidina, and other male and female associates. Such is the richness of the sources that details of garrison government and victualling exist alongside invitations to birthday celebrations, inventories of household goods (from bird nets to dining tunics), and a remarkable summary of the utensils and foodstuffs of Lepidina's kitchen.

Groups in British history: reformers, improvers, and the Kitchen Sink

The forty-five reference group essays added in May 2008 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 extends from the ninth-century scholars of King Alfred's court to the Beaux Arts Quartet or Kitchen Sink School of painters who came to public attention in the 1950s; geographically the new networks span much of Britain (from the Cockney School to the Scottish martyrs) and, overseas, from the Antarctic (Scott's expeditionary party of 1912) to the Far East (the Chindits, who fought the Japanese in Burma).

In the year marking the ninetieth anniversary of the female franchise (February 1918) and the election of the first woman MP to Westminster (November 1918) it is fitting that three of our essays chart the membership and activities of groups that did much to promote female suffrage. The National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS)—active from 1896 to 1918 and led by Millicent Garrett Fawcett—is generally characterized as the 'non-militant' body that promoted the campaign for equal voting rights for women (under existing franchise laws) through the education of public opinion and the organization of pressure at a constituency level. In contrast to the party neutrality of the NUWSS, the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) emerged in 1903 from supporters of the Independent Labour Party, of which its founder Emmeline Pankhurst was an active member. Unlike the NUWSS, the WSPU insisted on the inclusion of married women in the demand for votes and—drawing much of its support from working-class and socialist women—introduced militant action into its campaign. The third organization, the Women's Freedom League, was a group of socialist dissidents who broke away from the WSPU in 1907, opposed to what they considered the Pankhursts' autocratic leadership. Thereafter they campaigned by militant means for a notion of emancipation that went beyond the vote to address other restrictions in the lives of women, especially working-class women—a campaign subsequent members maintained until the early 1960s.

Reform and dissent, whether political or religious, are themes that connect a number of other groups in this update. Franchise extension had, of course, also been the aim of the Chartist movement, whose National Charter Association was founded in 1840 to co-ordinate and maintain the campaign to achieve 'a full and faithful Representation of the entire people of the United Kingdom'. Between 1840 and 1857 the association stood for Chartism in its most uncompromising and undiluted form, and came to national attention with the second Chartist petition, signed by more than three million people, in 1842. The rise of Chartism coincided with that of the Anti-Corn Law League (like the Charter Association and the WSPU a product of Manchester), whose members' advocacy of free trade led to the repeal of the British corn laws in 1846. In its campaign the league drew on the example of slightly earlier reform networks, including the Anti-Slavery Society (another new addition in this update), which mobilized religious opinion to assert a moral basis for its work. For members of the Anti-Slavery Society—second generation abolitionists active during the 1820 and early 1830s—the focus was on the mitigation and end to slavery following the abolition of the trade in 1807. The appeal to religious nonconformity enabled members of the Anti-Corn Law League to define and broaden the movement as one of general middle-class interest rather than of a self-interested mercantile élite, a perception that brought the league into conflict with the Chartists in the early 1840s.

This interweaving of groups, in structures and members, is further evident in several more of the networks now added to the dictionary. In their campaign for public health legislation in the late 1840s, for example, members of the Health of Towns Association modelled their organization on the Anti-Corn Law League. Nearly a century later a section of Oswald Moseley's British Union of Fascists comprised former suffragettes whose radical feminism was celebrated by the BUF, a movement notable for the political diversity of its most prominent activists.

Likewise, as in such earlier networks as the Green Ribbon and Holy clubs, it is possible to trace aspects of the nonconformist culture on which nineteenth-century reform societies would draw. Fears that Charles II would be succeeded by his brother James, a practising Roman Catholic, led in the mid-1670s to the formation of the London-based Green Ribbon Club, which challenged the denial of political and religious (including nonconformist) liberties. Like the National Charter Association, the Green Ribbon Club co-ordinated other whig groupings in the capital, and further afield, and was an early exponent of the political education movement adopted by later reform societies. Led by John Wesley, and based in the University of Oxford, the Holy Club met during the 1730s to follow the practices of the primitive—that is early—church. At the time the group remained within the established church, as did some of its members throughout their lives. But others later broke with Anglicanism, and Wesley's experience of the club (whose members were first labelled Methodists in 1732) undoubtedly formed the basis of his increasingly ambivalent relationship with the Church of England. Oxford was also the home of an earlier display of religious dissent, that of the late fourteenth-century theologian John Wyclif and his followers at the university, the Wycliffites, who supported his proposals for reform—including vernacular preaching, biblical translation, and in some instances his controversial rejection of transubstantiation. But if the early Methodists were largely accommodated within the established church many of Wyclif's ideas were condemned as heretical at the Council of Constance in 1415. Even so, some Wycliffites remained in the university, in inevitably shadowy networks, and made contact with supporters elsewhere, including the so-called Lollard knights.

In addition to those pursuing radical reform, some groups were motivated by the potential for self or societal improvement, or at least the desire to record and disseminate information with a view to implementing change. During the late 1930s and 1940s members of Mass-Observation documented popular life and belief in ways that it was hoped would contribute to the democratization of sociological knowledge. Under the banner of 'anthropology at home', and by observation of the behaviour and opinions of 'ordinary people', Mass-Observation's leadership sought to advance a 'new synthesis' that would take the country beyond what it identified as 'the miserable conditions of dogmatic faiths'. Efforts to distribute its research in affordable paperback editions (notably the Penguin Special series) recall the earlier work of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Founded in 1826, the society sought to exploit advances in printing and distribution to provide cheap, informative literature that would both appeal to those with an elementary education and guide them towards 'useful ends'. In search of a broad appeal, the society's members encouraged publications that were free from political and religious partisanship, though the movement's sympathy with political reform, and its leaders' involvement in the formation of the new University of London, meant that outsiders often perceived it as radical and secularist.

The collaborative generation of knowledge, albeit of more rarefied kinds, also links other new groups in this update. In the scholars at King Alfred's court and the clerks of Thomas Becket, for example, we see two intellectual networks providing information and instruction for the practice of good government. Alfred's scholars also offer a seemingly unique example in the pre-conquest period of advisers teaching a monarch to read, an innovation due directly to the character of those the king drew to him. It was the pursuit of scientific knowledge that also brought together members of two later networks, the founders of Royal Institution of Great Britain (active between 1799 and 1810, and specializing in 'Useful Mechanical Inventions') and the Analytical Society (1812-13), a gathering of Cambridge undergraduates who sought to substitute French concepts of differential notation for Newtonian geometry and, as they hoped, so establish mathematics as a recognized profession.

As in previous releases, the collaborative activities of artists and writers continue to provide us with a rich crop of creative associations. In art the May update adds the mid-eighteenth-century St Martin's Lane Academy, which, centred on William Hogarth, sought to establish a 'British school' of painting as a counterpoint to the popularity of continental practices. Later art groups include Unit One, a gathering of abstract painters who broke away from the Seven and Five Society (another new addition) in search of modernism, and the Beaux Art Quartet (1953-6) whose quotidian subject matter prompted one critic to ask whether they painted 'Everything but the kitchen sink?: The kitchen sink too', thus prompting the nickname by which they are also known. Appropriately for an update that includes a selection of country house patrons and landscapers, we also add an essay on the late nineteenth-century founders of the National Trust, to which properties like Studley Royal, Snowshill, and Culzean Castle have since passed.

The literary groups in this update are dominated by poets. The most influential of these groups was the early eighteenth-century Scriblerus Club. Though they met for only a few weeks in 1714 the Scriblerians—among them Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope—became for later Hanoverian critics exemplars of satirical writing, political subversiveness, and conservative pessimism. Writers of a more sober disposition include the contributors to the metrical psalter (published 1562), who, variously connected through their involvement in Protector Somerset's household, were drawn together as participants in this defining literary monument to the Elizabethan religious settlement. Four centuries later the notion of a group created and defined by print was repeated with the Georgian poets, now perhaps most closely associated with Rupert Brooke, whose work appeared in five volumes of Georgian Poetry between 1912 and 1922. Poets, albeit 'off-duty', also made up the 'immortal diners', who met on a single evening in December 1817, celebrated as the occasion when, in the company of several other guests, Wordsworth met Keats. The immortal diners are, to date, the shortest-lived of the groups in our selection and provide another interesting example of the various ways in which historical networks were constituted and conceived—from membership clubs and collaborative ventures to secret societies and one-off dinner parties. Food recurs in this update in connection with a slightly earlier political network, the 'mince-pie administration' formed by William Pitt on 18 December 1783 and so named because it was thought unlikely to survive the Christmas period. In fact the mince-pie politicians continued until the following spring, after which Pitt, with a new political configuration, was able to serve as prime minister until 1801. And it was Pitt's death five years later that prompted the creation of another political grouping now known for its evocative name. In search of a gathering of 'talents and character', the new prime minister, Lord Grenville, gave rise to what became his 'ministry of all the talents'—a concept that, almost exactly two hundred years later, was reprised by another new premier in search of breadth, inclusivity, and a fresh start.

If you would like to read more about the groups project you may be interested in the online essay here. 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 210 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 May 2008 update.

Our next online update

Our next online update will be published in October 2008 and will continue to extend the Oxford DNB's coverage of men and women in all periods to the late twentieth century. To mark the ninetieth anniversary of the armistice, October's update will include a special focus on people active during the First World War, in addition to new biographies of gardeners and regional lives, as well as the next instalment of group entries.

Back to top of May 2008 preface

October 2008 preface

New online contents, October 2008

Welcome to the twelfth online update of the Oxford DNB, in which, as every May and October, we extend the dictionary's coverage of men and women 'from the earliest times' to the twentieth century.

The October 2008 update adds biographies of 125 individuals active between the twelfth and the late twentieth century. In addition to new biographies, the update includes a further 21 '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.

Coming a month before the ninetieth anniversary of the armistice in November 1918, this update has a principal focus on individuals active during the First World War. Our selection highlights the different approaches taken by modern scholars studying the history of the conflict. In addition to military figures who were instrumental in shaping the events of 1918—and in bringing the war to its conclusion—the update includes pioneers of new forms of warfare; highly decorated front-line soldiers who came to national attention; people active in theatres other than the western front and in nursing; and men and women who provided cultural responses to the war in the form of songs, poetry, and visual images. One well-known image of the conflict, John Singer Sargent's group portrait Some General Officers of the Great War (NPG), is the starting point for a feature essay by Professor Gary Sheffield assessing the performance of those who commanded British forces on land.

October's update also continues several research projects that, over several years, will extend the dictionary's coverage in particular subject areas. Our second instalment of individuals who shaped the history of gardening highlights those who excelled in plant cultivation. Our interest in the history of empire and Commonwealth continues with men and women significant to the British connection with the Indian subcontinent, while the project on the pre-Reformation church adds biographies of bishops from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

The remaining biographies published in October 2008 include two queens of Scots; three pioneers of geriatric medicine; the extraordinary story of an MP murdered by a gunshot in 1536; the creator of the world's first purpose-built motor racing track (at Brooklands, Surrey); and the remarkable Victoria Woodhull (1838-1927), women's rights campaigner, Anglophile, and the first female presidential candidate in the United States of America. As ever, full details of the October 2008 update are available from the New online contents page and free extracts are available here. Don't forget that the complete dictionary is available online in nearly all English public libraries, as well as many others across Britain and worldwide. More information about gaining access to the Oxford DNB through your local library is available here.

First World War lives

As the ninetieth anniversary of the armistice that ended the First World War approaches, this October's update includes a selection of additional lives connected with this conflict. Many of these additions concern people involved in the later stages of the war, and notably those involved in the battles to resist the German spring offensive, and then the final allied advance, beginning in August 1918. Sir Hugh Jeudwine commanded the 55th division during the successful defence of Givenchy in April 1918; if the line had given way the channel ports might have fallen into enemy hands. The strain told on Edgar William Cox (1882-1918), Field-Marshal Haig's intelligence chief and, at thirty-five, the youngest brigadier in the British army, charged with predicting the location, strength, and direction of the German offensives. His assessments were generally accurate, but his pessimism was not shared by his commander and, in poor health, he drowned in mysterious circumstances in the early stages of the allied offensive. Sir Gerard Boyd (1877-1930), who had risen to temporary major-general after enlisting in 1895 as a private, was in command of the 46th division, which achieved a remarkable feat of arms by crossing the St Quentin Canal to breach the Hindenburg line on 29 September 1918. Hanway Cumming (1867-1921) led the 110th brigade through the battles of 1918, organizing his shattered battalions in the face of the German advance between March and May; and then led the brigade in the fast-moving offensive of the late summer and autumn. Cumming's posthumously published journal reveals the flexibility and initiative shown by brigade commanders during the final phase of the war. By then, less effective figures like Sir William Pulteney (1861-1941), who made costly mistakes during his puzzlingly lengthy command of the 3rd corps, had been weeded out.

Others responded to new forms of warfare. Submarines prompted novel tactics, and challenged existing rules of warfare. Godfrey Herbert (1884-1961), commander of a Q-ship, designed to resemble a merchant vessel to lure enemy submarines, achieved wide notice for his involvement in the controversial 'Baralong incident' of August 1915, when German submariners were shot as they escaped their sinking craft. The pharmacist Edward Harrison (1869-1918) led the team that developed a new respirator to protect troops at the front from gas. Much of the development entailed self-experimentation and, weakened by its effect, he succumbed to influenza in November 1918. The war in the air produced such individual aces as Philip Fullard (1897-1984), who was admired for his 'dash and fearlessness', but who attributed the success of his unit to team work. The former big-game hunter and traveller Hesketh Hesketh-Pearson (1876-1922) worked to improve the British army's use of snipers. The artillery expert Sir Herbert Uniacke (1866-1934) undertook systematic analysis of artillery tactics and techniques, endeavouring to promote 'best practice'. While he insisted on the vital importance of artillery, it was for him only a supporting arm since 'the final decisive factor is the bayonet of the Infantry soldier'.

The update includes several examples from the citizens' armies who fought in the trenches. A Harrogate schoolmaster and Wesleyan Sunday school class leader, who supplemented his earnings by playing professional football, Donald Simpson Bell (1890-1916) joined up in November 1914; he was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross for his attack on a machine-gun post during the battle of the Somme in July 1916. The Burton upon Trent municipal gardener William Coltman (1891-1974), who despite his religious convictions also enlisted early in the war, became a stretcher bearer. He was awarded a VC for his efforts in rescuing the wounded from no man's land, under fire, during the allied advance in October 1918. Another volunteer, the Irish Jesuit priest and military chaplain William Doyle (1873-1917), was killed aiding the wounded during the third battle of Ypres in August 1917 and was recommended for, but never awarded, the VC. The Rhondda miners' leader David Watts Morgan (1867-1933) was the embodiment of patriotic labour; enlisting as a private on the day that war was declared, he rose to the rank of lieutenant-colonel and was said to have recruited 15,000 Welsh miners for military service. Graeme West (1891-1917), who enlisted after university graduation, evoked the realities of the front line in his much-anthologized poem 'The Night Patrol'. By 1916 he had become disillusioned with the war, and his posthumously published diary (he was killed by a sniper's bullet in April 1917), edited as a statement of pacificism, was an early example of the literary reshaping of memories of the war.

By contrast, popular patriotism was aroused by Jessie Pope (1868-1941), who made a living as a prolific versifier. Her widely read war poetry published in newspapers, with its doggerel urgings to enlistment and glorification of combat, apparently oblivious to the horrors of the trenches, later attracted vilification; and in the post-war years she became an obscure figure. Earlier she had helped bring Robert Tressell's 'socialist' novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists to publication. In the 1914 poster 'Your country needs you!' the war produced one of the most famous pieces of graphic design of all time. The poster, a contribution to the unofficial recruiting effort, was produced by the artist Alfred Leete (1882-1933), who later advertised his native Weston-super-Mare as a holiday resort. A morale boost for the troops, the jaunty march song 'Pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag' was composed by the St Asaph-born brothers Felix Lloyd Powell (1878-1942) and George Henry Powell (1880-1951) as an entry for a prize competition run by a firm of music publishers. The sacrifice of the fallen was marked by the remembrance hymn 'O valiant hearts', written during the war by the Hereford MP and landowner Sir John Stanhope Arkwright (1872-1954), who likened the allied war dead to knightly heroes, and compared their sacrifice to Christ at Calvary. 'Peace could not give back her Dead' was the armistice day reflection of May Cannan (1893-1973), who nevertheless contested the idea that the war had been a futile waste of a generation.

Having served as a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurse and run a canteen for the troops in France before joining the intelligence bureau in Paris, Cannan was one of the many women involved in the war effort. A nurse before the war, Violetta Thurstan (1879-1978) organized hospitals and field ambulance services in Belgium and on the Russian and Salonika fronts, receiving the Military Medal for evacuating the wounded from a dressing station that was under bombardment. Irene Rathbone (1892-1980), an actress who became a VAD nurse in France and later London, sought to record the experience of women's war work in munitions factories and elsewhere in her fictionalized autobiography We That Were Young, published in 1932, whose themes reflected the emotional toll of the war upon women.

The imperial contribution to the war effort is represented by Mir Dast (1874-1945), a Pathan from the north-west frontier of British India who served in the Indian army. Posted to France in March 1915, he fought with the Lahore division in the second battle of Ypres in April 1915, when he rallied survivors after a gas attack, saving the lives of eight British and Indian officers. Twice wounded, he was sent for convalescence to Brighton, whose regency pavilion was thought likely to appeal to Indian soldiers, and it was there that he received the Victoria Cross from the king. Many of the British regular soldiers on the western front had, in turn, served in India. One such was Daniel Laidlaw (1875-1950), a piper of the King's Own Scottish Borderers, who won lasting renown on the first morning of the battle of Loos (25 September 1915). When an attack stalled under heavy artillery fire he scaled the parapets of the trench and piped the regimental march, despite shrapnel wounds, inspiring his battalion to continue the assault. Laidlaw was awarded the VC and, as the 'Piper of Loos', enjoyed some celebrity—though not quite on the scale of that accorded to George Findlater (1872-1942), who had performed a similar feat in piping the Gordon Highlanders into battle in the Tirah campaign of 1897. Findlater re-enlisted in 1914 but was invalided out in the following year.

Alongside these instances of service on the western front October's update includes figures active in other theatres. Sir Howard Kelly (1873-1952), commander of the light cruiser Gloucester, was involved in a naval action in the Mediterranean in the first days of the war, when he successfully detected and shadowed the German warships Goeben and Breslau, but was ordered to break off the chase. Their escape into Turkish waters was a factor in Turkey's entry into the war on the side of the central powers in October 1914. The diplomat Sir Gerard Lowther (1858-1916) was British ambassador at Constantinople in the pre-war years and his support for opponents of the Young Turks weakened British influence with the regime, though he had an admittedly difficult task in the unpredictable political climate of the Ottoman empire. Sir Charles Macpherson Dobell (1869-1954), involved in campaigns in West Africa at the outset of the war, subsequently commanded the Egyptian expeditionary force in its advance into Ottoman-held Palestine. Two attacks on Turkish forces at Gaza in March and April 1917 were failures; the first has been described as 'a wasted muddle', while the second has been accounted a 'senseless slaughter' as the attacking infantry received insufficient artillery support. The eventual collapse of the Ottoman empire produced further military challenges in the post-war period. Despite having seen command on the western front, Sir Aylmer Haldane (1862-1950) regarded a period during his posting at the head of the forces in the former Ottoman territories of Mesopotamia (later Iraq), held by Britain under League of Nations mandate, 'as the most tense cycle of activity' in his military career. Briefed to reduce the size of the garrison, he instead faced an Arab insurgency, in the summer of 1920, that threatened to overwhelm the governing forces. He published a detailed account of how he eventually suppressed the uprising and set about restoring the damaged infrastructure before the creation of the kingdom of Iraq in 1921. Other western front commanders were posted to Ireland during the Anglo-Irish war of 1919-21. Sir Peter Strickland (1869-1951), a divisional commander, led counter-insurgency operations and exercised martial law powers in four counties of Ireland until the truce of July 1921; he was the intended target of the IRA ambush that killed Hanway Cumming. For others who survived the First World War Bolshevism now presented the greatest threat. A member of a prominent engineering firm, Richard Rapier Stokes (1897-1957) gained the Military Cross on the western front, an experience that left him with a deep abhorrence of war, but also a fierce patriotism in the face of communism; in 1940, as a Labour MP (he was subsequently a cabinet minister, only the second Roman Catholic to join the cabinet), he controversially opposed the war against Nazi Germany, believing that it would only benefit Soviet Russia. 'I have spent three of the best years of my life killing Germans apparently to no avail', Stokes reflected.

Religious benefaction and celebration

Three of the earliest female subjects added in this update are remembered for lives of religious dedication and benefaction. Margaret Holland, countess of Clarence (d. 1439), owed her considerable wealth to her first husband, a son of John of Gaunt. Her independent fortune was instrumental in her second marriage to Henry IV's son Thomas, duke of Clarence, and was evident in her taking a personal retinue of 143 people (including 10 priests and 11 sumptermen to oversee her baggage train) when she travelled to France in 1419. Widowed again in 1421, Margaret bestowed some of her wealth on the Bridgettine monastery at Syon, Middlesex, founded by her brother-in-law Henry V, to which she developed a deep spiritual attachment in later life. Almost a century after Margaret Holland's involvement, Katherine Palmer (d. 1576) entered the monastery, where she remained until its suppression in 1539, when she fled to Flanders. Returning to Syon nearly twenty years later she was elected abbess, only to be forced into exile once more following the accession of Elizabeth I. For another fifteen years she led her sisters across Flanders, defending them from Calvinist attacks, and is now credited with ensuring the survival of what is today England's only religious community with a continuous existence since before the Reformation. The last of our trio of medieval and early modern women is Sibylle Boys (d. in or after 1455), another wealthy widow, whose involvement in the brewing trade (then common among widows) prompted a correspondence with William Paston, to whom she famously submitted her recipe for a 'faire holsom drynk of ale'. In addition to this well-known appearance in Paston's 'scribbling papers', Lady Boys is recalled as a benefactor. Her wealth is thought to have rebuilt St Andrew's Church, Holme Hale, Norfolk, and to have supported the poet John Lydgate, whose 'Epistle to Sibille' describes the sound management and industry of the ideal housewife.

The religious conflicts that shaped Katherine Palmer's life were also evident, from a different perspective, in the career and death of her near contemporary Robert Pakington in 1536. A London MP sympathetic to the doctrines of the emerging Reformation, Pakington was murdered by a mysterious assailant who shot him with a gun—then a highly unusual method of killing. The fact that no one was arrested for the MP's murder prompted numerous theories, many of which suggested an action planned and financed by bishops critical of the Reformation and of Pakington's sympathy to reform. The dangers of religious disagreement are also evident in the early life of Bernard (d. 1214), one of the pre-Reformation bishops added in this update. Though included in the Oxford DNB as a bishop of Carlisle, to which see he was appointed by King John in 1200, Bernard was born in either Italy or Dalmatia and had served as archbishop of Ragusa, from where he had fled in fear of his life having lost the allegiance of his congregation. Bernard's successor at Carlisle, Hugh (d. 1223), owed his election to John's determination that the vacant see would go to the English king's man, not that of the Scottish monarch, Alexander II, who had occupied north-west England in 1216-17. Alexander has a connection to another of our new subjects: Yolande (d. in or after 1324) married the king's son, and so became queen of Scots in 1285. October's update also adds the biography of an earlier Scots queen, Sibylla (d. 1122), consort of Alexander I, whose opinion of his wife does not appear to have been high. On her death the king 'did not waste many sighs on her, for she was wanting, it was said, in correctness of manners and charm of person'. Contests between England and Scotland provide the backdrop for another medieval religious life, that of John Appleby (d. 1389), lawyer and dean of St Paul's. One of Appleby's northern livings involved him closely in the development of border law intended to settle disputes over infringements of the then highly contested border between England and Scotland. Appleby's expertise in civil law provided the basis for the English to enforce greater penalties on those who broke the truce between the two countries, a contribution that prompts his Oxford DNB biographer to commend Appleby's 'significant contribution to the elaboration of the earliest features of international law as it was practised in England'.

The celebratory nature of religious observance is marked, in a less turbulent climate, by new entries on a small group of nineteenth-century hymn writers, whose contributions continue to form part of the Anglo-American religious tradition. In addition to Sir John Arkwright, author of the remembrance hymn, this update adds the Bristol insurance broker William Chatterton Dix (1837 1898), who wrote the Epiphany hymn 'As with gladness men of old', and George Woodward (1848-1934), latterly vicar of St Augustine's, Highgate, who was prominent in reviving the carol tradition, and is best known as the author of the words to 'Ding dong! Merrily on high'. John Julian (1839-1913), incumbent of Wincobank, South Yorkshire, spent twenty-five years compiling his Dictionary of Hymnology, a magisterial work that remains at the centre of hymnological research. Another monumental work of compilation from the early twentieth century was the Anglo-Saxon dictionary of Thomas Northcote Toller (1844-1930).

Gardening: cultivation and innovation

The October 2008 update adds the second of three selections of gardeners' biographies in a project that began in May of this year and will conclude in May 2009. Innovation and experimentation link the achievements of many of those included in this latest set of lives. At his garden at Highdown, near Worthing, Sussex, Sir Frederick Stern (1884-1967), a banker who had gained the Military Cross during war service, demonstrated the possibilities of gardening on chalk, while at East Lambrook, Somerset, Margery Fish (1892-1969), secretary to six editors of the Daily Mail, established a cottage garden planted in reaction to formal bedding to provide colour throughout the year. The founder of the seed company Bees Ltd, which promoted many plant collecting expeditions, Arthur Kilpin Bulley (1861-1942), created a garden at Neston, Cheshire, which was presented to the University of Liverpool and became its botanic garden. The plant collecting tradition is also represented by Euan Cox (1893-1977), a member of a prominent family of Dundee jute manufacturers, who developed the gardens at Glendoick, Perthshire, as a leading centre of rhododendron cultivation.

Another theme is the dynastic nature of gardening knowledge. Four generations of the Jackman family (per. 1763-1976) developed clematis cultivars at their Woking nursery. One of these—developed in 1858 when wild varieties of clematis brought to Britain by plant collectors in China were crossed with other varieties—produced the best-known and most widely-grown clematis cultivar around the world, Clematis Jackmanii. Ernest Ballard (1870-1952) of Colwall, Herefordshire, made a speciality of breeding Michaelmas daisies, which he promoted as an adornment for autumn gardens, valuable for their 'hardiness, ease of culture, variety of colour, and wild profusion of bloom'; his daughter-in-law Helen Ballard (1908-1995), of Mathon, Worcestershire, was an indefatigable collector and hybridizer of hellebores. Sir Frederick William Moore (1857-1949) succeeded his father as curator of the botanic gardens at Dublin, and became recognized as Ireland's premier horticulturist; Richard Irwin Lynch (1850-1924), who revived the Cambridge University Botanic Garden, was the son of a Cornish gardener. The celebrated vicarage garden at Bitton, Gloucestershire, associated with Henry Nicholson Ellacombe (1822-1916), who cultivated some 3000 varieties of plants, had been originally established by the canon's father. Another clergyman gardener, William Wilks (1843-1923), vicar of Shirley near Croydon, developed the Shirley poppy, and used his position as secretary to the Royal Horticultural Society to encourage scientific research into heredity, selection, and cross-fertilization.

Local and international lives

The close connection between gardening and regional history is maintained in other parts of the October update, notably a selection of amateur collectors whose collections are now preserved in museums around the country. The village schoolmaster at Wetton, Staffordshire, Samuel Carrington (bap. 1798, d. 1870), excavated over 100 burial mounds around his native village, and found Celtic, Romano-British, and Anglo-Saxon remains at Thor's Cave, Wetton. He also collected fossils from his local north Staffordshire limestone, with much of his collection being displayed in the pantry of his home in Wetton, and subsequently preserved in a number of museums. The Wells postmaster Herbert Balch (1869-1958) devoted his spare time to the scientific exploration of the Mendip hills cave system, and to curating the collections of the Wells museum. Henry Johnston-Lavis (1856-1914), a physician who started a medical practice for the English community first in Naples and later southern France, pursued geological interests—in particular concerning volcanoes, and became an authority on Vesuvius. His specimens passed to University College, London. An inheritance from the family stove-making business financed the travels of Gertrude Benham (1867-1938), whose anthropological collections, gathered during her eight round-the-world expeditions, were donated to the Plymouth museum. While Benham is remembered for travelling the world, the reputation of members of the Ashington group derives from their depictions of daily life in the Northumberland mining town from which they took their name. The group, all coalminers who came to art through evening classes in the 1930s, gained considerable attention both for the quality of its work and from those attracted by the idea of working people engaging in high cultural pursuits. Though rooted in Ashington for its subject matter, the group's work was displayed widely in the UK and overseas (including China in 1980, one of the first exhibitions from the West after the cultural revolution). There has been renewed interest in the group in recent years: in 2006 the group's permanent collection went on display at a purpose-built gallery at the Woodhorn Colliery Museum, Ashington, and in 2007 the group was the subject of Lee Hall's play The Pitmen Painters (performed at the National Theatre, London, in summer 2008).

Recreational pursuits of a different kind, though both with a similarly strong association to place, are the legacy of two further newcomers to the Oxford DNB. As construction work begins on London's Olympic stadia, it is timely to reflect on the difficulties encountered by the Surrey landowner Hugh Locke King (1848-1926), who created the world's first purpose-built motor-racing track on his estate at Brooklands in 1907. It cost him a sizeable slice of his (and his wife's) personal fortune and led to hundreds of construction workers sleeping rough in the Weybridge area during building work. The enterprise also alienated Locke King's neighbours, who complained of the noise, crowds, litter, and fumes generated by race meetings. But equally it provided British motor sport with a pioneering facility, and had an unexpected role as a centre of wartime aircraft production. Locke King envisaged motor racing as following the format of horse racing. In 1776 the army officer, Yorkshire landowner, and racing enthusiast Anthony St Leger (bap. 1731, d. 1786) had the idea of a sweepstake for three-year-old horses run over two miles. The race that bears his name, run annually at Doncaster racecourse, remains one of five British classic races.

Alongside individuals closely associated with the regions of Britain, the October update also includes individuals from overseas now remembered for their contribution to British life. During the Napoleonic wars the parents of Louis Lucien Bonaparte (1813-1891), relatives of the French emperor, were interned in England, and their son was born at Grimley, Worcestershire. Although his early years were spent in Italy, he settled in London in the 1850s and pursued linguistic studies, becoming an authority on the Basque language. Among these who came to Britain in the First World War was the Serbian philosopher Dimitrije Mitrinoviç (1887-1953), who in August 1914 fled the Austro-Hungarian empire for London, where he spent the rest of his life promoting internationalism. The American graphic designer Edward McKnight Kauffer (1890-1954) likewise left Paris at the outbreak of the war and settled in London, where his innovative poster designs were used to advertise London's underground railway and the launch of the Daily Herald newspaper.

It was a more sinister manifestation of internationalism that concerned Alfred Stace Dyer (1849 1926), the first of a pair of biographies offering historical precedents for present-day social issues. Now much in the news, the subject of trafficking people was a concern in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and was taken up by Dyer, a Northamptonshire printer, who exposed the trafficking of young British girls to the brothels of the European mainland, and later turned his attention to state-regulated prostitution in British India. Alison Neilans (1884-1942), a militant suffragist imprisoned during the women's suffrage campaigns, continued the attack on state-sanctioned brothels, which she associated with militarism, and particularly opposed laws that embodied the 'double standard' in matters of sexual morality and legally stigmatized prostitutes.

Empire and Commonwealth: India

October's update also extends our coverage of the former British empire and early Commonwealth, with the publication of new entries on people significant to British links to the Indian subcontinent. Among them is an entry on the Tagore family (per. 1690-1951), a remarkable dynasty whose members have played leading roles in business, religion, law, and culture in Calcutta and in India more generally from the eighteenth century to the present. The family's most famous member was undoubtedly the Nobel prize-winning poet Rabindranath Tagore, but his grandfather, Dwarkanath Tagore (1794-1846), a fabulously wealthy merchant who dined with Queen Victoria and had audiences with the pope and King Louis-Philippe of France, now also appears in the dictionary in his own right.

The entry on the Tagores makes clear that they willingly allied themselves with European merchants and felt at ease with British culture (while also playing important roles in the development of Hindu culture). A rather different relationship with the British characterized the life of Lakshmi Bai (1827/8-1858), the rani of Jhansi, who, driven by outrage and resentment at the East India Company's decision to annexe Jhansi, became 'the most revered heroine in Indian history' for her role in the Indian 'mutiny' of 1857 8. Later opponents of British rule whose biographies now appear in the dictionary include Varahagiri Venkata (V.V.) Giri (1894 1980), a trade unionist and political activist who was expelled from Ireland in 1916 under suspicion of associating with those responsible for the Easter rising of that year, and who later became president of India; Chaudhary Charan Singh (1902-1987), who became the leading spokesman for the Indian peasantry and later left the Congress party, was jailed by Indira Gandhi, and became Janata Party prime minister; and Rafi Ahmad Kidwai (1894-1954), another Congress politician from the United Provinces, and a follower of Jawaharlal Nehru, who was unusual (and prominent) as a Congress Muslim politician. All three were repeatedly jailed by the British. Another key figure in Muslim politics in India, Sir Mian Fazl-i-Husain (1877-1936), was a good deal more critical of Congress and its policy of non-cooperation with the British, and was one of the founders of the Unionist Party, which held power (and kept both Congress and the Muslim League at bay) in the Punjab until independence. Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan (1917-1980), a British-trained army officer who served during the Second World War in Iraq, north Africa, and Italy, later became military ruler of Pakistan, responsible for launching the disastrous military operation in East Pakistan in 1971 that led to war with India and the independence of Bangladesh, of which Tajuddin Ahmed (1925-1975), a pre-independence Muslim League activist, was the first prime minister.

Lakshmi Bai's fame in India owes something to her balladic evocation by Subhadra Kumari Chauhan (1904-1948), a poet and Gandhian activist who again (with her husband) was frequently jailed for her political activities. Equally important in the literary history of the subcontinent were Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi (1864 1938), who after more than twenty years working for the Indian railways became a key figure in the development of a modern Hindi (as distinct from Urdu) literature, and Saadat Hasan Manto (1912-1955), one of the best-loved and most widely read modern writers in Urdu, who also worked as a scriptwriter in pre-independence Bombay. A much more controversial figure was Katherine Mayo (1867-1940), an American journalist and author, whose Mother India (1921) held Hindu culture responsible for the political, social, and economic woes of India, and provided welcome support for those 'diehards' (such as Winston Churchill) who opposed constitutional reform in the subcontinent. The British impact on India is now, of course, most clearly visible in the built environment, and among the new subjects in this update is Henry Medd (1892-1977), Herbert Baker's representative in New Delhi, and architect in his own right of both the Anglican and the Roman Catholic cathedrals in the city, who burst into tears on leaving India. Finally, the release also includes an entry on the historian Sarvepalli Gopal (1923-2002), author of sympathetic works on British rule (despite his own nationalist beliefs and involvement) as well as of magisterial biographies of Nehru and his own father, the philosopher and politician Sir Sarvepalli Radakrishnan. Gopal's life in many ways encapsulates the ambiguous and complex relationship between Indians and their one-time rulers.

The professions—new and old

One of the medical specialisms that received official recognition at the creation of the National Health Service, which this year marked its sixtieth anniversary, was geriatrics, and October's update records the lives of three of its early practitioners. Joseph Sheldon (1893-1972), appointed a consultant physician at the Royal Hospital, Wolverhampton in 1921, developed a deep interest in the health of older people. He held his out-patient sessions in Wolverhampton on market days in order to make visiting easier, and undertook systematic studies of older people in the community. His later surveys of geriatric services exposed a highly unsatisfactory state of affairs and led to the introduction of purpose-built units. Sir Ferguson Anderson (1914-2001), physician at Stobhill Hospital, Glasgow, overcame much prejudice towards this branch of medicine, and promoted the establishment of the chair of geriatric medicine at Glasgow University, the first in the country (and possibly in the world). Another Glaswegian, Bernard Isaacs (1924-1995), headed Birmingham University's department of geriatric medicine, which became noted for its high standard of effective and respectful care for elderly people. His influential books included The Survival of the Unfittest (1972), a study of old people in the East End of Glasgow, which began with a vivid example of how the consequences of a fall could escalate into risks to health, independence, and quality of life.

Other professions that emerged in the twentieth century are represented in the update. Sir William Smith Crawford (1878-1950) was the Glasgow-born founder of W. S. Crawford Ltd, one of the few early twentieth-century British advertising agencies to achieve an international reach. Crawford made strenuous attempts to raise the status of advertising in public life, and to reclaim the profession from 'quacks and charlatans'. During the great depression of 1931 he directed a Buy British campaign, to persuade the public that discriminating shopping could spend the nation out of the slump. In the late 1930s the sociologist Henry William Durant (1902-1982) set up the British Institute of Public Opinion, whose credibility was reinforced by correctly forecasting the outcome of the West Fulham by-election in 1938. After war service in France, for which he won the Military Cross, Edward Henry Molyneux (1891-1974) in 1919 set up a fashion house in Paris, where he created luxurious clothes for the hedonistic lifestyle of international high society. His impeccably made and fitted clothes, combining British understatement and French chic, reached a height of popularity in the 1930s when his clients included Wallis Simpson. Mid-twentieth century university expansion is represented by Frederick Attenborough (1887-1973), principal of University College, Leicester, from 1932 to 1951, and father of David and Richard, naturalist and film director respectively. Attenborough's major influence was to increase student numbers and teaching facilities and his contribution is commemorated with an eighteen-storey tower block on the campus (named after him in 1970). The journalist and Soho denizen Daniel Farson (1927-1997) became an early television celebrity in the mid-1950s, conducting a series of controversial interviews, one of which, with Dylan Thomas's widow, had to be faded out when he provoked her to fury.

Virginia Woolf, daughter of the DNB's first editor, Leslie Stephen, wrote in 1938 that 'It is much to be regretted that no lives of maids are to be found in the Dictionary of National Biography'. That is no longer true, and the present update includes Nellie Boxall (1890-1965), daughter of a farm worker from Farncombe, Surrey, who was cook and servant to Virginia Woolf from the mid-1910s to the mid-1930s. The couple had a notably stormy relationship; Boxall appears frequently in Woolf's diaries as the object both of affection and hostility and reveals the contradictions in Woolf's relations with working women who are often championed in her fiction but were more harshly treated in real life. After finally leaving the Woolfs in 1934, Boxall achieved note as cook for the actors Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester before retiring to her native town.

The themes of internationalism and women's work are brought together in one final—and remarkable—life, fittingly added shortly before the American presidential election of November 2008. In 1872 Victoria Claflin Woodhull (1838-1927), the daughter of a gristmill owner from Homer, Ohio, stood as the first female presidential candidate in the United States of America. A scandalous figure, she spent election day in jail in New York, having exposed the sexual misconduct of a prominent America preacher. She came to England in 1877, where she spent most of her life, though remaining an American citizen. She married (as her third husband) a member of the Martin banking family. On his death in 1897 she inherited his Worcestershire estate at Bredon's Norton, where she reinvented herself as a country landowner, and promoter of Anglo-American friendship, for which she was commemorated by a memorial in Tewkesbury Abbey.

Groups in British history

The twenty-one reference group essays added in October 2008 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. Chronologically our new groups extend from the tenth-century Benedictine reformers—a network of ecclesiastics influenced by the resurgence of Benedictine monasticism on the continent—to the 1950s Independent Group, a loose artistic circle identified as the fathers of British pop art.

Some of the networks now added are particularly well known. Our medieval coverage, for example, includes the Lancastrians—supporters of Henry VI during the Wars of the Roses—and the Yorkists, allies of Henry's cousin, Richard, duke of York, who first questioned the legitimacy of, and then took up arms against, the king. War also united those who fought with Henry V against the French in the battle of Agincourt (1415), though it was of course Shakespeare who gave them their legendary status as 'We few, we happy few, we band of brothers'. Just as Henry V is celebrated for his exemplary leadership, so his forebear John, is commonly known as the 'bad' king. However, as our new essay on John's 'evil' counsellors shows, his reign's reputation for venality and tyranny owed much to the thirty-two courtiers who advised the king and whom contemporaries deemed 'evil' and 'most wicked'.

The bloody turmoil of the Reformation and its aftermath is all too evident in the fate of the Marian martyrs, a group of more than 300 men and women executed for heresy by Mary Tudor between 1555 and 1558, and also in the actions of the thirteen Roman Catholic gentlemen—best known as the Gunpowder plotters—who sought to initiate the overthrow of the new Stuart regime with an attack on the Palace of Westminster in 1605. From among those who succeeded in defeating royalists forces later in the century came the Putney debaters, the parliamentarian soldiers and civilian Levellers who met at St Mary's Church, Putney, in 1647 to discuss the prospective settlement of the nation. From the thirty-six men known to have spoken during the eleven days of deliberations, Thomas Rainborowe's defence of the right of all free men to vote ('the poorest hee that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest hee') endures as a key moment in the evolution of democracy and has ensured the debaters' prominence in popular and radical histories of Britain. Progressive thinking, albeit in a calmer political climate, was also a legacy of another well-known group, the mid- to late eighteenth-century Bluestocking circle. Now typically regarded as an assembly of intellectual women dedicated to fostering and promoting the work of other women, the circle originated as a fashionable gathering of men as well as women, and only acquired its modern association over several generations, during which time the term bluestocking also gained negative connotations among conservative critics.

Networks like those active at Agincourt, Westminster, and Putney are also noteworthy for their strong attachments to specific places, a theme evident in several more of our new essays. In a gathering known as the Dedham conference, a group of sixteenth-century ministers met regularly in the Essex market town of Dedham to consider how best to reform the Church of England along quasi-presbyterian lines; the comprehensive records of their assembly provide historians with one of the most detailed accounts of the godly in late Elizabethan England. The Sussex town of Rye was a focal point of the literary impressionists, a small group of late nineteenth-century writers, among them Henry James and Joseph Conrad, who promoted impressionism within English literature, while Leicester House (situated at what is now London's Leicester Square) was the meeting place of the mid-eighteenth-century politicians and courtiers united by their opposition to George II and his ministers, and by their support for the king's ostracized son, Prince Frederick. The importance of prominent individuals, like Frederick, for networks is also shown in three final groups from the twentieth century: the 'fishpond', a grouping of naval officers supportive of the reforms to the service proposed by Sir John Fisher, first sea lord from 1904 to 1910, the 'syndicate of discontent', a second naval circle linked by their opposition to Fisher's innovations; and the Auden group, whose association with the poet was used by supporters and critics alike to describe a loose network of left-wing thirties intellectuals.

As ever, readers with access to the complete Oxford DNB (and this includes almost every member of a British public library) can browse the 230 groups now 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 2008 update.

Our next online update

Our next online update will be published in January 2009 and will continue the Oxford DNB's coverage of recent and contemporary history with some 200 biographies of men and women who died in 2005. Our next set of group essays will appear as part of the next-but-one update, to be published in May 2009.

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