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2009 updates: introductions

January 2009

New online contents, January 2009

Welcome to the thirteenth 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 215 men and women who died in 2005, as well as one individual who died before this date, included within a new article. A selection of biographies is freely available along with a full list of the new lives.

Of the 215 new subjects who died in 2005, 45 are women, 67 were born before the outbreak of the First World War, and 8 were born after the conclusion of the Second World War. The oldest subject is Alfred Anderson, who was born in 1896 and was the last living member of the pre-1914 Territorial Army, and the last survivor of those who went to war in autumn 1914 and of the famous Christmas truce on the western front. He is joined in this release by Harold Lawton, born in 1899, a noted French scholar and the last surviving prisoner of war from that conflict. The youngest subject in this release is the rally driver Richard Burns, who was born in 1971.

Political lives

January's update includes two prime ministers from the 1970s, Edward Heath and James Callaghan, and several other notable politicians from that era. Taken together, the lives of the politicians now added to the dictionary provide an overview of the history of the preceding generation. Ted Heath, whose biography has been written by his former private and political secretary Douglas Hurd, emerges as a contradictory figure whose achievements—notably taking Britain into the European Economic Community—have to be balanced against failures of political judgement and a personal style that often alienated his aides and ministerial colleagues. As Lord Hurd makes clear, as prime minister Heath presided over a sudden volte face in economic policy in 1972 and over an unsustainable financial boom that in turn led to recession and the infamous 'three-day week' as production was cut in many industries. His government failed in its efforts to curb trade-union power and was eventually brought down in a confrontation with the National Union of Mineworkers in early 1974 that led Heath to call an early and ill-advised general election.

James Callaghan, whose biography has been written by his former cabinet colleague Roy Hattersley, was a senior member of the Labour administrations before and after Heath's government and became prime minister in 1976 following the resignation of Harold Wilson. In manner and career Jim Callaghan (or Sunny Jim as he was known) provides a contrast with Heath. Unlike Heath, Callaghan had held the highest offices of state as chancellor of the exchequer and foreign and home secretary before entering 10 Downing Street. Whereas Heath tried to confront the trade-union movement, in 1969—and at a crucial moment in the history of the Labour Party—Callaghan had defended the unions from those ministers, notably Barbara Castle, who would have reformed British industrial relations. And as prime minister Callaghan had the task of stabilizing the British economy after the excesses of the early 1970s, an undertaking that began badly when his administration was forced to seek emergency support from the International Monetary Fund. While Heath was reserved with colleagues and uncomfortable in public, Callaghan's style was relaxed and avuncular, though he did not lack political guile. But he too made the wrong call over a general election: it is widely believed that had he gone to the country in autumn 1978 he might have won. In the event, the 'winter of discontent' that followed put paid to his administration in the election of May 1979, and also brought to a close the distinctive era of British politics of the 1960s and 1970s.

The addition to the dictionary of Gerry Fitt, leader of Northern Ireland's Social and Democratic Labour Party, is a reminder of the febrile events of 1978-9 and of the end of this era, for it was Fitt's decision to abstain in the vote of no confidence in the House of Commons in the spring of 1979 that led to Labour's defeat at the polls and the election of Margaret Thatcher's first administration. Gwynfor Evans, leader of Plaid Cymru during this period, is also included among those who died in 2005. This update contains in addition the life of the most prominent British fascist of the era, John Tyndall of the National Front and then the British National Party, whose cause briefly prospered during the economic downturn of the mid- and late 1970s.

Ted Heath is joined by his ill-fated chancellor Anthony Barber, forever remembered for the 'Barber boom' of the early 1970s, and by Gordon Campbell, secretary of state for Scotland in that Conservative administration. Two other notable Conservative politicians are Sir Nicholas Scott, a 'one nation' Tory, once tipped as a future leader of the party, and Baroness Blatch, an important figure in local government in Cambridgeshire and one of John Major's so-called fenland mafia, who was a junior education minister between 1992 and 1994. From the other side of the political spectrum January's update includes the Labour left-winger Stan Orme, who was briefly a member of Callaghan's cabinet, and Ron Todd, whose leadership of the Transport and General Workers' Union was characterized by conflict with Neil Kinnock, leader of the Labour Party, as well as with Margaret Thatcher. A staunch monarchist, Todd took the unusual step of making the queen mother an honorary member of the TGWU.

The history of the Labour Party after 1979 is captured in the biography of Robin Cook, who emerged as a leading figure in his party during the 1980s. Cook brought together a sharp intellect, brilliance in debate, a strong moral sense, a fondness for horse racing, and later a complex private life. His eloquence in the House of Commons gave heart to the Labour benches in the party's long period out of power between 1979 and 1997. But his temperament and appearance—he was often unkindly compared to a gnome—did not fit him for leadership. He looked and evidently felt out of place as foreign secretary in Tony Blair's first administration, and he subsequently resigned ministerial office when the United Kingdom joined the United States in the invasion of Iraq in 2003. His untimely death was mourned by many Labour activists. Cook is joined by Mo Mowlam—another popular Labour minister, though one latterly more favoured by the public than by the leadership of her party. Mowlam's role in the Northern Ireland peace process at the end of the 1990s and her personal struggle against debilitating illness made her a well-loved and admired figure. Her fall from political favour was met with loud complaints from the press and public alike. Other Labour politicians now added to the dictionary include Phillip Whitehead, a talented MP and television producer, who pushed through parliament a 'right to know' law for adopted children who might otherwise never discover their parentage, and Donald Bruce, a left-wing MP and fierce opponent of the European Union.

Among figures notable in public life as campaigners and lobbyists several names stand out in this update. Peter Benenson, the founder of Amnesty International in the early 1960s, is included alongside the nuclear physicist, anti-nuclear campaigner, and leading figure in the Pugwash movement of scientists Sir Joseph Rotblat. Amnesty International corporately in 1977 and Rotblat personally (though jointly with Pugwash) in 1995 were awarded the Nobel peace prize. Arthur Seldon was a key figure in the Institute of Economic Affairs and a major intellectual influence on Margaret Thatcher, while Richard Sandbrook and Sir Peter Large were early advocates of, respectively, sustainable development and disability rights. Sir Frederick Bishop began his career as a civil servant and then oversaw the National Trust's massive expansion of membership, activities, and influence. Eric Roll enters the dictionary for a host of different achievements: as an economist, economic historian, and civil servant, and as a diplomat involved in many of the key negotiations of the post-war era, from the Marshall plan to Britain's first application to join the EEC in the 1960s. Lord Roll was described by the American economist J. K. Galbraith as the most accomplished negotiator of his generation.

Professional and business life

Among notable entrants from the professions the pioneering career of Dame Rose Heilbron stands out. With Helen Normanton she was the first female king's counsel (KC) in England and Wales, as well as the first woman judge, the first woman to lead a circuit, and the first female treasurer of an inn of court. She is joined by Mary Marre, who chaired the committee on the future of the legal profession that opened the way to solicitors being able to act and plead for their clients in the courts. Between 1982 and 1992 the judge John Donaldson served as master of the rolls. His work returns us to the political themes covered in this update through his role as president of the ill-fated National Industrial Relations Court (1971-4) established by the Heath government, the cause rather than the resolver of industrial conflict. Geoffrey Lane, lord chief justice between 1980 and 1992, is another notable legal subject added in this release, alongside Sir Jean-Pierre Warner, the first British advocate-general at the European Court of Justice, and Bob Alexander, a leading barrister described by Lord Denning as 'the best advocate of his generation'.

January's update is also notable for a number of women remembered for their work in scientific and medical fields. Dame Cicely Saunders, the pioneer of the hospice movement in Britain, was drawn to working with the terminally ill during the 1940s, and in 1967 she opened St Christopher's Hospice, where more than 50,000 healthcare professionals had been trained by the time of her death. The entomologist and naturalist Dame Miriam Rothschild was a leading authority on fleas and undertook pioneering work on ecological biochemistry, including the mechanisms of warning colouration. They are joined by, among others, the botanist Joyce Lambert, who established that the Norfolk broads were man-made; the biochemist Helen Muir, who specialized in degenerative diseases of the joints; and the cytologist Betty Macgregor, who initiated the first successful programme of cervical cancer screening.

The themes of medical and scientific research are continued in the biographies of Sir Richard Southwood—an entomologist who led public health enquiries into lead in petrol and BSE—and of Sir Richard Doll, who enjoyed international fame and commendation for his epidemiological studies in the 1950s and 1960s that established the link between smoking and lung cancer, and so helped to change public attitudes to tobacco. Other leading figures in medical science include Bill Inman, the pharmaco-epidemiologist who devised the 'yellow card' system of alerting to problems with drug safety; Bill Cleland, a pioneer of open-heart surgery using extra-corporeal circulation; and Sir John Dacie, a leading haematologist and expert on leukaemias. The mathematician and physicist Sir Hermann Bondi now joins Sir Fred Hoyle and Thomas Gold in the Oxford DNB: together they propounded the now discredited 'steady state' theory of the universe. Another mathematician, Sir Harry Pitt, noted for his seminal work on Tauberian theorems, went on to a career in university administration. Richard Fitter was a prolific ornithologist and naturalist, and the author of many standard field guides; Tony Fogg was an expert on marine ecology, especially the roles of algae and plankton.

It is claimed that the great fast bowler Fred Trueman said of David Sheppard—in the days when the future bishop opened the batting for England but was not always a secure slip fielder—'It's a pity t' Rev doesn't put his hands together more in t' field'. Sheppard was briefly captain of the England cricket team. He was also, and for much longer and with more lasting social impact, the bishop of Liverpool, and he heads our group of religious lives in this update. Sheppard gave spiritual solace and civic leadership at a time when Liverpool was in economic and social decline, in the 1980s and 1990s, and formed one half of a notable Christian partnership with the Roman Catholic archbishop of Liverpool, Derek Worlock. Sheppard became one of the most respected and well-loved churchmen of the age. He is joined by Hugh Montefiore of Birmingham, another notable and sometimes controversial bishop, and by James Whyte, the moderator of the Church of Scotland who preached famous sermons after the tragedies at Lockerbie in 1988 and Dunblane in 1996. Maurice Wiles was a leading academic theologian and a man of unorthodox views (and the father of the mathematician Sir Andrew Wiles, who proved Fermat's last theorem). John Rayner was a leading rabbi and liturgist in the Liberal Jewish tradition in Britain, while Geoffrey Parrinder was a respected scholar of comparative religion.

The presence of figures from business, engineering, and design has been a noted feature of recent January updates and in this release we add further biographies of individuals from these and related fields. The civil engineer William Brown devised the multi-box form of bridge deck, while his contemporary, the architect Povl Ahm of the Arup practice, worked on such iconic post-war buildings as Coventry Cathedral, the Sydney Opera House, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Four lives are associated with automotive engineering and car manufacture: Keith Duckworth of Cosworth Engineering revolutionized the design of racing car engines in the 1970s and 1980s; Sir Kenneth Corley of Lucas led a company that made electrical components for the motor and aviation industries; Alexander Trotman was chairman and chief executive officer of the car company Ford UK; and John DeLorean—one of the most celebrated entrepreneurs and crooks of the 1970s—headed a company, based in Northern Ireland, that took millions in public subsidy to produce the eponymous 'gull-wing' car. We can add a fifth life connected with cars, though in this case we are dealing with miniature models and the biography of Leslie Smith, the industrialist associated with Matchbox cars, the gift of first choice to boys in the 1960s.

John King, the ebullient chairman of British Airways and a leading exemplar of 'Thatcherite' businessmen in the 1980s, represents the aviation industries alongside Sir Frederick Page, a leading aircraft designer and executive, and the first chairman of British Aerospace. Sir Kenneth Durham was the scientist who restructured Unilever and ensured its viability, while the inventor Jeremy Fry was also mentor to the entrepreneur James Dyson. The life of Sir Nigel Mobbs of Slough Estates, worth nearly £2 billion at his retirement, shows the sums that could be made by riding Britain's post-war property booms. Ken Swan, the founder of Swan Hellenic, showed likewise that in an age of affluence the 'grey pound' was worth chasing: there was money to be made out of travel and services for the retired. Sir Leslie Porter, husband of Dame Shirley Porter, married into the Cohen family—founders of the Tesco supermarket chain—and prospered in the days when Tesco literally 'piled 'em high and sold 'em cheap'. Janet Reger made her name in lingerie design and sales, and knew that she had arrived when Tom Stoppard included the line 'Don't get your Janet Regers in a twist' in his play Night and Day. From knickers to bridges and from boom to bust, the highs and lows of British business are included in this release.

Literature, scholarship, and the arts

Of the literary figures included in this update perhaps the most notable is the novelist John Fowles, famous for The Collector, The Magus, and The French Lieutenant's Woman and also a notable amateur geologist and curator of the local museum in Lyme Regis. Other novelists include David Hughes, whose most successful work, The Pork Butcher (1984), told the story of a German soldier's return to the scene of a wartime massacre, and the Cuban exile Guillermo Cabrera Infante, who is best known for his celebration of pre-revolutionary Havana, Tres tristes tigres. Among dramatists, Christopher Fry, author of The Lady's Not For Burning, may be contrasted with Willis Hall, who, with his longtime co-writer Keith Waterhouse (who has written his entry), wrote many plays and television dramas, including Billy Liar. Another comic and satirist included here is Willie Donaldson, whose Henry Root Letters exposed the vanities of many public figures during the late 1970s. In the field of children's literature Helen Cresswell is joined by the book editor Miriam Hodgson, who worked with many of the most notable writers of young fiction of her day. Julia Darling, the poet, playwright, and novelist known for the novel Crocodile Soup, is included, as is Anna Haycraft on two counts: for her role as a publisher of authors including Beryl Bainbridge and in her own right as a novelist publishing under the name of Alice Thomas Ellis, in which guise she was famous for The Sin Eaters among other books. These creative writers of different types are complemented by several notable literary critics. David Daiches was a prolific writer of many books on literature, especially Scottish literature, as befitted a native of Glasgow. Philip Hobsbaum was both a critic and a poet whose literary discussion groups in London, Belfast, and Glasgow were credited with assisting the careers of many writers including Seamus Heaney, while Robert Woof was a literary scholar and successful director of the Wordsworth Trust. George Painter is remembered for his biography of Marcel Proust and Victor Selwyn as founder of the Oasis Salamander Trust, which set about collecting and publishing the otherwise neglected and forgotten poetry of the Second World War.

Many of the historians added in January's update were public figures in their own right, notable not only for their scholarship but for the wider roles they played. Sir Glanmor Williams and Sir Rees Davies were both very distinguished Welsh historians of their homeland. Sir Bill Deakin was not only the founding warden of St Antony's College, Oxford, but Churchill's indispensable literary assistant and adviser and a wartime SOE officer who worked with Tito and his partisans in Yugoslavia. Maurice Cowling of Peterhouse, Cambridge, known for his work on Victorian political history, was reputed to have had influence over Margaret Thatcher and some Thatcherite MPs of the 1980s, several of whom had been his pupils. As our article makes clear, however, this influence has been exaggerated. Douglas Johnson, a historian of modern France, was also an interpreter of the French to the British. He is joined by Monica Charlot, the British-born pioneer of 'British studies' in France and by Maurice Beresford, who studied Britain's deserted medieval villages. The sociologist Joe Banks was an expert on the history of the Victorian family and the advent of family planning in that era. Classicists added to the dictionary include the admired eccentric David Shackleton Bailey and the expert on Roman demographics and stoicism Peter Brunt. Also included is Martin Lings, scholar of Islam and author of an acclaimed Life of Muhammad, and three leading educationists: Michael McCrum, headmaster of Eton and then master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, who was one of the leading public school headmasters of the era; Ted Wragg, the critic in equal measure of both Conservative and New Labour education policies; and Sybil Marshall, the pioneer of the 'symphonic' method of teaching.

The mix of individuals drawn from broadcasting and journalism reflects the wide influence and broadening genres in both fields in the late twentieth century. Michael Davie and Kenneth Harris were journalists on The Observer in its golden age. Harris, graduating to the role of executive, both 'saved' The Observer in 1976 and then encouraged its sale to the controversial entrepreneur Tiny Rowland in 1981. Patrick Keatley was a leading foreign and Commonwealth correspondent and commentator, working for much of his career on The Guardian. In television Michael Gill was a gifted documentary film-maker responsible for Kenneth Clark's Civilization, and Johnnie Stewart the innovative producer of Top of the Pops in the shows heyday of the 1960s and 1970s. From radio, Leonard Miall was the BBC broadcaster who broke news of the Marshall plan and went on to a career in management in the corporation, while John Timpson's reassuring Norfolk burr was to be heard on a range of programmes in the 1980s and 1990s, including Today and Any Questions? Another voice heard frequently in these years—a slow mid-Atlantic-meets-aristocratic drawl—belonged to the self-appointed authority on the royal family and the landed families of England, Harold Brooks-Baker, the American publisher of Burke's Peerage and Debrett's. Humphrey Carpenter, a biographer, jazz player, and witty broadcaster in quite a different style is also included in this update.

A similar diversity is to be found in the lives drawn from the visual arts. Painters range from Conroy Maddox, the leading English surrealist, to the 'pop' artist Patrick Caulfield, and Karl Weschke, a former Nazi paratrooper settled in England, whose sombre and threatening scenes may have reflected in some oblique way his earlier experiences. Two sculptors are also included: Sir Eduardo Paolozzi, the surrealist-influenced modernist, and Bernard Meadows, at one stage assistant to Henry Moore and part of the 1952 Geometry of Fear exhibition. Among photographers are Fay Godwin, noted for her landscapes reflecting environmental concerns, Humphrey Spender, whose documentary work was a feature of Mass-Observation records, and Patrick Lichfield, the aristocratic photographer who recorded the rich and stylish. From among the patrons and administrators of arts the Oxford DNB has chosen Margaret Gardiner, who created and endowed the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness, Joan Crossley-Holland, who played a key role in the modern revival of 'arts and crafts' through the Oxford Gallery on that city's High Street, and Lilian Browse, the art dealer known as the Duchess of Cork Street who was an expert on Walter Sickert.

Musical lives are largely drawn from the classical world and include Norbert Brainin, a member of the Amadeus Quartet, which was originally known as the Brainin Quartet. Other players and singers include Dame Moura Lympany, the pianist and acclaimed interpreter of Rachmaninov, June Bronhill, the Australian singer famous for light opera roles, Eleanor Warren, a cellist who became head of music programmes at the BBC and initiated Monday lunchtime concerts at St John's, Smith Square, in London, and the conductor Meredith Davies. Stanley Sadie, expert on Mozart and editor of the Grove Dictionary of Music, is also included alongside Robert Farnon, a notable composer of film and television scores, representing the world of light orchestral music. Derek Bailey, in contrast, left his mark as a leading theorist and practitioner of improvised music. Aspects of pop music history are represented by Laurel Aitken, the so-called 'godfather of ska', and Jamaica's first genuine recording star, whose influence spread widely in Britain, and by the guitarist and blues singer Long John Baldry. Baldry toured in the 1960s with the Rolling Stones, helped Elton John at the start of his career, and discovered the young Rod Stewart playing harmonica on the platform at Twickenham station.

Comedy, film, and sport

Dave Allen and Ronnie Barker, two great comedians of contrasting styles, head our coverage of entertainment, theatre, and film in this release. Allen, the original bar-stool raconteur, was a laconic mixture of gentle and scabrous humour, poking fun at his Irish background and Catholic upbringing. Barker, perhaps the nation's favourite comic, was a master of characterization as Fletcher in the prison comedy Porridge or as the grocer Arkwright in the gentle Open All Hours. He had come to attention alongside John Cleese and Ronnie Corbett in The Frost Report; soon after he made his lasting impression partnering Corbett in The Two Ronnies, which won fans young and old over its fifteen-year history. Other comic figures include Cyril Fletcher, whose 'odd odes' were a feature of the 1970s television programme That's Life, Jack Tripp, who made his career as a pantomime dame, and Malcolm Hardee, an influential promoter of alternative comedy during the 1980s. The actor David Kossoff could play comic roles, notably as radio's Alf Larkin, but was better known as a broadcaster who specialized in moral themes and in the telling of Bible stories.

Among a clutch of actors Sir John Mills stands out as the most notable. He was described as 'a new sort of Everyman hero', the epitome of the cheerful Tommy and reliable Englishman in many films; his versatility allowed him to play numerous roles, including a memorable Pip in David Lean's version of Great Expectations and Captain Anson in Ice Cold in Alex. David Lean is also recalled by the inclusion of two of his colleagues—Guy Green, the cinematographer who won an Oscar for his work on Great Expectations, and the film production designer John Box, winner of a remarkable four Oscars—and of his wife, the film actress Kay Walsh, who did some of her finest screen work in films he directed. The January update also includes another notable post-war cinematographer, Erwin Hillier, who worked on The Dam Busters, and John Brabourne, film producer and pioneer of 'pay-TV' cable television. Constance Cummings, born in America, enjoyed a seventy-year career on stage and screen; and Sheila Gish was an actress especially associated with roles in plays by the American playwright Tennessee Williams. Mary Wimbush had a varied career but was best known in later life for playing Julia Pargetter in the radio serial The Archers.

If anyone may be said to sum up the age this release chronicles it is surely George Best, often claimed as the finest footballer who ever pulled on a professional shirt in these islands. Born in Belfast and brought to Manchester United as a teenager, Best's outrageous talent on the wing charmed the crowds and bamboozled full backs in equal measure. He was, as his biographer Michael Crick maintains, the complete footballer, whose remarkable speed and control of the ball allowed him to go past defenders with ease. Best was fortunate to play in a club team including talents like Dennis Law and Bobby Charlton, but at international level with Northern Ireland he never had the opportunity to grace a major international tournament. He was child of the swinging sixties, and his boyish good looks and taste for the high life were his downfall in the 1970s. There were occasions when Best lived up to his name, but he was more of a celebrity off the field than on it in his later years as a player. His descent into alcoholism and early death were part of national life for two decades but when he died the people of his native city paid tribute in their thousands to a man who had entertained so many. Best is joined by another celebrated footballer of a slightly earlier period, Johnny Haynes of Fulham—captain of England and the first player to earn £100 a week—who is remembered as a brilliant passer of the ball. After winning the 1951 open golf championship Max Faulkner enjoyed a long career as a writer and commentator on his sport, in contrast to the world champion rally driver Richard Burns, whose life was ended prematurely by illness. Prominent sportswomen in this update include Kay Stammers, Wimbledon ladies' doubles champion (with Freda James) in 1935 and 1936, and Audrey Court, who won a silver medal in the women's relay at the Berlin Olympics in 1936, where her brother Godfrey Brown (who is already in the dictionary) won gold. They are joined by Margaret Hughes, the first woman to write and be published on cricket.

Alongside these successful representatives of their country are others whose dedication and bravery require recognition. Arthur Bywater, for example, a manager and administrator of munitions factories in the Second World War, was awarded both the George Medal and the George Cross for his remarkable bravery on two occasions when explosions threatened numerous casualties. Malcolm Fewtrell of Buckinghamshire CID was jointly in charge of the investigation into the great train robbery of 1963 and was in large part responsible for solving that sensational crime. But there is also Melita Norwood, dubbed the spy who came in from the Co-op, who lived an apparently blameless life in a London suburb until unmasked in her old age as a post-war spy for the Soviet Union who never lost her commitment to the cause of Soviet communism.

Our next online update

Our next online update will be published in May 2009 and will include men and women active from the 'earliest times' to the late twentieth century. May's update will complete our series on British gardeners and horticulturists, as well as continuing long-term projects on the pre-Reformation episcopacy and shapers of the British empire and early Commonwealth. It will also feature Victorian naturalists, some familiar names in domestic engineering, and the next set of group articles—from the Elizabethan sea dogs to the 'angry young men'.

Back to top of January 2009 preface

May 2009

New online contents, May 2009

Welcome to the fourteenth 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 2009 update adds biographies of 87 individuals active between the eleventh and late twentieth century. In addition to new biographies the update includes a further 20 ‘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. These 20 new articles bring the total number of published groups to 250, meaning that we are now approximately two-thirds of the way through the project.

Central to May’s update is a set of 30 biographies of men and women who shaped the history of British gardening. Many of the new subjects made their name cultivating popular varieties of garden plants, but there are also plant hunters, broadcasters and writers, and those responsible for some of the Britain’s best-known gardens. These 30 lives conclude our project, which began last May, to extend the dictionary’s coverage of garden history. A selection of the new biographies published in 2008 9, along with some gardening lives already included in the dictionary, is now available in an interactive map.

Another focus of May’s update is a set of Victorian and early twentieth-century engineers who pioneered new standards in domestic and public hygiene. These individuals led the way at a time when Britain was widely acknowledged as an exemplar for public health, public cleanliness, and ‘salvage’—an earlier term for recycling. Our interest in the history of empire and Commonwealth also continues with new biographies of men and women who shaped the history of southern Africa, the Caribbean, the Pacific, and the Far East, while the continued project charting the pre-Reformation episcopate adds biographies of bishops from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries.

As ever, full details of the May 2009 update are available from the online contents page, and a free selection of extracts and highlights is available here. You may also like to know that, following an agreement in April 2009 between OUP and library authorities in Scotland and Wales, the online edition of the Oxford DNB is now freely available to many more Scottish and Welsh readers. As a result, more than 90 per cent of the United Kingdom now has access to the complete dictionary through a local public library, and if you were previously unable to gain access to the dictionary you may well be able to do so now. As before, most libraries offer ‘remote access’, which allows library members to log in to the Oxford DNB simply by entering the membership number on their library card in the box provided on the dictionary’s homepage. Remote access allows you to consult the Oxford DNB at any time and on any computer (at home or work, for example); there’s no need to visit the library as long as you have a membership number handy. Full details of participating public libraries, including those that joined the scheme in April 2009, are available here.

May’s update also includes more than 1000 reciprocal links between Oxford DNB biographies and entries in Oxford University’s new online resource, Electronic Enlightenment. Electronic Enlightenment offers the searchable correspondence of eighteenth-century thinkers and writers, and the publishers and booksellers who promoted their ideas. Links are available in the left-hand margin of relevant Oxford DNB entries (for example, Voltaire and Adam Smith) and are an excellent way for eighteenth-century scholars to further their research. The Oxford DNB now provides over 50,000 links to trusted external resources, including the National Portrait Gallery, National Register of Archives, American National Biography, the Royal Historical Society bibliography and, now, Electronic Enlightenment.

Gardeners: profession and national pastime

Our latest selection of gardening lives highlights the importance of those who held the position of head gardener for the formation and dissemination of horticultural knowledge and fashions. Many of the leading figures in this category were Scots, including Charles M’Intosh (1794-1864) from Perthshire, who came from a long line of gardeners. M’Intosh was employed by landowners in Scotland and England before entering the service of British and foreign royalty, and drew on his experience in his gardening manuals, which benefited both professional and amateur gardeners. William McNab (1780-1848) and James McNab (1810-1878), father and son, made important contributions to scientific horticulture as curators, successively, of the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh. The varied apprenticeship of James Barnes (d. 1877) underlay his phenomenal skill as a cultivator at Bicton, Devon, where a legal dispute with his employer (who falsely accused him of neglecting the garden), led to an important assertion of the status of the gardening profession. Like Barnes, whose hallmark was the cultivation of speciality fruits, including pineapples and cucumbers, Robert Hogg (1818-1897), a nurseryman from Duns in Berwickshire, became the leading authority on fruit growing and a key promoter of practical gardening among members of the Royal Horticultural Society—one of several figures in this update to have played a prominent role in the development of the RHS. In the year that the Royal Botanic Garden, Kew, marks its 250th anniversary we also include William Jackson Bean (1863-1947), who rose through the hierarchy at the garden—from student gardener in the melon yard to curator of Kew’s arboretum—and spent his evenings compiling the standard work on trees and shrubs in the British Isles. Another life in horticulture was that of Fred Streeter (1877/9-1975), who began as a twelve-year-old washing flower pots, and became one of the earliest garden broadcasters, dealing on radio and television with questions from recreational gardeners and never recommending anything he had not tried himself.

Next to these practical tips were the often more theoretically grounded prescriptions of the garden designers. Edward Kemp (1817-1891) acquired experience of large-scale projects as an apprentice at Chatsworth and made his name as a designer and a champion of public parks, most notably at Birkenhead, though he also offered popular advice on how to lay out small gardens. Donald Beaton (1802-1863), whose apprenticeship was served in Scotland, was a leading advocate of bedding plant gardening and was interested in the theory of complementary colours. Francis Inigo Thomas (1865-1950) reacted against ahistorical schemes with their imported specimen plants, and dedicated his career to reviving native styles and plantings from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Edwardian country gardens.

Among the foremost amateur gardeners of her age was Louisa Lawrence (1803/4-1855), who cultivated exotic plants at Ealing Park, Middlesex, and became a prolific prizewinner at the shows of what was then the Horticultural Society of London, of which she was one of the earliest women fellows. A century later the Perthshire garden of Dorothy Renton (1898-1966), now owned by the National Trust for Scotland, was noted for its cultivation of new introductions, while the Kent cottage garden of Edward Solomon Hyams (1910-1975) led to an interest in ecology and soil fertility. Hyams is also remembered as a writer and his monumental history The English Garden (1964) is described by his Oxford DNB biographer as ‘the most eloquent testimony to the post-war revival of English gardens’. After a successful career in business Sir Thomas Hanbury (1832-1907) created a garden at La Mortola on the Mediterranean coast of northern Italy. With an unrivalled collection of plants it is now recognized as a UNESCO world heritage site. Hanbury is also noteworthy for presenting the RHS with a 60 acre plot at Wisley, Surrey (now one of its principal public gardens), that allowed the society to move from its cramped, polluted site in Chiswick. Louisa Lawrence’s son Sir Trevor Lawrence (whose biography also appears in this update) oversaw the move to Wisley as president of the RHS, and is credited with reviving the society’s fortunes in the early twentieth century.

Other well-known gardens to feature in May’s update—both in Cornwall—are those at Heligan, overseen by two dynasties of Cornish landowners and politicians, the Tremayne family (per. 1741-1901), and the estate of Caerhayes Castle, where John Charles Williams (1861-1939) utilized Cornwall’s favourable climate for horticulture, especially for the cultivation of rhododendrons. Perhaps the most controversial legacy of the amateur landowner gardeners is that of Christopher John Leyland (1849 1926). In his lifetime Leyland was best known for promoting the construction of turbine-powered vessels in the Tyneside shipbuilding industry. But posthumously he is associated with Cupressocyparius leylandii, the accidental product of cross-pollination between two cypress trees, whose fast-growing properties admirably suited Leyland’s Northumberland estate—but are of more dubious benefit in suburban gardens where they have been inappropriately planted.

Numerous British gardens have been enriched by the products of overseas plant-hunting expeditions. The travels of the Cornish brothers William (d. 1863) and Thomas Lobb (d. 1894), sons of a gamekeeper, led to important discoveries in South and North America and south-East Asia (including the monkey puzzle tree and the ceanothus), enriching their employer, if not themselves. Charles Maries (1851-1902) was sent to China and Japan in the 1870s with instructions to collect plants that might thrive in British gardens, while between the two world wars Frank Ludlow (1885-1972) undertook collecting expeditions in Bhutan, Tibet, and Kashmir. New introductions were made available to gardeners through nurserymen like Charles Lawson (1795-1873), who built up a successful business specializing in grasses and pines and became lord provost of Edinburgh before suffering a spectacular financial collapse.

Specialist plantsmen are represented by Samuel Arnott (1852 1930), a retired Dumfries baker whose snowdrop hybrid came to be grown around the world, and by Peter Barr (1826 1909), the Govan-born nurseryman who rescued daffodils from the obscurity into which they had fallen in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, so earning him the title of ’daffodil king‘. Daffodil cultivation was also the life’s work of Guy Livingstone Wilson (1885-1962), who forsook a position in the family’s Ulster textile business to pursue his enthusiasm. Roses meanwhile were the passion of Henry Honywood D’Ombrain (1818-1905), a leading clergyman gardener who became the first secretary of the National Rose Society. May’s update also adds Henry Eckford (1823-1905), whose formative gardening experience had been gained on some of Scotland’s best-known estates, and who developed new varieties of sweet pea with such success that the flower came to be widely grown in British gardens. Eckford’s work brought him fame in North America and recognition by the RHS, and led to his being dubbed the ’father of the sweet pea’.

Recorders and preservers of nature

The plant-breeding work of horticulturists informed the studies of Charles Darwin, whose anniversary we celebrate this year; men like Donald Beaton, the bedding plant specialist, were also correspondents of Darwin. Two other categories of activity that underpinned the work of naturalists, botanical art and taxidermy, are also represented in this update. Sarah Anne Drake (1803-1857) was notable for her scientific accuracy as well as her artistic ability, and spent fifteen years resident in the household of the botanist John Lindley, though her achievements received little acknowledgement in her lifetime. A correspondent of the mycologist Miles Berkeley, Anna Maria Hussey (1805-1853), the wife of a clergyman, produced a much admired volume of illustrations of British fungi, intended in part for mothers wishing to teach their children about nature. Augusta Joanna Elizabeth Innes Withers (d. 1876) undertook commissions for the Horticultural Society of London and then received royal patronage, but died in poverty and obscurity. It is only recently that the Cornish amateur naturalist Emily Stackhouse (1811-1870) has been identified as the main source of illustrations for the best-selling volume Flowers of the Field. Our fourth botanical artist is Lilian Snelling (1879-1972), principal lithographer to Curtis’s Botanical Magazine for over thirty years, who received the Victoria medal of honour, the Royal Horticultural Society’s highest award, in 1952.

From recording to preserving specimens. Edward Gerrard (1810-1910), employed in the zoological department of the British Museum for fifty years, set up a flourishing taxidermy and osteology business, supplied with specimens by London Zoo. Another London firm, established by a second taxidermist, (James) Rowland Ward (1847 1912), claimed to have originated the idea of setting up animals in natural groups, and made a name for its dramatic displays at exhibitions and at its Piccadilly showrooms. Provincial firms, such as that founded by Peter Spicer (1839-1935) at Leamington, specialized in hunting trophies, while the specimens of birds from the wetlands of Norfolk preserved by Thomas Edward Gunn (1844-1932) reflect the overlapping interests of wildfowlers and naturalists. The work of these preservers, once a common feature of domestic interiors, is today on display in museums across the country. A final taxidermist now added to dictionary made his name by displaying his work to the public during his lifetime. This was Walter Potter (1835 1918), of Bramber, Sussex, who was responsible for perhaps the best-known and certainly the most curious collections of Victorian taxidermy, comprising elaborate and sentimental anthropomorphic tableaux.

Engineers for daily living

May’s update also includes of set of new subjects, principally engineers, whose work sought to establish a sanitary infrastructure for a growing population. Given their predominant focus on water purity, waste management, domestic hygiene, salvage, and heating, they may rightly be considered pioneers of some basic necessities of civilized life that we now take for granted and use daily. The industrialist and engineer Robert Thom (1774-1847), for example, constructed a gravitational scheme to supply Greenock with pure, filtered water, which became one of the technical wonders of the west of Scotland. Working contemporaneously with Thom, James Simpson (1799-1860) developed the modern form of sand filter beds to purify London’s water. These methods sustained the urbanization of Britain, were exported to the colonies, and remain the basis of municipal water supplies dependent on surface water. Water supply also made possible the introduction of the water closet, the major innovation in domestic sanitation, developed through the ingenuity of such sanitary engineers as John Shanks (1825-1895) and (Josiah) George Jennings (1810-1882), who also built the first public conveniences in London, and the pottery manufacturer Thomas William Twyford (1849-1921).

Discharge of water-borne waste into public sewers raised new challenges for civil engineers like John Roe (1795-1874), who was at the forefront of a vigorous debate about sewer design, favouring an ovoid pipe for the rapid removal of waste from urban centres. The Manchester philanthropist and promoter of town planning Thomas Coglan Horsfall (1841-1932) was among those who campaigned for smoke abatement to reduce air pollution in Britain’s cities. Large schemes for the ventilation and heating of public buildings—hospitals, prisons, churches, museums, and town halls—were pioneered by engineers such as George Haden (1788-1856) and Wilson Weatherly Phipson (1838-1891). A prominent sanitary engineer, William Eassie (1832-1888), was active in the Cremation Society of England, supervising the construction of the crematorium at Woking where the first legal cremation in Britain took place in March 1885. And a municipal sanitary inspector and civil engineer, Jesse Cooper Dawes (1878-1955), became the leading authority on the growing problem of domestic waste, overseeing salvage recovery of valuable reusable materials, and criticizing indiscriminate burning and dumping. In 1940 he claimed that Britain had derived more salvage from domestic waste than all continental countries combined. Dawes may have a claim to be the pioneer of our modern practice of recycling.

Four Scottish engineers illustrate the worldwide impact of British engineering advances. The mechanical engineer Walter Montgomerie Neilson (1819-1889) harboured a passion to build railway locomotives in Scotland, and established a firm in Glasgow, where he successfully developed designs and identified overseas export markets. The Clydeside marine engineers Alexander Carnegie Kirk (1830-1892) and James Weir (1842/3-1920) made important innovations in the design of steamship engines that enabled those vessels to surpass sailing ships, and helped to secure Glasgow’s position as a world centre of shipbuilding. The Aberdeenshire-born civil engineer (Richard) Henry Brunton (1841-1901), who oversaw the construction of thirty lighthouses along Japan’s rugged coast, was among the 2500 westerners hired by the Japanese government after the Meiji restoration of 1868, and his memoirs are an important record of the experience of those foreign employees.

Empire and Commonwealth

May’s update further extends our coverage of lives shaped by the British empire through the inclusion of another fifteen entries whose geographical and occupational sweep reflects the breadth and diversity of the imperial experience itself. The earliest born of our new subjects, the Wesleyan missionary John Thomas (1797-1881), first went to Tonga in 1826, and is acknowledged as a key figure in the dissemination of Christianity on the islands, helped greatly by his alliance with the powerful king of Vava’u (and eventually of the whole Tongan archipelago), Taufa’ahau. Thomas’s career was not without controversy, but with hindsight his impact on these small Pacific islands pales in comparison with that made by Sir Albert Ellis (1869-1951), whose discovery of phosphate on Nauru and Ocean Island (Banaba) set in train the environmental devastation of those islands, whose inhabitants are still struggling to cope with the consequences. Like Thomas a sincere evangelical Christian, Ellis believed that the development of the phosphate industry was in the islanders’ own interests.

A rather more romantic view of the Pacific was purveyed by Ellis’s contemporary, Beatrice Grimshaw (1870-1953), whose novels and short stories typically featured ‘independent young women, corruptible men, and frequently sinister natives’; she was for a time a highly successful writer, and contributed significantly to the popular British view of the ‘south seas’ and their local cultures. Another female author, Emily Innes (1843-1927), has provided historians with a rich source of material on the impact of colonialism in Malaysia, though her highly caustic account of both Malay society and British officialdom—written as a corrective to Isabella Bird’s more appreciative view—made little impact at the time. The same cannot be said for a third woman whose life is included in this update, Helen Joseph (1905-1992). Born into relative comfort in Sussex, and first travelling to South Africa to convalesce after a riding accident, she became increasingly involved in the anti-apartheid struggle in that country, enduring repeated banning orders, house arrests, and harassment by the South African police, and was eventually recognized as ‘the mother of the struggle’. At her funeral Nelson Mandela described her as being both ‘a South African revolutionary’ and ‘a lady of the British empire’; this was, he said, ‘a contradiction in the eyes of many but to Helen her own reality’.

As well as people of British birth or descent whose lives were intertwined with the history of the British empire, this update includes those who, in different ways, sought to cope with the impact and legacies of the empire at the receiving end. Sir Ugo Mifsud (1889-1942), twice prime minister of Malta, was a moderate nationalist who found himself increasingly at odds with British rule, and is remembered in Malta above all for his passionate and eloquent denunciation of British deportations during the Second World War. Sir Milton Margai (1895-1964), first prime minister of Sierra Leone, was an unashamed Anglophile (with an English wife) who was nevertheless forced to resort to extraordinary measures to contain the pressures fuelled by the ethnic and political tensions that were a legacy of British rule in his country. Herbert Chitepo (1923-1975), a leading figure in the resistance to white rule in Rhodesia, was perhaps the best prime minister that country never had; his murder in Zambia in 1975, which paved the way for the leadership of Robert Mugabe, remains one of the unsolved mysteries of the liberation struggle. This update also includes the lives of two very different political leaders from the Caribbean: Maurice Bishop (1944-1983), the radical head of the New Jewel Movement, which seized power in Grenada in 1979, and Dame Eugenia Charles (1919-2005), prime minister of Dominica, known as ‘the iron lady of the Caribbean’, who was at the forefront of those urging the United States to intervene in Grenada after Bishop’s assassination by his political rivals in 1983.

Finally—since the impact of British rule extended much deeper than the politics of a particular country—this update includes two people who mediated the modernization of indigenous culture, in both cases in India. Dadasaheb Phalke (1870-1944), recognized as the father of the Indian film industry, produced the first films based on Hindu religious figures having watched a film version of the life of Christ. Phalke’s contemporary, Dhanpat Rai (1880-1936), better known as Munshi Premchand, introduced the social concerns of contemporary writers in English into the Urdu and Hindi canons. He fought, ultimately unsuccessfully, against the increasing cultural divergence between the two language traditions, which reflected the increasing political antagonism between Muslims and Hindus under British rule. These cultural as well as political concerns will be explored in further new entries in subsequent updates.

Medieval churchmen: patronage and pastoral care

In May we also continue our project to provide a complete listing of the pre-Reformation episcopate, and here we add eleven new lives in ten articles. A common theme in this update is the interconnection between religious and political life, and especially the importance of royal patronage for the furthering of clerical careers. That of Richard Hill (d. 1496), for example, changed dramatically after the battle of Bosworth (1485) and the accession of Henry VII, who transformed him from an obscure if comfortable cleric to an ecclesiastical high flier: Henry’s liking for Hill led to his becoming first dean of the Chapel Royal and then bishop of London. It was the search for peace, rather than the outcome of war, that shaped the career of Henry of Sandford (d. 1236), bishop of Rochester. Clearly a man of ability, Bishop Henry was entrusted with important tasks both by Henry III and the pope, including peace talks with the French during the 1230s. So too John Harewell (d. 1386), bishop of Bath and Wells, who in 1370 travelled to France in a party led by John of Gaunt to seek a diplomatic settlement. Harewell was also notable for the generosity of his bequests, including a year’s wages in cash to his servants and funds to build the south-west (or Harewell) tower at Wells cathedral, together with two bells, Great and Little Harewell. John Hals (c.1407-1490) was both a victim and ultimately a beneficiary of royal patronage, having his elevation to Exeter blocked by Richard, duke of York, but later securing the see of Coventry and Lichfield when his patron, Margaret of Anjou, Henry VI’s consort, moved into the ascendant. Hals proved to be an outstanding diocesan, a characteristic of several other newcomers, among them John of Climping (d. 1262), bishop of Chichester—described in his lifetime as ‘a man of wonderful simplicity and innocence’—who was responsible for the canonization of his predecessor and thus for making his cathedral a centre of pilgrimage. Perhaps the most striking instance of royal patronage is the elevation of Robert Wyville (d. 1375). On the recommendation of Edward II’s consort, Isabella, Wyville became bishop of Salisbury despite the dismay of contemporary chroniclers and the pope’s acknowledgment that, had he realized that Wyville was so illiterate and unpersonable, he would never have elevated him to such heights. In fact the bishop’s critics were proved wrong: Wyville’s detailed register supplies historians with valuable evidence on his forty-five year episcopate and the running of his diocese, showing him to have been conscientious in its administration and diligent in attending parliament and convocation.

Groups in British history

The twenty reference group essays added in May 2009 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 ‘new men’ of Henry I’s reign—an influential twelfth-century grouping of officeholders enriched by royal service—to the ‘angry young men’ of the 1950s, whose novels and plays scandalized and inspired in equal measure.

In addition to the angry young men, our coverage of literary groups extends over nearly four centuries, from the 1950s back to the patrons, players, and writers who made up Jacobean England’s two great theatrical companies, the Lord Admiral’s Men and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, also known as the Shakespeare Company. Both companies were formed in 1594 to provide Elizabeth I with entertainments during the Christmas festivities. Both also broke with existing hierarchical models to work as a team, sharing members’ assets, incomes, and costs. This was a structure the Shakespeare Company maintained, and that cultivated a remarkable esprit de corps among the players and authors, who in addition to Shakespeare (a founding member) included the leading actors Richard Burbage and Will Kemp. Relations were not always harmonious, however: in 1599 an Admiral’s man was murdered in a dispute between company authors and a year earlier the dramatist Ben Jonson had killed another member of the Admiral’s company in a duel. Jonson himself went on to become the focus of a coterie of literary apprentices and affiliates, known as the sons, or tribe, of Ben, whose connections are also traced in this update. It was theatrical appreciation, rather than creation, that was said to unite members of another of our new groups, the early nineteenth-century Greek Play bishops, so-called because of observers’ belief that their elevation to the episcopate derived less from theological or pastoral proficiency than a knowledge of classical literature. Hence the Greek Play bishops became symbolic of what critics regarded as the inadequacy of late Hanoverian church leadership. Like the Greek Play bishops, the angry young men (or AYM) were defined from the outside by onlookers who championed or bemoaned them as the face of post-war Britain, be this good or bad. Befitting a movement characterized by cynicism and a loathing of complacency, the writers identified as ‘angries’ rejected any notion of group identity. John Osborne, for example, dismissed talk of a literary network as ‘cheap, journalistic fiction’ and, indeed, the few meetings that took place between supposed members were characterized as much by abuse as appreciation.

Where the AYM saw much to ridicule in post-war Britain, others regarded this as a time for optimism born of scientific innovations, of which the development of penicillin to treat bacterial infection was pre-eminent. Another of May’s group essays charts the story of the discoverers and developers of the drug from the initial breakthroughs of Alexander Fleming and his staff at St Mary’s Hospital, London, to the development of usable quantities of penicillin by an Oxford team led by Ernst Chain and Howard Florey, and the subsequent mass production of the drug during the Second World War. The penicillin story is one that provokes strong opinions, and the essay also describes the difficult relationship between the London and Oxford scientists, and the post-war development of the ‘Fleming myth’ that championed the image of the lone, pioneering scientist. In addition to penicillin, post-war optimism was evident in the designs of an innovative school of architects who, as members of what was then the world’s largest architects’ office, that of London county council, sought to rebuild and remodel London from the mid-1940s. Many Londoners today live with decisions taken by the LCC architects, for good or ill, depending on taste: from Scandinavian-style or Le Corbusier-inspired blocks of flats to modernist comprehensive schools, the Royal Festival Hall, or the brutalist South Bank Centre. The history of the modern architectural profession can be traced back to the 1830s and to the actions of another new group in this update, the founders of the Institute of British Architects (subsequently the Royal Institute of British Architects, or RIBA). Similarly an essay on the creators of the Geological Society of London (1807) charts the role of its founding membership—of geologists, mineralogists, and chemists—in developing a nationwide organization capable of withstanding a challenge from the mighty Royal Society.

One of the striking characteristics of the new Geological Society was the diversity of religious affiliation among its early membership, with Quakers, Unitarians, Independents, and Anglicans finding common cause in scientific investigation. But elsewhere in this update religious faith, and especially faith under threat from innovation, served as a motive for further forms of association. As the most serious rebellion in Tudor England, affecting the whole of northern England, the Pilgrimage of Grace (1536-7) was a violent but ultimately unsuccessful uprising against Henrician religious and economic policy. It was drawn predominantly from members of the lower clergy and commoners, but also attracted conservative members of the northern nobility who wished to remove the king’s minister Thomas Cromwell. Opposition to royal policy likewise led to the Pentland rising (1666) in which presbyterians in southern and western Scotland rallied to preserve the national covenant, signed by Charles II at his coronation in Scotland in 1651, but renounced in favour of episcopalianism after the restoration. After the suppression of the rising by crown forces, its participants, most notably the field preachers, emerged as covenanting folk heroes whose legacy shaped Scottish presbyterian identity into the nineteenth century.

Four early eighteenth-century groups highlight the religious and political factionalism that characterized an age of limited toleration (as displayed by the dissenting ministers who took part in the 1719 Salters’ Hall debate) and of emerging party politics. Initially the tory October Club (act. 1711-1714) came together to press Robert Harley to investigate the mismanagement of the preceding whig administration. However, the club—which took its name from the October beer members drank at a Westminster tavern—soon broke free of Harley’s parliamentary control and fell victim to party divisions that saw the tories defeated in 1714 and thereafter excluded from office. Two further essays, on the Pulteney ‘patriots’ and Robert Walpole’s Norfolk congresses, reveal the extent to which factionalism also shaped whig politics during the reigns of George I and George II. To the followers of William Pulteney, Walpole’s political dominance (based in their opinion on corruption) seemed to threaten the nation’s health and moral character, with the patriots quickly becoming a cross-party grouping of disaffected whigs and ostracized tories who shared a common enemy. In the face of these protests Walpole assembled his political friends at sumptuous country house gatherings. These were dubbed his ‘Norfolk congresses’ following a 1728 satire on one such party at Walpole’s new seat, Houghton, which now became the focal point for the ‘Robinocracy’ so detested by Pulteney’s patriots.

A final theme to emerge across groups in this update is royal service. Of these perhaps the best known instance is the Sealed Knot, a coterie of six royalist partisans who worked on behalf of the exiled Charles II during the English Commonwealth. The group’s name, which can be traced to a funeral sermon of the 1630s, was adopted to symbolize a tightly knit circle through which a form of domestic royalist politics would be resumed. But if closely bound, the Sealed Knot was also realistic and, eschewing futile adventures, dedicated itself to making the best use of ‘rational’ opportunities for restoration. This pragmatism severely hindered the Knot’s effectiveness to carry out the king’s bidding or to foment change, though since the 1960s it has gained a more romantic image thanks to the use of its name by a society that re-enacts battles of the civil war. Earlier examples of royal service and allegiance are found among Henry I’s ‘new men’, a Victorian term based on twelfth-century observations by Orderic Vitalis, who, identifying the rise of a new grouping of civilian officials during the reign, spoke of ‘great men’ being ‘pulled down  from positions of eminence’ to be replaced by new men ‘of base stock who had served him well’. A slightly later act of allegiance, this time to Richard I, and to the Christian faith, took the form of the third crusade, a three-year campaign (1190-92), originating in England, Normandy, and Aquitaine, to recover Palestine from Saladin, ruler of Syria and Egypt. Military service also brought together members of Marlborough’s staff, the officers and civilians who played an important supporting role to John Churchill, first duke of Marlborough, in his capacity (1702-11) as commander of British and allied forces during the War of the Spanish Succession. And service of a not always noble form characterizes the activities of one final group added in this update. These were the sea dogs, a heterogeneous network of sixteenth-century English privateers who sought to exploit worsening Anglo-Spanish relations from the 1560s. Their apotheosis came in 1588 when, led by Francis Drake, John Hawkins, and Martin Frobisher, they frustrated the Spanish invasion attempt and so ensured the security of Queen Elizabeth and protestantism against papacy. The story of the sea dogs, and their depiction as a patriotic and noble assembly, has gained much from nineteenth- and twentieth-century retellings in books and on film. Yet, as our article notes, such romantic and stirring depictions obscure the many occasions when the sea dogs’ privateering in the name of queen and country became piracy for personal gain.

As ever, readers with access to the complete Oxford DNB (and this includes almost every member of a British public library) can browse among the 250 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 May 2009 update.

Our next online update

Our next online update will be published in October 2009 and will continue to extend the Oxford DNB’s coverage of men and women in all periods to the late twentieth century. October’s update includes a special focus on people who have shaped Scottish history, and Scots overseas, as well as Britons active in Latin America.

Back to top of May 2009 preface

October 2009 preface

New online contents, October 2009

Welcome to the fifteenth 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 2009 update adds biographies of 96 individuals active between the thirteenth and late twentieth century. In addition to new biographies the release includes 10 theme articles comprising ‘reference groups’ (profiling well-known historical networks) and ‘reference lists’, which provide information on holders of prominent offices or honours in the past.

October’s update also marks the fifth anniversary of the dictionary’s first appearance in print and online. The fifteen updates published since 2004 have added biographies of 2123 men and women active between the first and the twenty-first century, along with more than 400 theme articles (groups, lists, and features) for quick reference. To mark the fifth anniversary, the Oxford DNB’s editors have chosen some of their favourite lives published between 2005 and 2009.

The October 2009 update includes two principal sets of biographies, in which new additions are linked by common national and geographical themes.

The first set considers men and women who shaped the political, economic, and cultural history of Scotland from the seventeenth to the late twentieth century, alongside Scots remembered for activities overseas. Appropriately in the 250th anniversary year of the birth of Robert Burns, our new selection includes an entry on the poet’s wife, Jean Armour (1765-1834), a subject of his popular verses and a link to Burns as he emerged as a figure of national importance after his death in 1791. This selection has an additional resonance for the dictionary, as it coincides with the tenth anniversary of the death of the Oxford DNB’s founding editor, Colin Matthew, who was born in Inverness, brought up in Edinburgh, made annual visits to the highlands, and was among many other things an accomplished piper. His wide Scottish interests are traceable in his contributions to the dictionary.

Our second set of new biographies comprises Britons associated with Central and South America between the early nineteenth and the late twentieth century. Many were prominent in the military campaigns that secured the independence of the new Latin American republics. Later subjects went as settlers, missionaries, diplomats, businessmen, and archaeologists. In many cases they, like earlier political activists and mercenaries, are commemorated in their adopted countries but their stories are less familiar to British readers.

The crossing of national borders is a theme that connects other new subjects added in this update—notably two small groups of Hanoverian courtiers and Genevan exiles who came to Britain in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Looking beyond the British Isles, our interest in the history of empire and Commonwealth continues in this update with a selection of ten individuals active in Africa, the Caribbean, Malta, and Singapore, while the project to chart the pre-Reformation episcopate adds twelve more bishops from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries.

As ever, full details of the October 2009 update are available from the new online contents page, and a free selection of extracts and highlights from the latest release is available here. The complete dictionary (57,045 biographies and 462 theme articles) is available, free, in nearly all public libraries in the UK, with most now offering remote access, which enables library members to log in, at any time, at home (or anywhere they have internet access). Full details of participating public libraries, and how to gain access to the complete dictionary, are available here.

Scottish lives: Scotland and overseas

The Scottish subjects added to the dictionary are remembered for their varied contributions to 400 years of national life and to the promotion of Scottish culture beyond the British Isles. Among the earliest of the new additions, two individuals—the royalist heroine Christian Fletcher (1619/20-1691) and Jean Armour (1765-1834), wife of the poet Robert Burns—will be familiar to many as prominent figures in the national story. Fletcher, the wife of a presbyterian minister at Kinneff, near Montrose, was one of a group of royalist sympathizers responsible for smuggling the honours of Scotland (the crown, sceptre, and sword of state) out of Dunnottar Castle, so preventing them from falling into the hands of Cromwell’s English forces. Though it was she who removed the honours and, with her husband, kept them safe until 1660, Christian Fletcher received scant recognition for her courage during her lifetime. Only after the honours were rediscovered by Walter Scott, and placed on permanent display at Edinburgh Castle from 1819, did interest in Fletcher grow. By the late nineteenth century she had become an exemplar of loyalty and heroism, depicted in books and popular art, and held up as a model by Robert and Agnes Baden-Powell for members of the Girl Guide movement. Within the last decade renewed interest in Fletcher and her true role at Dunnottar has been prompted by the inclusion of the crown of Scotland in ceremonies at the Scottish parliament. In contrast to Christian Fletcher, whose celebrity is entirely posthumous, Jean Armour received considerable public attention as an important link to her deceased husband, then rapidly taking on the mantle of Scotland’s national poet. In life their relationship had been far from comfortable: Armour suffered censure from her family and the kirk, endured Burns’s philandering and scorn, and was left with a family to raise in her mid-twenties after the poet’s early death. But to later generations she was also, clearly, Burns’s true love and the subject of some of his most popular songs, as well as being a person of remarkable tolerance and fortitude. It is not surprising therefore that Armour has become a figure of commemoration in her own right, especially in her native Ayrshire and in Dumfriesshire, and has featured prominently in events to mark the poet’s anniversary during 2009.

In addition to Armour, October’s update includes three further individuals included for their place in the history of Scottish literature. The Orkney novelist Joseph Storer Clouston (1870 1844) won early acclaim for his stories of comic escapades, farcical situations, and confused identities. He went on to develop the espionage genre in The Spy in Black (1917), which was made into a film which was premièred in August 1939, with ominous timing in view of its theme: a projected German submarine attack on the British fleet in Scapa Flow. During the Second World War Joseph Todd Gordon Macleod (1903-1984) became a household name as a BBC newsreader, but his principal significance is as a poet who wrote vivid evocations of the Scottish landscape and its inhabitants, under the pseudonym Adam Drinan—an allusion to his ancestors’ origins on Skye. Landscape and rural pursuits were also interests of John McNeillie (1916-2002), known to many by his pen name Iain Niall, and for his novel Wigtown Ploughman (1939), which offered a brutal and compelling account of the hardships of Ayrshire’s rural economy, and remains a staple of the Scottish school syllabus.

A calmer depiction of the countryside was to be found in the work of the artist William Shiels (1783-1857). A founder in 1826 of the Royal Scottish Academy, Shiels first established his reputation as a portraitist, and led a peripatetic existence that took him to the United States, before returning to Edinburgh, where he undertook a series of scientifically accurate illustrations of domestic livestock, informed by his experience of growing up on a Berwickshire farm. Patrick Allan-Fraser (1813-1890) also began his career as a portraitist and became a leading member of the Clique circle of painters, one of Scotland’s first informal groups of artists. Today, however, Allan Fraser is better known both as an architect, responsible for remodelling Hospitalfield House, Arbroath, in an early manifestation of the arts and craft style, and as an art patron whose legacy continues with the Hospitalfield Trust for artists. From his Edinburgh studio William Fergusson Brassey Hole (1846-1917) painted a number of popular works depicting scenes from Scottish history, and these brought a commission in 1897 to carry out a striking mural decoration for the central hall of the new Scottish National Portrait Gallery, sections of which are available here, and which in full charts Scotland’s past from the Stone Age to Thomas Carlyle. Mural paintings of Scottish historical and Celtic mythological themes also featured in the work of the Dundee artist John Duncan (1866-1945), a leading figure among Patrick Geddes’s Celtic revivalists of the 1890s, who went on to produce his finest works in the Edwardian period under the influence of the European symbolist movement.

Scotland’s standing as the home of golf is represented in this update by the St Andrews carpenter Hugh Philp (1786-1856), whose name is forever associated with his elegant handmade clubs, designed for hitting the leather balls stuffed with feathers then used by players of the game. Although displaced by clubs adapted to the new gutta-percha balls, Philp’s work remained sought after by connoisseurs, who regarded him as the Stradivarius of golf-club makers. The Perth fishing tackle business of Peter Duncan Malloch (1852-1921) catered for the annual pilgrimage to the Scottish hills, rivers, and lochs of sportsmen in pursuit of game. Himself a champion angler, Malloch was also a scientific naturalist and an authority on fish conservation, and wrote a pioneering study of the salmon’s lifecycle. In the new sport of motorcycling, Hawick garage-owner James Guthrie (1897-1937), an army dispatch rider during the First World War, was offered a racing contract by the British Norton bike firm. For three years European 500cc champion, and winner of six Manx TT races, Guthrie died after crashing while in the lead in the final lap of the German grand prix in 1937. Meanwhile, in the world of mass entertainment, the comedian Tommy Lorne (1890-1935) successfully perpetuated the Scottish pantomime tradition into the 1920s and, despite fierce competition from cinema, managed to break box-office records even during the depression years. What many Scots saw at the cinema in this period owed much to Sir Alexander King (1888-1973), the cinema manager and booking agent responsible for more than ninety venues across Scotland, and a member of the Films of Scotland Committee, which promoted Scottish life and culture on screen, including a film by Walt Disney in his People and Places series. Alongside cinema, football was another mass entertainment form of the early twentieth century. While the crowds focused on events on the pitch, their ability to do so in their hundreds of thousands owed much to the Glasgow engineer Archibald Leitch (1865 1939), who became Britain’s most prolific and innovative stadium architect. Leitch’s success is all the more striking given that his career was almost ended following the collapse of a stand at his new Ibrox stadium in Glasgow in 1902. Cleared of responsibility for the disaster, he went on to create grounds for, among other clubs, Rangers (for whom he rebuilt after 1902), Arsenal, Manchester United, Everton, Sunderland, and Aston Villa, with designs that remained in use until wholesale redevelopment in the 1990s.

Leitch’s spirit of technical innovation (he was also an early exponent of concrete as a building material) is shared by another engineer, James Blyth (1839-1906), who in the late 1880s constructed the first turbine capable of generating electricity from wind power. Blyth’s windmill, erected at his holiday cottage near Montrose, predated that of an American engineer by several months. That it lacked the braking mechanism of the American model has meant that Blyth’s design is often overlooked as a world first. Not that this relative lack of control impaired Blyth’s design: indeed, his second ‘wind engine’ ran for nearly thirty years, providing electricity for Montrose asylum. Innovation in geriatric medicine was the achievement of Noah Morris (1893-1947), who dedicated himself to understanding and promoting the specific needs of elderly patients typically excluded from care in voluntary hospitals.

Both Morris and Blyth spent their working lives as university teachers at Glasgow and Anderson’s College (later Strathclyde University) respectively—just two of the institutions that have given Scotland its far-reaching reputation for excellence in higher education. Among the beneficiaries of the Scottish university system now added to the dictionary is Donald Fitzroy Bell (1859-1908), an Edinburgh law student who founded a students’ representative council to organize student participation in the university’s tercentenary celebrations in 1884, thereby creating a model for student institutions elsewhere in Britain and the English-speaking world. Bell stood unsuccessfully as a Conservative parliamentary candidate for Berwickshire against another of the dictionary’s newcomers, the sitting Liberal MP, Harold John Tennant (1865-1935), who made his mark in parliament talking up the issue of protecting workers employed in hazardous occupations. Brother-in-law of the prime minister, H. H. Asquith, Tennant went on to a series of social-reforming achievements, such as the medical inspection of schoolchildren and the establishment of minimum wage regulations, and was briefly a member of the wartime cabinet as secretary of state for Scotland. Scotland’s status within the United Kingdom was a leading interest of the University of Glasgow’s regius professor of law, Andrew Dewar Gibb (1888-1974). Described as ‘a legal nationalist’, he regarded Scots law, which had survived the Act of Union, as a basis for the restoration of Scottish nationhood, and went on to serve as chairman of the Scottish National Party.

Our final selection of new Scottish subjects made their name overseas. Having graduated from St Andrews, David Colville (c.1581-1629) spent his life in Spain and Italy where, as an Arabic scholar of precocious ability, he advanced European understanding of the Koran by interpreting the Muslim holy writ from the basis of Arabic commentaries rather than from the common position of anti-Islamic polemic. William Trent (d. 1724) was another Scot, originally from Inverness, who is known for a life outside Scotland—on this occasion as a merchant in colonial America and as the founder of Trenton (now the capital of New Jersey) where his Georgian residence, the site of a museum to his life and settlement, has been designated an American national landmark. William Hastie (1754/5-1832) and Adam Menelaws (1748?/9-1831) were two of the master stonemasons who in 1784 responded to the architect Charles Cameron’s advertisement in the Edinburgh Evening Courant to work on Catherine the Great’s palace at St Petersburg. Their lives illustrate Scots’ long association with Russia. Menelaws went on to undertake architectural and landscape design for tsars Alexander I and Nicolas I, while Hastie became involved with other Scottish craftsmen in ironworks construction and bridge-building, and had a considerable influence on Russian town planning. A century later, in 1884, the Scottish general Sir Peter Stark Lumsden (1829 1918) was selected to lead the British commission to settle the disputed borders of Afghanistan, and was involved in the celebrated Panjdeh incident, when Russian forces overran a border post and brought the two countries to the brink of war. Also in Asia, the Glasgow missionary James Gilmour (1843-1891) embarked on his two decades of solitary, self-denying work in Mongolia, where he failed to make converts but produced a classic account of Mongolian life. An engineering fitter from Dundee, James Thompson Bain (1860-1919), became acknowledged as the founder of trade unionism in South Africa, where he fought on the Boer side and developed a deep hostility to the mine-owners. In 1913 he organized a successful general strike, but in 1914 was deported to Britain, where a vast demonstration in Hyde Park registered his standing among the British left. By contrast Robert McVey Dollar (1844-1932), who started his working life as a lathe operator in Falkirk, prospered in the North American timber trade and became a shipping tycoon on the Pacific coast. He never forgot his native land, and his homecomings to Falkirk were marked by a succession of benefactions to the town. When she was still a child, the family of Mary Garden (1874-1967) left Aberdeen in search of better opportunities in America, where singing lessons paid for by her father’s employer led her to a career as an operatic soprano. Chosen by Debussy to create the role of Mélisande, she followed this with further successes in Paris and New York, as well as film appearances, before her retirement in 1934 and eventual return to Aberdeen, where she died.

Britons in Latin America

Continuing the overseas theme, the October 2009 update includes a selection of Britons active in Latin America, after the end of Spanish and Portuguese colonial control. Many of those who sought adventure in the independence movements were of Irish origin. Peter (Pedro) Campbell (1782-1832), dubbed the Irish Gaucho, was a Tipperary tanner who served in the British expedition to the River Plate in 1807 commanded by John Whitelocke, whose attempt to capture Buenos Aires ended in humiliating failure. Campbell was taken prisoner and remained in South America, becoming a guerilla leader in the wars of independence from Spanish rule, and was acknowledged as the founder of the Uruguayan navy. The ‘liberator of Chile’, Bernardo O’Higgins (1778-1842), was the son of an Irishman who had served the Spanish crown; educated in England, where he spent his formative years, he returned to South America, became a commander in the patriot armies, and as supreme director of Chile staffed the Chilean navy with British officers. Previously tried for his involvement in the United Irishmen rising of 1798, and describing himself as a Roman Catholic victim of religious persecution, John Devereux (1778-1860) raised an Irish legion in support of Simón Bolívar. His supporters included Francisco Burdett O’Connor (1791-1871), from a Cork landowning family and brother of Feargus O’Connor, the Chartist leader. O’Connor spent seven years fighting in the independence campaign, and was declared a liberator of Bolivia, where he settled as a farmer. In 1829 a Dublin-born mercenary in the Colombian army, Rupert Hand, earned notoriety for his role in the killing of the rebel José María Córdova, later regarded as a national hero. After a colourful military career Hand became a teacher of English in Caracas. Another mercenary, Richard Longfield Vowell (1795-1870), the orphaned son of an MP in the Irish parliament, fought for nearly thirteen years in the independence campaigns, and survived to chronicle his experiences, published after his return to Britain in 1830. Contemporary with Vowell’s works was a carefully observed account of Simón Bolívar’s forces written by the Scottish soldier and sometime slave overseer Alexander Alexander (b. 1781/2), who had enlisted in the Venezuelan rebel army after service in the Royal Artillery.

After independence British influence in the region became so pervasive that it has been described as part of the ‘informal empire’. Among those who sought to make their fortunes there was Robert Ponsonby Staples (1784/5-1852), who represented British merchants in Buenos Aires in a semi-official capacity. At Bahia, Brazil, the British consul William Pennell (1765-1860) astutely managed the relationship between the British, Portuguese, and Brazilian governments during the process of Brazilian independence, protecting the trade privileges that British merchants enjoyed. Pennell’s success in building relationships in Brazil was shared by a successor in Bahia, James Wetherell (bap. 1823, d.1858), who left an unusually perceptive account of everyday life in the province. John Henry Mandeville (1773-1861) spent a decade as minister in Buenos Aires, where he mediated in the rivalry between the British merchants there and in Montevideo and managed relations—which some critics regarded as servile—with the Argentinian dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas, whom he saw as essential for maintaining stability in the country. Less sensitive to local interests was Britain’s chief representative in Central America for two decades, Frederick Chatfield (1801 1872), who aspired to incorporate the region into the British empire, meddling in local politics and pursuing expansionist territorial claims, before over-reaching himself in his attempts to pre-empt growing American involvement in the region. Equally controversial was the Glasgow anti-slavery activist David Turnbull (1793?-1851), who as superintendent of liberated Africans at Havana tirelessly exposed the continuance of the slave trade in the remaining Spanish colonies of Puerto Rico and Cuba, from where he was soon expelled.

Many of the Britons drawn to the new South American republics settled there. Perhaps the most remarkable was Mary Greenup (1789-1846) from Faversham in Kent, whose second husband, General James English, was in charge of raising a legion of mercenaries to fight under Bolívar. She accompanied her husband to South America in 1819 and was at the centre of the social scene in Bogotá, where she represented British banking interests. Later she ran a cacao plantation. Alexander Caldcleugh (1795-1858), whose account of his travels is an important source for the early years of independence, took the part of British bondholders in Chile, where he was visited by Darwin during the Beagle voyage. Thomas George Love (1792/3-1845) arrived in Buenos Aires in 1820, where he ran the meeting place for British merchants, and founded a newspaper for the British community, in which he criticized London’s failure to accord the Argentine republic proper respect as an independent nation. Two further Britons were prominent among the technical experts brought to Paraguay to spearhead that country’s national development in the mid-nineteenth century. The first was a London engineer, William Henry Keld Whytehead (1825-1865), who established and directed an arsenal at Asunción, whose scale and technology attracted widespread attention, and which played an important part in Paraguay’s war against the triple alliance of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. The second was a Scottish doctor, William Stewart (1830-1916), who trained army medical staff and was personal physician to the president and his remarkable consort (the Irish-born Eliza Lynch, whose biography appeared in an update of the Oxford DNB published in 2005). The independence of the former Spanish colonies also attracted such travellers as Frederick Catherwood (1799 1854), whose involvement in archaeological expeditions and railway building reflected the opportunities the region presented.

For emigrants from Wales, Patagonia offered a remote location where the Welsh language and traditions could be protected from external influences. A young printer in Caernarfon, Lewis Jones (1837-1904), was attracted to the idea of a Welsh colony, and organized the first pioneers to the Chubut Valley settlement, founded in 1865. Among those settlers was Abraham Matthews (1832-1899), a Congregational clergyman who ministered to their spiritual needs, likening the Welsh colonists to the Israelites in the desert.

South America was also the focus for protestant missionary and educational effort, as illustrated by four Scottish lives. James (Diego) Thomson (1788-1854) travelled through South America between 1818 and 1825 under the auspices of the British and Foreign School Society founding monitorial schools, encouraged by the governments of the new republics as a low-cost means of spreading education. In subsequent journeys to Mexico he distributed copies of the Bible and initiated its translation into indigenous languages. The missionary Robert Reid Kalley (1809-1888) was driven from the Portuguese island of Madeira as a result of his proselytizing among the Catholic population, but he and his wife Sarah Poulton Kalley (1825-1807) made more headway in Brazil, where they successfully established an evangelical church. From the South American Missionary Society’s base on Keppel Island in the Falklands, Wilfrid Barbrooke Grubb (1865-1930) set out in 1889 to work among the indigenous peoples of the remote Paraguayan Chaco. His pioneering thirty-year mission, combining evangelizing with concern for the economic well-being of the peoples affected by westernization, was much publicized in Britain, where he was presented as ‘the Livingstone of South America’.

Tyntesfield house near Bristol, built in Victorian Gothic style for William Gibbs (1790-1875), is evidence of wealth generated by British commercial interests in the former Spanish colonies. A lucrative guano monopoly in Peru and Chile underlay the prosperity of the Gibbs family, and funded William Gibbs’s high-church philanthropy. In 1884 the Cornish mining engineer George Chalmers (1857-1928) became superintendent of the Morro Velho gold mine in Brazil, the world’s deepest mine, and part of the largest foreign enterprise in Brazil, as well as being the centre of a large British community with its own church and clubs. By the early twentieth century, however, British commercial supremacy in the region was under challenge from the United States and Germany, as the business writer William Henry Koebel (1872-1923) warned. Koebel’s British Exploits in South America (1917) was wartime propaganda, criticized by scholars for omitting the more disreputable episodes (like Henry Morgan’s sacking of Portobello), and proved to be an epitaph to a diminished role. Nevertheless, in the post-war years the Scottish livestock breeder Sir Herbert Gibson (1863-1934), who ran his family’s ranches near Buenos Aires, continued to promote trade relations between Britain and Argentina, and was awarded a baronetcy for organizing the British Empire Trade Exhibition in Buenos Aires in 1931. Unusually, he took Argentinian citizenship, though he was readmitted a British subject during the First World War, when he secured supplies of South American wheat to feed the allies. The merging of expatriates into South American societies was exemplified by the civil engineer Richard Edward Latcham (1869-1943), who was employed on infrastructure projects during the colonization of the Araucania region of Chile. Meeting many Mapuche people, he learned their language, and developed a self-taught interest in Chilean anthropology and pre-history, on which he became a leading authority. His scholarly studies stood in contrast to the sensationalist approach of the adventurer Frederick Albert Mitchell-Hedges (1882-1959), whose quest for vanished Mayan cities in Central America in the 1920s was the subject of much embellishment and, subsequently, doubtful claims. And Latin America continued to attract idealists, among them Michael Woodward (1932-1973), who was born in Chile to a British father and Chilean mother. Educated in Britain, he returned to Chile and became a Roman Catholic priest, embracing liberation theology. His activities in that cause led to his arrest and death under interrogation when the Chilean military seized power in September 1973.

Empire and Commonwealth

The breadth and depth of Britain’s influence overseas are further reflected in the lives of ten new subjects with connections to the British empire and Commonwealth added to the dictionary in this update. Though never formally part of the British empire, Egypt was a lynchpin of the imperial system from the 1880s, and the leaders of Egyptian opinion consequently faced peculiar obstacles in their demands for self-government. Saad Zaghlul (1857x9-1927) was initially favourable to British rule, but in the turmoil following the First World War and the intensification of British control of Egypt he emerged as the leader of the nationalist movement, suffering deportation twice before becoming prime minister of Egypt after concessions by Britain. He was never reconciled to the limited extent of Egypt’s independence, however, and the Wafd party that he founded—which was led after his death by his protégé Mustafa al-Nahas (1879-1965)—dominated Egyptian politics for the next thirty years, in a fraught, albeit at times ambivalent, relationship with the British.

Al-Nahas’s failure to use the dominance of the Wafd to bring about long-overdue social reform in Egypt was a key factor in the growing unpopularity of his party, and its eventual demise at the hands of a military coup in 1952. By contrast Sir Paul Boffa (1890-1962) of Malta, Lim Yew Hock (1914-1984) of Singapore, Robert Llewellyn Bradshaw (1916-1978) of St Kitts, and Sir John Carter (1919-2005) of Guyana were all powerful figures in the labour movements of their respective colonies, and used their positions both to agitate for important labour and social reforms and as the springboards for political careers within the developing independence movements in their colonies. Bradshaw was the only one of the four not to live to see his country become independent, in part because of secessionist movements in Nevis and Anguilla (which resulted, eventually, in Anguilla remaining a crown colony). Lim, on the other hand, came himself from a secessionist state, but when Singapore broke away from Malaysia he chose to enter the Malaysian diplomatic service rather than continuing his political career in Singapore. The fractious nature of post-independence politics in countries struggling with the legacies of British rule are even more evident in the lives of Joe Appiah (1918-1990) of Ghana and Siaka Stevens (1905 1988) of Sierra Leone. Appiah, despite an impeccable early career in the anti-colonial movement, was increasingly aligned with Ashanti particularism, and was one of the most prominent civilian supporters of the military coup in 1972. Stevens similarly played on ethnic rivalries in Sierra Leone to become the corrupt and dictatorial president of a one-party state, paving the way for the brutal civil wars of the 1990s and early 2000s.

Two African intellectuals from very different eras complete this group of lives framed by the experiences of empire. Francis Peregrino (c.1851-1919) was born in Accra, lived and married in England, and then spent twelve years in America before finally settling in South Africa, where he became a prominent, though idiosyncratic, leader of the Cape coloured community and advocate of pan-Africanism. Dambudzo Marechera (1952-1987), from Zimbabwe, is now widely recognized as one of the most brilliant if also one of the most difficult African writers of his generation. His short, violent, troubled life, and his equally bleak and disturbing writings, not only reflected his name (meaning ‘sorrow’ or ‘trouble’ in Shona) but also epitomized the rootlessness and despair of those at the sharp end of colonialism, racism, and discrimination.

Crossing boundaries: émigrés, exiles, and advocates

Many of the new subjects added to the dictionary in this update left Britain for a new life, principally South America. But equally some others came from continental Europe to foster diplomatic ties or to seek political refuge. Links with the German states became especially important during the eighteenth century after the accession of the elector of Hanover as King George I in 1714. The brothers Gerlach (1688-1770) and Philipp von Münchhausen (1694-1762), second cousins of the infamous Baron Münchhausen, were distinguished émigré politicians who acted as George II’s chief ministers for his German lands, shaping Hanoverian affairs from London. A generation on, Ernst Friedrich Münster served Hanover as an influential champion in George III’s court, and Britain as a skilled mediator in the negotiations that followed the end of the Napoleonic wars. The continued importance of Anglo-German dynastic ties is evident in the life of Princess Frederica (1848 1926), daughter of King George V of Hanover, and—as George III’s great granddaughter—a princess of Great Britain and Ireland. Having refused to accept a Prussian pension, Frederica turned to her British relatives (she was a correspondent of her aunt, the duchess of Cambridge, and of her father’s cousin Queen Victoria) and moved to Hampton Court. In England she engaged in charity work, establishing in Surrey a home for poor women recovering from childbirth.

Britain as a refuge is a theme further developed in the lives of three late eighteenth-century Genevan exiles—Sir Francis D’Ivernois, Jacques-Antoine Duroveray, and Étienne Claviére—who settled first in Ireland and then in London. All three were prominent members of a political movement that had sought to remove French influence from their native city state, and all were exiled after the rising’s suppression in 1782. Their hopes of creating a New Geneva in Ireland having come to nothing, the trio—who each became a British subject—gathered around Lord Shelburne’s Bowood circle of intellectuals and reformers. Thereafter their political trajectories took contrasting courses. Clavière, a prominent financier, moved to Paris and became a minister in the revolution’s Girondin regime, advocating closer ties between France and Britain through his contacts in the Bowood circle. Accused by Jacobins of being a British spy, he again sought refuge in London as a British subject in 1793 but was handed over to the revolutionary tribunal, in whose custody he committed suicide. Duroveray and D’Ivernois, by contrast, remained in London until their exile was lifted in 1790. Having returned to Geneva, Duroveray advocated the creation of a British-style constitution and later served as a British agent against the French. D’Ivernois meanwhile returned to Britain to become a diplomatic agent and propagandist for William Pitt’s ministry, for which he was knighted in 1796. A fourth Genevan added this October is Étienne Dumont (1759-1829), who, while not an exile from the failed rising, was also resident in London and was a member of the Bowood circle. Here Dumont met the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, of whose work he became an internationally recognized interpreter, editor, and advocate. Through a series of accessible summaries, published first in French and then translated into English, Dumont did much to shape the promotion and appreciation of Benthamism in Britain and continental Europe.

The act of disseminating the ideas and work of another, on this occasion the Methodist leader John Wesley, brings together four more eighteenth-century figures. A feature of the early evangelical revival was the prominence given to women, first as band leaders and then—as with Leeds-born Sarah Crosby (1729-1804)—as preachers from the 1760s. Crosby’s well-documented life offers valuable insight into Wesley’s views on women’s role within Methodism, including practical advice on the best way for women to address mixed crowds. Aspects of Wesley’s character are also evident in his relationship with a second preacher, Sarah Ryan (1724-1768), whose conversion to Methodism followed an early life of bigamy and poverty. Ryan, who initially lodged with Sarah Crosby and later ran an orphanage with the influential preacher, Mary Bosanquet, proved too controversial for some, including Wesley’s wife. But for Wesley himself Ryan’s redemption provided a direct reminder of God’s presence. As he wrote to her: ‘Others often lead me to Him  you bring me straight to His presence.’ Religious careers like those of Crosby and Ryan reveal the importance of the Methodist leader in explaining women’s prominence within the movement. However, such opportunities declined in the 1790s after his death, prompting many women to break with Wesleyanism in favour of less hierarchical revivalist groups like the Methodist Bible Christians. One such figure was Ann Freeman (1797-1826) who became a notable and popular field preacher during the 1820s—on one occasion addressing a thousand-strong crowd in Brighton—and who travelled across England and Ireland either alone or with a female companion. Denied the preaching opportunities of an earlier generation, women now sought to promote the work of those who had gone before them. The considerable significance of Mary Bosanquet, and her husband John Fletcher, within the early Methodist movement owes much to our fourth new addition, Mary Tooth (1778-1843), who perpetuated the couple’s spiritual legacy by collecting relics and establishing their former home as a site of pilgrimage from the 1820s.

Medieval churchmen: royal and episcopal service

In October we also continue our project to offer a complete listing of the pre-Reformation episcopate, and here we add biographies of twelve churchmen active between the twelfth and the early sixteenth century. The majority of the bishops in this selection are notable for their achievements not just as churchmen but also in royal administration and diplomacy. Richard Bintworth (c.1285-1339) was one such man of talents. A doctor of civil law, in the 1330s he was charged with the weighty task of finding agreement on ‘all matters in dispute’ between the kings of England and France. But the peak of Bintworth’s career was short-lived: consecrated bishop of London and appointed chancellor of the realm in 1338, he died at the end of the following year. Brevity of office also marked out the career of Henry of Braunstone (d. 1288), the first of five bishops of Salisbury included in this update, whose pontificate lasted just seven months. It would have been longer had he not been beaten to the see by Walter Scammel (d. 1286) in an election held three years earlier. Scammel, like Richard Bintworth, had came to Salisbury with a notable record of royal service, including temporary custody of Wilton Abbey, then a troublesome house riven by dissension. Henry of Braunstone’s successor was William de la Corner (d. 1291), a trusted royal servant who continued in diplomacy after his election, acting in 1290 as Edward I’s representative in negotiations between the kings of France, Majorca, and Aragon. De la Corner, who died overseas during a later diplomatic mission, was in turn succeeded by Nicholas Longespée in 1291. Though himself an old man by medieval standards (then in his mid-sixties he was described as annosus or ‘full of years’), Longespée enjoyed a comparatively lengthy five-year reign as bishop. The fortunes of Ralph Erghum (c.1338?-1400), our fifth bishop of Salisbury, reveal the dangers to be had in combining ecclesiastical and political careers. Elected bishop in 1375, Erghum became a royal councillor after the accession of the ten-year-old Richard II in 1377, but he was demoted to the lesser see of Bath and Wells at the instance of the lords appellant in 1388.

Political questions, this time of royal inheritance, also shaped the episcopate of Walter Durdent (d. 1159), who as bishop of Coventry was required to tread a careful line on the subject of King Stephen’s successor, Durdent’s preference being Duke Henry, the future Henry II, not Stephen’s son Eustace. Personal diplomacy was likewise an attribute of John (d. 1180), bishop of Chichester, who became directly involved in a dispute with the monks of Battle Abbey when they claimed exemption from episcopal jurisdiction. Bishop John’s approach was firm but polite—likened by the abbot to being offered a sword smeared with honey. Disputes also marked the reigns of two further bishops added in this update. William Gray (c.1388 1436), bishop of Lincoln, was concerned with cases of heresy arising from the spread of Lollard opinions, as well as with monastic apostasy. The latter was also a cause of disquiet for John Smart—one of two suffragan bishops added in this set (the other being William Duffield)—who as abbot oversaw the troublesome Wigmore Abbey in the years immediately before the dissolution of the monasteries. Smart’s story is a truly remarkable one through which it is possible to plot minutely the ebb and flow of power politics that saw the abbot accused of, among other crimes, sexual incontinence, extortion, and the gross mismanagement of the abbey and its community. That Thomas Cromwell chose not to resolve the dispute between Smart and his canons reveals how advantageously Wigmore’s reputation for chaos served Henry’s administration on the cusp of one of the most momentous events in English history. At the time Smart not only escaped punishment but also gained handsomely from a generous pension after the dissolution of his house, though subsequently he has been condemned by historians as ambitious, dishonest, and unworthy. By contrast our final bishop, Roger of Clinton (d. 1148), has experienced a more positive reversal of opinion. Denounced in the Gesta Stephani as dim, violent, and overly fond of sports, Roger emerges here as a man of learning responsible—while bishop of Chester—for the extensive rebuilding of Lichfield Cathedral and, like others in this update, as a capable ambassador of royal interests overseas.

Themes: groups and reference lists

The ten theme articles added in October 2009 see a return to Scottish history. During the 1890s the kailyard school of novelists (of whom J. M. Barrie was the most prominent) gained considerable popularity for their romanticized depictions of rural Scottish life and customs against the backdrop of encroaching urbanization. By contrast, essays on two earlier groups—the lords of the congregation and the kirk party—recall more turbulent episodes in Scotland’s past. In both cases the group’s actions were motivated by efforts to promote protestantism in the face of ungodliness. In the late 1550s the lords of the congregation, a gathering of Scottish peers named for the bond to which they committed themselves, mounted a rebellion against the regent, Mary of Guise. Having successfully taken control of the government after Mary’s death, the lords were responsible for the legal establishment of protestantism within Scotland and later served as exemplars for members of the covenanting movement. Almost a century later militant presbyterians gained political control in Scotland with the kirk party—a radical regime opposed to those seeking to restore Charles I’s authority and committed to the promotion of godly rule, though it was divisions within the kirk that led to the party’s collapse in 1650. Other Scottish-related themes in October’s update include ‘reference lists’ of the lords advocate—the head of the system of public prosecutions in Scotland and now the Scottish government’s chief legal officer—and of the presidents of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, which was established in 1783 as Scotland’s national academy of science and letters. October’s update includes two further reference lists: cabinet secretaries (since 1916 head of the cabinet office and therefore the chief civil servant responsible to the prime minister and cabinet) and holders of the Order of Merit, an honour instituted by Edward VII and awarded for ‘exceptionally meritorious service’ in science, the military, or the arts.

Literature and warfare are topics that appear in the first of the three remaining reference groups published in this update. The Dymock poets were a quintet of writers, among them Rupert Brooke, who came together in the villages on the Herefordshire-Gloucestershire border immediately before the outbreak of the First World War. Their work—like that of the kailyard school—was characterized by fond recollections of a rural landscape now out of reach to soldier poets overseas. Our two remaining groups describe networks that shaped English, and later British, foreign affairs. The English participants in the Field of Cloth of Gold took part in one of the Tudor period’s most spectacular set-piece diplomatic events between Henry VIII and François I of France. The purpose of the gathering, which saw the monarchs and their entourages indulge in weeks of tournaments and banquets, was to negotiate a strategy to contain the ambitions of the new Holy Roman emperor. Despite such gatherings, relations with France were then, and remained, at best cordial and ever likely to deteriorate into conflict. Two centuries later the British were involved in a series of wars with France, the fiscal and economic burdens of which did much to worsen relations between George III’s government and British Americans opposed to taxation without political representation. Our essay on the ‘founding fathers’ of the United States identifies the politicians, soldiers, and legislators who achieved independence, and also traces the different ways in which the protean notion of a founding generation has been re-defined by successive generations of Americans.

As ever, readers with access to the complete Oxford DNB (and this includes members of almost every British public library) can browse among the more than 250 groups and 150 reference lists 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 2009 update.

Our next online update

Our next online update will be published in January 2010 and will extend the dictionary’s coverage further into the twenty-first century, with more than 200 entries on men and women who died in 2006.

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