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2010 updates: introductions

January 2010

New online contents, January 2010

Welcome to the sixteenth update of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which adds 208 new articles and, in total, 213 new biographies to the dictionary. All but two of these 213 people died in 2006. Of those who died in 2006, 41, or one in five, were women. The earliest born, in June 1900, was Philip d’Arcy Hart, medical researcher; the latest, born in August 1962, was Aleksandr Litvinenko, the Russian dissident who was assassinated in London by means of radioactive material. The majority, some 116, were born in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s.

As ever, a selection of these new articles and a list of all new subjects added to the dictionary are freely available. The complete dictionary (57,258 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.

Popular entertainment and broadcasting

The Oxford DNB takes a broad and inclusive view of national history and contemporary achievement and includes many subjects who played notable roles in popular culture, including the worlds of entertainment, broadcasting, and journalism. A large proportion of the lives added in January 2010, including some of the most notable figures, are drawn from these areas and made their most important contributions in the 1960s. Elkan Allan was never a household name, but he created and produced the pioneering Ready, Steady, Go!, one of the first British pop music television programmes, which was broadcast on Friday evenings from 1963 with its catchphrase, ‘the weekend starts here’. He is joined by Alan (Fluff) Freeman, the eternal disc jockey—a term that entered the language about this time—who was still broadcasting into his seventies, and Arthur Chisnall, who turned Eel Pie Island in the River Thames at Twickenham into an influential venue for the leading ‘rhythm ‘n blues’ bands of the era, including the Rolling Stones. The breadth of popular music is illustrated by the inclusion of Freddie Garrity, lead singer and all-round clown with Freddie and the Dreamers, Desmond Dekker, who pioneered reggae in Britain and is remembered for the song ‘Israelites’, and also Syd Barrett, a founding member of Pink Floyd, who composed their quirky early songs but whose talent was dissipated by drug abuse and mental decline. He was the ‘crazy diamond’ of one famous song; he ‘shines on’ in our article. Other and older styles of popular music are represented by the trombonist and bandleader Don Lusher, who took over the leadership of the famous Ted Heath Band; Ambrose Campbell, leader of the West African Rhythm Brothers, who were popular from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, and Gracie Cole, a pioneering female brass-band trumpeter of the 1930s and 1940s. Ivor Cutler, the gravel-voiced poet and humorist championed by the late John Peel, is also included.

Few films better exemplify the strengths and weaknesses of British post-war film-making than the Quatermass series of science fiction adventures of the 1950s and 1960s: imaginative fantasies about alien invasion yet with a quaintly English feel, held together with balsa wood and sticky-backed plastic. Their director, Val Guest, whose film career stretched across several decades, is a notable entrant to the dictionary. No television creation better encapsulated the attractions to a mass audience of a suave and sophisticated secret agent than The Saint, played by Roger Moore, which was a highlight of Sunday evening viewing through the 1960s. Its creator, the producer Monty Berman, who was also responsible for the television crime dramas Gideon’s Way and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), is also added to the Oxford DNB in this update.

Charlie Drake, who was famous in the early days of British television for his slapstick humour, is joined in the dictionary by a popular black comedian of his era, Charlie Williams, and by a comedian of a very different type, a stalwart of radio panel shows who was once voted ‘the wittiest living person’, the much admired Linda Smith. We include three television actors who were often on our screens: Tom Bell, who specialized in menacing roles as a criminal or a ‘hard copper’; Derek Bond, whose career included several Ealing films and who was a controversial president of the actors’ trade union Equity; and the quiet and understated Peter Barkworth, whose most significant role may have been in Tom Stoppard’s television play of the 1970s, Professional Foul. In this he played a professor of philosophy attending an academic conference in Prague who was uncharacteristically emboldened to speak out on freedom and justice. This update also includes the actress Sally Gray, a star of the 1930s and 1940s in films like They Made Me a Fugitive and Obsession; the theatrical agent Kitty Black; Philip Tomlinson, a pioneer of drama written and staged by disabled people; and the playwright David Halliwell, who had early success with Little Malcolm and his Struggle against the Eunuchs. They are joined by two notable women in the theatre, Mary O’Malley, who founded the Lyric Theatre in Belfast, and Jill Fraser, who was director of the Watermill Theatre in Aylesbury.

Among broadcasters now added to the dictionary pride of place must go to Raymond Baxter in television and Nick Clarke in radio. Baxter’s calm, headmasterly tones may now seem dated, especially for a weekly programme on technology. Yet in the 1960s he made Tomorrow’s World into one of the most memorable programmes of the first age of television and his part in the first transatlantic broadcast ensures him a place in broadcasting history. Clarke was the authoritative voice of radio news and current affairs, a firm but courteous interlocutor who personified a certain BBC house style, as did June Knox-Mawer, who presented Woman’s Hour on Radio 4. Naomi Sargant, a pioneer of educational television, Tom Weir, a mountaineer and naturalist and a ubiquitous figure on Scottish television, and Kenneth Griffith, the irascible and controversial Welsh documentary-maker, are also included in this update, as is Robert Carrier, who was one of the earliest of TV chefs and also a popular writer on food and cookery and a flamboyant entrepreneur.

We also include several notable television executives, among them Marmaduke Hussey, who was very much the choice of the Conservative government as chairman of the BBC when appointed in 1986; the eccentric and autocratic Peter Cadbury, who ran Westward Television for two decades; and Sir Iain Tennant, chairman of Grampian Television. From the world of journalism they are joined by Eric Mackay, editor of The Scotsman; Glen Renfrew of the news agency Reuters; and a committed journalist of a different sort, Richard Clements, the editor of Tribune for two decades from 1961, when its columns and editorials held together the Labour left wing and set out its distinctive political viewpoint. Among those writing for the national press pride of place must go to three remarkable humorists. Richard Boston wrote regularly for The Guardian and was an early supporter of the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA), which did so much to improve national morale in the 1970s and 1980s. Frank Johnson’s distinctive columns and sketches, famous for their insight into the quirks and eccentricities of politicians and the age in general, were enormously popular in whichever publication they appeared, whether the Daily Telegraph, The Times or The Spectator. And Michael Wharton scaled the heights of satirical journalism in his ‘Peter Simple’ column for the Telegraph and showed a remarkable prescience in the process: in an example of the way that life can imitate art, some of his comic creations seem now to have come alive to inhabit our town halls, schools, universities, and churches.

This sporting life

The influence of the media on modern sport is evident in the lives of some of the sportsmen and sportswomen now added to the dictionary. Pride of place goes to the great Fred Trueman, the Yorkshire and England fast bowler and the first man to take 300 wickets in test cricket. Trueman was the personification of that common conjunction, a great sportsman and a ‘difficult’ person. He spoke as he played, with an honesty and directness that made him admired, but also made him enemies among the cricket hierarchy. Those same qualities transferred well to the radio commentary box where Fred was a fixture for many years, pronouncing (almost always dolefully) on the merits of successive England cricket teams. ‘In my day’ was the start of many a Trueman comparison, almost always to the detriment of the England team then playing. But his authority was rarely questioned: Fred was a national institution—‘pipe smoker of the year’ on one occasion—whose exploits in the game at every level were his entitlement to speak as he found. John Spencer, the snooker player, was propelled to stardom by the sudden popularity of snooker in the first years of colour television. Pot Black was so much more compelling when you could also see the red, yellow, green, brown, blue, and pink as well. Jackie Pallo, the wrestler, now joins Shirley Crabtree (aka Big Daddy) and Martin Ruane (aka Giant Haystacks), his opponents in many Saturday teatime televised bouts, in the Oxford DNB. Pallo with the distinctive jack-tar ribbon in his hair was the buccaneer audiences loved to hate, who also became distinctly unpopular with his fellow wrestlers when he admitted to their fakery in the ring. Another sportsman whose career attracted publicity and attention was Peter Osgood, the Chelsea centre-forward at a time when his team were an attraction of ‘swinging London’ at the end of the 1960s. A footballer of an entirely different sort—diminutive where Osgood was tall and physically commanding—was Jimmy (known as Jinky) Johnstone, the Celtic midfielder with remarkable ball control who in 1967 was a member of the first British team to win the European cup. Ron Greenwood did not excel on the football field himself, but as that rare and almost contradictory thing, a thinker about the game, he fashioned West Ham United into one of the most attractive teams of 1960s (nurturing along the way the remarkable world cup-winning talents of Bobby Moore, Martin Peters, and Geoff Hurst), and was a well-respected manager of England between 1977 and 1982. Other sportsmen featured in this release include three athletes: the short and bespectacled Sydney Wooderson, who held the world records for the mile and half mile; Don Thompson, who won the gold medal at the Rome Olympics in 1960 for the 50 kilometre walk; and Ken Jones, who was both a record-breaking sprinter and a try-scoring rugby union international. David Nicholson the jockey and racehorse trainer is also included, along with the cricket writer and advocate of women’s cricket Netta Rheinberg.

Music, art, and literature

The most notable composer added to the Oxford DNB in this update is Sir Malcolm Arnold, whose music was always popular but perhaps for that reason fell out of favour with the critics. He won an Oscar for his score for the quintessential British film of the era, Bridge on the River Kwai. Other compositions included Concerto for Hosepipe and Grand Concerto Gastronomique! He is joined by the composer Robin Orr and by Sir John Drummond, television producer, director of the Edinburgh Festival, and an influential arbiter of musical taste. Edgar Hunt, a key figure in the modern revival of the recorder and recorder music, who did so much to promote recorder playing in primary schools, is included. So too is Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, the great soprano—and not just for her music, as she was controversial for alleged collaboration with Nazism and for the influence of her svengali-like husband, Walter Legge. Another story of the manipulation of a performer can be found in the biography of the pianist Joyce Hatto, whose accomplishments were overshadowed by the discovery after her death that her husband had plagiarized other recordings and issued them as hers. Moira Shearer, the ballet dancer, is a much loved entrant to the dictionary to whom no scandal attaches. The film with which she is most frequently associated, The Red Shoes (1948), has never dimmed in popularity and is now the subject of renewed interest in a revised and retouched version.

Our release features a number of notable artists, including the painters Sandra Blow (abstract collages), Dennis Bowen (abstract landscapes), and John Latham, whose use of mixed media led to his being sacked from St Martin’s School of Art for making artworks out of library books. Sir Kyffin Williams is famous for his landscapes of Snowdonia. Joash Woodrow was discovered only very late in his life when scenes of his native Leeds were compared by many to Lowry. Alongside these practising artists we include other figures from the art world: Dennis Farr, an authority on modern British art and director of the Courtauld Institute; the art journalist and critic Peter Townsend; the architectural critic Colin Boyne; Frank Willett, a scholar of African art; Annely Juda, the gallery owner who specialized in modernist Russian art; and Alan Fletcher, the ‘father figure of British graphic design’. Garden design in Britain is also represented in the lives of Christopher Lloyd, journalist and gardener, Valerie Finnis, gardener and photographer, and Ian Hamilton Finlay, creator of the influential garden Little Sparta.

The leading literary life added to the dictionary in this release is that of Dame Muriel Spark, author among many other works of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Prickly, feisty, controversial, and eccentric, Muriel Spark by character and lifestyle was not suited to the metropolitan literary world and could be difficult to pin down in all senses of the term. Indeed she reinvented herself and her oeuvre several times in her career. Even her roots and religion were deliberately obscured and became the subject of an acrimonious public argument with her son later in her life. Many of the other authors included in this release had international connections. The German-born author Sybille Bedford wrote novels as well as travelogues, autobiography, and other non-fiction. She is joined by the Indian-born novelist Raja Rao and the publisher John La Rose, a key figure in the black community in Britain. Peggy Appiah, the daughter of the Labour politician Stafford Cripps, joins her husband Joe in the Oxford DNB; she was a notable anthologist of west African stories. Eric Newby was one of the foremost travel writers of the era, famous for his Short Walk in the Hindu Kush among other volumes of memoirs. The children’s writers added include Jan Mark, Philippa Pearce—who wrote Tom’s Midnight Garden, several times adapted for television—and Ursula Moray Williams, who wrote the Adventures of the Little Wooden Horse. The poet John Heath-Stubbs is also included among those who died in 2006.

Politics and scandal

Among political lives one stands out above all, that of John (Jack) Profumo. He was not an especially notable figure in post-war British politics and would probably not have been included in the Oxford DNB if he had merely been a diligent secretary of state for war, his position in 1963 when the ‘Profumo affair’ broke. But his personal indiscretions and political errors at that time gave a name to a complex set of events, many of them played out before a shocked but also prurient public, that marked not only the decline of a government, that of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, but the end of an era. The combination of sex, spies, drugs, suicide, high politics, and low cunning was irresistible and emboldened the press and broadcasters to go further than ever before in uncovering the lives of the rich and irresponsible, and satirizing the traditional governing class. The world looked different a year later when Harold Wilson led Labour back into power in ‘the white heat of [technological] revolution’. Simon Heffer’s biography explains these events, including Profumo’s affairs and his infamous lie to the House of Commons. He also shows how Jack Profumo redeemed himself through forty years of dedicated and selfless social work, out of the public eye, for good causes in the East End of London. It is a life that reads like a morality tale with many different messages for our age. Profumo will forever be remembered for giving a name to a transition in the cultures of politics, the press, and even British humour. When, a decade later, Lord Lambton, another Conservative minister who is also included in this release, was also involved in a sexual scandal there was far less comment and only very limited political impact. This is another measure of the effects of the Profumo affair, which accustomed the British public to a new public morality and changing rules of behaviour. As Philip Larkin reminded us later:

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me)—
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
and the Beatles’ first LP (‘Annus Mirabilis’, in High Windows, 1967)

Other political lives added to the dictionary include two colourful backbenchers from either side of the Commons: Tony Banks, the populist London Labour MP, who obscured his roots as the son of a diplomat and acquired a reputation as a sharp-tongued Cockney wit, and Eric Forth, the Conservative noted for his garish appearance and forthright, ‘politically incorrect’ opinions. Merlyn Rees, a leading figure in the Labour administration of the 1970s as Northern Ireland and then home secretary, is also included. Though no fluent speechmaker in public, he was a close and trusted ally of the prime minister, Jim Callaghan (who entered the Oxford DNB last year). Other political additions include a special forces officer and an intelligence officer who both became Tory MPs, respectively Sir Douglas Dodds-Parker and Sir Peter Smithers; the moderate Conservative John Peyton; Margaret Bain (née Ewing), who was well known as a Scottish Nationalist MP under both her names; and Ted Grant, the Trostkyist creator of the Militant Tendency, which in the 1970s and 1980s attempted to enter and subvert the Labour Party.

Perhaps the most influential political figures included here were neither MPs nor ministers: in Ralph Harris, later Baron Harris of High Cross, and in Alfred Sherman, we have two of the key figures behind the rise of Margaret Thatcher and the invention of Thatcherism in the 1970s. Sherman, once a communist, was an important figure behind the intellectual changes in Conservative ideology that led to the Thatcherite break with the post-war social and political consensus, but he fell out of favour once the Conservatives were in power. Harris, on the other hand, had been a radical Conservative thinker and follower of the free-market economist Friedrich Hayek since his working-class youth. After a brief stint as a university lecturer he founded the Institute of Economic Affairs to propound classical liberal economics at a time when such ideas were deeply unfashionable. His work as a writer and propagandist helped to re-establish a political economy based on the market rather than the state at a time, in the mid- and late 1970s, when Keynesian orthodoxy was under stress.

Law and public service

The worlds of politics and law are straddled by Victor Mishcon, Baron Mishcon, who served many high-profile clients. He is joined by three law lords: Ackner, who had represented the families at the Aberfan inquiry in the 1960s and who was an expert on libel and administrative law; Brightman, a trusts and taxation lawyer, who had recruited Margaret Thatcher to his chambers in the 1950s; and Simon of Glaisdale, a family lawyer held in high esteem by his profession. The legal scholars Kurt Lipstein (international law) and Sir Robert Megarry (equity and the law of property) are also included. Among diplomats in this release are Sir Julian Bullard, whose final posting was as ambassador in Bonn, West Germany (and who joins in the dictionary his father Sir Reader Bullard and his brother Sir Giles); the strongly pro-European Sir Roy Denman; the Arab expert Sir Michael Weir; and the ambassador to Japan Sir Michael Wilford. A refugee from Germany in the 1930s, Sir Hans Singer worked for many years as a senior United Nations economist, becoming one of the most influential figures in the economics of development.

The January update also includes a notable collection of figures from the intelligence community. Francis Cammaerts was an SOE officer in France during the Second World War; Milicent Bagot was a Soviet expert in MI5 and is believed to have been the model for John le Carré’s fictional creation Connie Sachs; and Sir Colin Figures served as the head of the Special Intelligence Service (MI6) at the time of the Falklands War. In contrast Aleksandr Litvinenko was a former KGB agent who became a public critic of the Russian government and was a naturalized British citizen domiciled in London at the time he was killed, quite possibly by Russian operatives acting on state orders, by poisoning with the radioactive material Polonium-210. The most notable figure from the armed services whom we add to the dictionary in this update is Sir Anthony Farrar-Hockley. The first Dictionary of National Biography was notable for the profuse inclusion of scholars and soldiers, though these were usually two different sets of people. In Farrar-Hockley the two categories were combined in a single figure—a hugely influential army officer who saw service in many of the major conflicts since the Second World War, and a military historian and commentator on military affairs who wrote and spoke with unexampled authority.

Business life

Two contrasting leaders of aviation head our list of business figures. Sir Peter Masefield trained as an aeronautical engineer, wrote widely on aviation, and as a businessman and senior public official was a key figure in the development of British aviation from the 1950s to the 1990s. Sir Freddie Laker was different in style and approach. His experience during the Second World War launched his career as an entrepreneur of the skies and he is remembered as the larger-than-life figure who pioneered cheap aviation for the ordinary traveller. His Skytrain, which provided cheap transatlantic flights from London to New York, went into administration in 1982 after less than five years in business, but it was the start of a process that has led to affordable air travel for millions. Those businessmen with their feet planted altogether more firmly on the ground include Sir Kenneth Bond, the accountant and indispensible assistant to Arnold Weinstock at GEC; Sir Leslie Smith, chairman of British Oxygen; Simon Sainsbury, a key figure in the growth of the family firm in the 1960s and 1970s who then turned to philanthropy; and Edward Brech, the management consultant and historian of management. We also include John Macsween of the eponymous family firm famous for the manufacture of the haggis. Finally we mark the creative genius of advertising executive John Webster, who brought to the British public the Sugar Puffs honey monster, the bicycling bear promoting Hofmeister Beer, and perhaps most memorably of all, the chimpanzees in the different Brooke Bond PG Tips advertisements.

Religion and scholarship

From Mammon to God, who has been worshipped and studied by many different faiths and denominations in modern Britain, as our religious entries demonstrate. Prominent Anglicans in this release include David Hand, the missionary and archbishop of Papua New Guinea, Michael Mayne, dean of Westminster, and the leading church administrator Sir Derek Pattinson. We also include the evangelical leader Selwyn Hughes; Zaki Badawi, the Islamic scholar and leader of moderate Muslim opinion who founded the Muslim College in London for the domestic training of imams and was committed to inter-faith dialogue; William Montgomery Watt, the Scottish Episcopalian who studied Islam and wrote an acclaimed biography of Muhammad; Mary Boyce, scholar of Zoroastrianism; and Arthur Peacocke, a biochemist who devoted his career to reconciling science and belief. The entry on Rabbi Louis Jacobs takes us to the heart of the most controversial episode in the religious history of modern Anglo-Jewry, in which Jacobs lost his position as a minister of the United Synagogues and a likely future chief rabbi when he integrated modern scholarship on the provenance and composition of the Torah into his writings and teachings.

Among the scholars included in this release are several notable linguists: Peter Ganz, who played a role in transcribing and eavesdropping on the conversations of captured German officers and scientists during and after the Second World War; the Hispanists Ivy McClelland and Sir Peter Russell; the French scholar Alan Raitt; and the Esperanto poet and writer William Auld. The anthropologist Rodney Needham, who was influenced by structuralism, is joined by the classical archaeologist Peter Megaw, whose major excavations were in Cyprus, and by the Cambridge numismatist Philip Grierson. The philosopher Sir Peter Strawson, the economists Alfred Maizels and Michael Posner, and the urban geographer Emrys Jones are also included. Enid Mumford studied the impact of technology in the workplace; Olive Banks (who now joins her husband and collaborator Joe Banks in the Oxford DNB) was a feminist, sociologist, and historian, and an expert on the history and sociology of the modern family. The several doctors and medical experts evident in January’s update include Sir Henry Yellowlees, the influential chief medical officer of health in the 1960s and 1970s; the paediatricians June Lloyd (Baroness Lloyd of Highbury) and Michael Chan (Baron Chan, the first peer from a Chinese background); Sir Richard Bayliss, physician to the queen; and the influential geneticist Paul Polani. Paul Beeson, born in the United States, was a key figure in the development of medicine in Oxford; Sir Martin Roth, based in Cambridge, was an influential psychiatrist whose work countered the ‘anti-psychiatry movement’ of figures like R. D. Laing.

This release also includes the leading molecular biologist Vernon Ingram; the biochemist Philip Randle; the zoologist Keith Eltringham, who refined the aerial survey methods required for animal population counts; the plant chemist Arthur Bell, whose work on plant toxins was important for the manufacture of new medicines and who became director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; the particle physicist Richard Dalitz; and Brebis Bleaney, who was notable for the study of electron paramagnetic resonance. The work of Sir Nicholas Shackleton on palaeoclimatology is now recognized as a pioneering venture into a subject of the greatest contemporary scientific and popular interest. Shackleton, a talented clarinettist, is also notable for building a very valuable collection of musical instruments that he left to the University of Edinburgh.

A final category covers those with a foot in the past: the Byzantine historian Joan Hussey; the historian of late medieval Italy Philip Jones; Dennis Twitchett, who was an expert on medieval China; and John McManners, who wrote extensively on France before, during, and after the revolution of 1789. Two of the biographers we now include, Georgina Battiscombe and Alethea Hayter, wrote studies of the same Victorian writer, Charlotte Yonge. Battiscombe also wrote biographies of John Keble and the reforming Victorian earl of Shaftesbury, while Hayter made an important study of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Two further figures link the dictionary to the world of public history and heritage: Levi Fox was a key figure in the founding and development of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford upon Avon, while Marie Hartley founded the Dales Countryside Museum, a gem of a provincial museum. Finally, if the Oxford DNB may be allowed to honour its own, we include the life of the portrait photographer Godfrey Argent, sixty-seven of whose images are used as illustrations in the dictionary.

Our next online update

Our next online update will be published in May 2010 and will include men and women active from the ‘earliest times’ to the late twentieth century. May’s update will include sets of biographies of civilian heroes, commemorated for acts of ‘everyday heroism’; of provincial artists and artistic networks; and of Britons in Japan. May’s update also sees the start of a new research project to extend the dictionary’s coverage of modern linguists and foreign language scholars. In addition we will continue to extend the themes area of the dictionary with essays on historical networks including the Marlborough House set, the Persia Committee, the Bristol school of painters, and the modernist Penwith Society of Arts, based in St Ives, Cornwall.

Back to top of January 2010 preface

May 2010

New online contents, May 2010

Welcome to the seventeenth online update of the Oxford DNB, in which, as every May and September, we extend the dictionary’s coverage of men and women ‘from the earliest times’ to the twentieth century. The May 2010 update adds biographies of ninety individuals active between the thirteenth and late twentieth century. In addition to new biographies the update includes a further ten ‘reference group’ essays—our selection of historical groups and networks—available (for those with subscriber access) in the themes area of the online edition.

In this update we begin a new research project to extend the dictionary’s coverage of men and women who left their mark as interpreters, observers, and promoters of continental European languages and culture. Here we add biographies of thirty-five individuals, active between the mid-nineteenth and late twentieth century, who developed Britons’ understanding and appreciation of the languages, literatures, history, and culture of countries from Denmark to Greece, Portugal to Russia. Britons’ international interests are also reflected in new biographies of individuals active in the Middle East, Japan, and North America. They include a fifteenth-century merchant recently identified as the first Englishman to lead an expedition to the New World, the London-born architect of the Hoover Dam, and the Lancashire phycologist whose research on algae helped to preserve the artificial cultivation of seaweed that has since shaped the modern sushi industry. Other new biographies highlight figures influential in nineteenth-century social and political reform; in advances in archaeology and prehistory; and in the development of modern forms of nursing and social care. A final set of biographies looks at those who have achieved note for acts of civilian heroism since the late-nineteenth century. Individually these are remarkable stories that captured the public’s attention in the immediate aftermath of the event, and have since been celebrated through private memorials and national honours. Collectively they allow us to reflect on changing attitudes to popular heroism, and in particular the emergence and commemoration of the ‘everyday hero’ as a means of shaping debates on public morality.

As ever, full details of the May 2010 update are available from the new online contents page, and a free selection of extracts and highlights is available here. The complete dictionary (57,348 biographies and 475 theme articles) is available, free, in nearly all public libraries in the UK, with most now offering remote access that enables library members to log in, at any time, at home (or anywhere they have internet access). Elsewhere the Oxford DNB is available online, at any time, from schools, colleges, universities, and institutions worldwide. Full details of participating British public libraries, and how to gain access to the complete dictionary, are available here.

Linguists, languages, and European cultures

May’s update sees the start of a new research project to extend the dictionary’s coverage of individuals working in Britain who studied and observed the language, literature, and culture of continental Europe. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, our selection traces the contribution of editors and translators in making accessible works of continental literature, and later by the consolidation of modern languages, and the study of European history and culture, as staples of British school and university teaching. Among early translators is William Hazlitt (1811–1893), son of the celebrated essayist, who worked as an editor for the European Library series and subsequently produced English editions of Dumas, Hugo, Schiller, and others for his own series. The generation that followed Hazlitt included Ellen Marriage (1865–1946) and Clara Bell (1834–1927), who are best known for their ‘complete’ translation of Balzac’s Comédie humaine, of which they were responsible for twenty-six and thirteen volumes respectively—Marriage going so far as to travel in France to check local details within the novels. Other translators, like the Greek-born cotton merchant Alexander Pallis (1850–1935), a British citizen from the 1890s, intended their work to serve political ends. Pallis became a pioneer of modern spoken Greek with his advocacy of ‘demotic’, or colloquial, forms for his translations of Shakespeare, the Iliad, and the New Testament. The defence and promotion of Greek nationhood and culture was also an aim of John Mavrogordato (1882–1970), who from 1914 worked for the Anglo-Hellenic League to defend Greek interests against rival Balkan states. Mavrogordato subsequently provided British readers with what became the standard history of modern Greece, while Stephen Graham (1884–1975) offered them a view of pre-war Russia composed during his life as a self-confessed ‘vagabond’ in that country.

Though Graham maintained the wandering life, figures like Mavrogordato later turned to academia as the focus of European studies, and especially of modern languages, which became increasingly centred on the universities. May’s update includes some of the most influential figures in the establishment of modern languages in British higher education, among them Leonard Willoughby (1885–1977), who as head of German at University College, London, combined important editions of literary texts with historical surveys of literature and the creation of the influential journal German Life and Letters. Other Germanists now added to the dictionary include the Austrian-born August Closs (1898–1990), who combined studies of lyric poetry with efforts, after the war, to promote reconciliation between British and German towns through twinning—a reminder of the wider cultural contribution of those who championed European studies within Britain. So too the work of the French scholar John Orr (1885–1966), who combined research into Romance linguistics with work to improve relations with the citizens of Caen after the town’s destruction in the battle for Normandy in 1944. Politics and scholarship also came together in the life of Elias Bredsdorff (1912-2002), who, having fought for the Danish resistance, became an active internationalist and cultural mediator between Britain and his homeland while also teaching and writing on Danish linguistics and literature at Cambridge. Other prominent language specialists now added include the Italianists Peter Armour (1940-2002) and Uberto Limentani (1913–1989), both Dante experts, and Carlo Dionisotti (1908–1998), widely considered the twentieth-century’s greatest historian of Italian literature; the Hungarian scholar and academic translator George Cushing (1923–1996); London University’s first professor of Russian literature, Richard Hare (1907–1966); the French scholar Dominica Legge (1905–1986), an expert on Anglo-Norman literature at Edinburgh, and the Hispanist Frank Pierce (1915–1999), of Sheffield University, who resisted the growing trend to narrow specialism with studies of poetry, the novel, and Spanish literary history. Others are likewise remembered for their broad engagement with a chosen culture, among them Donald Charlton (1925–1995), who played a leading role in the development of Warwick University and whose research encompassed French literature, religion, philosophy, art, and cinema. The Russianist Johnny Stuart (1940-2003) combined a vast knowledge of iconography and Eastern Christianity with an astute commercial sense (remaining outside academia, he was a consultant for Sothebys), a love of émigré high-life, and—replete with motorbike and leathers—a passion for post-war rock culture.

Britons overseas: Japan, the Middle East and North America

Continuing the theme of Britons’ international interests, May’s update contains selections of people from Britain who made an impact in Japan, Persia, and North America. One of the earliest British settlers in Japan after the establishment of diplomatic and trade relations in 1858 was the Illustrated London News correspondent and illustrator Charles Wirgman (1832–1891), whose Japan Punch contained humorous commentaries on the foreign community at Yokohama. The differing experience of those experts who were employed by the Meiji regime to assist the modernization of Japan are illustrated by the lives of Thomas William Kinder (1817–1884), a mechanical engineer appointed director of the imperial mint at Osaka, at a considerable salary, to create confidence in the new Japanese monetary system. Though successful in this task, he was unpopular with many of his Japanese staff, and his contract was not renewed in 1875. By contrast the metallurgist William Gowland (1842–1922), responsible for the purity of the coinage, remained in Japan for over fifteen years, and also undertook pioneering archaeological research into Japanese prehistory. As Gowland left Japan in 1888, the Scottish civil engineer William Kinninmond Burton (1856–1899) was establishing himself as a designer of water supply schemes for Japan’s growing urban populations. The phycologist Kathleen Mary Drew (1901–1957) never visited Japan, but her researches in Manchester on the life cycle of red algae helped to ensure the survival of edible seaweed cultivation in Japan, making possible the modern nori industry (whose product is now familiar to western consumers of sushi).

Representing the long British engagement with Persia is Samuel Manesty (1758–1812), a member of a Liverpool merchant family who was British resident at Basrah and a trader in the Persian gulf. During the Napoleonic wars, when French interests were becoming established in Persia, Manesty undertook an unofficial diplomatic mission to Tehran to meet the shah, and to avert a rupture of Britain’s relations with the Persian ruler. Later in the century another British merchant in the region, Henry Finnis Blosse Lynch (1862–1913), who had made a special study of the Armenian region, was elected an MP in the Liberal landslide of 1906. A critic of British policy in the region, which divided Persia into British and Russian spheres of interest, Lynch preferred to support the fledgling constitutional movement in Persia, forming the Persia Committee (act. 1908–1914) as a prominent but ultimately unsuccessful pressure group. Also active in the Middle East was the journalist Philip Percival Graves (1876–1953), who had family connections with the Levant. As correspondent in Constantinople for The Times he observed the Young Turks’ revolution of 1908, and is best remembered for breaking the story, in 1921, that the antisemitic document ‘Protocols of the elders of Zion’ was a crude forgery. May’s update also includes three individuals with connections to North America, beginning with the Bristol merchant William Weston (d. in or before 1505) who, following recent research by our contributors, is now thought to have been the first Englishman to lead an exploration to the New World, probably in 1499. Three hundred years later the chemist William Bollaert (1807–1876) travelled in South America, exploring for mineral deposits. Today, however, he is best known for his records of his visit to the newly independent republic of Texas, to promote British settlement there at a time when Britain looked to an independent Texas as a possible counterweight to the growing power of the United States. It was in California that our third subject, the London-born architect Gordon Kaufmann (1888–1946), made his name, first as the designer of Mediterranean-style houses for the rich and famous and then as the architect of the magnificent Hoover Dam, one of the great examples of inter-war American modernism and engineering prowess.

Social reformers, archaeological observers

Slavery in the southern states of America was a target of the writer, and secretary to the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, Louis Alexis Chamerovzow (1816–1875), a leading figure in the abolitionist movement, who employed his literary talents in the cause, editing the autobiography of the Georgia slave John Brown. Chamerovzow was also a prominent member of the Jamaica Committee (act. 1865–1869), the subject of another new group article in this update, in which he—in alliance with evangelical activists, philanthropists, and radical parliamentarians—remonstrated against the violent suppression by Jamaica’s colonial governor of an uprising among the black peasantry. The records of the Royal Literary Fund, to which Chamerovzow had applied for assistance as an indigent author, illuminate much of his previously obscure early life. Those records also bring into sharper focus the later years of a significant commentator on economic policy, David Robinson (1787–1849); a prolific author of articles critical of liberal tory economic policy in the 1820s, Robinson descended into poverty, and his applications to the fund were denied. Another influential author who shared Robinson’s fate was James William Greenwood (bap. 1835, d. 1927), whose eyewitness account of the conditions of vagrants in the Lambeth workhouse in 1866 caused a sensation. Like Robinson he disappeared from public view, from which obscurity only the recently available census data retrieves him; in his later years he depended on a state old-age pension.

One contributor to debates on poverty was the Perthshire fruit-grower Patrick Matthew (1790–1874), whose wide-ranging prescriptions included British colonial settlement, and whose intellectual interests offered a form of evolutionism that led him to claim priority over Charles Darwin. The moral regeneration of society was the life’s work of the Greenock businessman John Dunlop of Gairbraid (1789–1868), who saw sobriety as the key. As a full-time temperance propagandist he favoured total abstention and was regarded as the father of organized temperance societies in the British Isles. The burgeoning of voluntary associations in this period created a demand for corporate emblems, a demand met by the firm of George Tutill (1817–1887), which produced brightly coloured and elaborately decorated banners for trade unions, friendly societies, and other Victorian organizations. His firm dominated banner making for a century, and the major collection of his work is preserved in the People’s History Museum in Manchester. The importance of associations in preserving the position of artisan breadwinners was the deeply held belief of Daniel Guile (1814–1882), secretary of the ironfounders’ union, which prided itself on the considerable welfare benefits it disbursed to its members. Guile was one of the small group of London-based trade union secretaries who formed the Junta (act. 1862–1871), which was successful in gaining a measure of public and legal acceptance for trade unionism. Voluntary association of another kind is represented by the MP and landowner Sewallis Evelyn Shirley (1844–1904), a pedigree dog breeder. Concerned at the widespread cheating and poor standards of hygiene at dog shows, he joined with other leading dog fanciers to create the Kennel Club in 1873.

Some lives of those involved in archaeology illustrate the varying institutional settings in which they undertook their work. Large-scale oil paintings of Stonehenge and other British prehistoric monuments executed by the Bath shoemaker and self-taught amateur artist Richard Tongue (1795–1873) were donated by him to the British Museum and other repositories; he worked independently, and was latterly resident in a Wiltshire lunatic asylum. William Gowland, whose work in Japan has already been mentioned, spent a summer on an early restoration of Stonehenge, under the auspices of learned societies. Three expeditions undertaken between 1926 and 1928 by Thomas Athol Joyce (1878–1942) to make detailed examinations of Maya sites in British Honduras were commissioned by the British Museum; he was accompanied by the traveller and journalist Lilian Elwyn Elliott (1874–1963). Wartime service in Bomber Command introduced the Cambridge University geologist (John) Kenneth Sinclair St Joseph (1912–1994) to the interpretation of aerial photographs, a technique he developed in the post-war years as a new methodology for archaeological research, making a series of remarkable discoveries during the dry summer of 1949.

Medical lives, childhood, and art

The dictionary’s coverage of medical biography is also extended in this update. Professional accreditation and organization were hotly contested in the field of nursing, where we now include the London Hospital’s ‘Matron of Matrons’, Eva Charlotte Ellis Lückes (1854–1919). She promoted the authority of nurses in the care of patients, while also being the leading voice against the registration of nurses, which she believed would lower standards. (Violet) Honnor Morten (1861–1913), who wrote manuals on nursing care and established a society to provide free nursing for London schoolchildren, was among the many Lückes trained and influenced. The early generation of women to qualify as medical practitioners included Dorothea Clara Maude (1879–1959), who undertook independent work in British military field hospitals in France and Serbia during the First World War. It was in the area of orthopaedic surgery that Maude’s contemporary Maud Forrester-Brown (1885–1970) made her mark, attending children’s clinics across the south-west of England (sometimes on horseback), writing studies of childhood paralysis, and becoming consultant surgeon at the Bath orthopaedic hospital on the formation of the National Health Service in 1948. Thirty-five years later the businessman Roy Griffiths (1926–1994) was called on by the Conservative government to chair an inquiry into the NHS; his report led to the introduction of general management in health authorities and gave medical professionals greater responsibility for the management of their services. Griffiths’s later review of community care was similarly influential and its recommendations, enshrined in legislation in 1993, led to a revolution in the provision of services by the voluntary and private sectors. Meanwhile it was the daily realities of care that informed the work of Leila Rendel (1882–1969), whose Caldecott Community created an innovative haven for deprived children and for the development of treatment for disturbed young people.

Children also feature in May’s update with biographies of the mysterious Edward Jones (b.1824), who gained widespread publicity for repeatedly breaking into Buckingham Palace, and of Penelope Boothby (1785–1791), who sat for one of Joshua Reynolds’s most successful child portraits (seen here), known to many as the ‘Mob-Cap’ and the inspiration for Millais’s Cherry Ripe (1877). Boothby is also remembered for the artefacts that marked her early death, including a striking tomb (a model of which was said to have moved Queen Charlotte to tears) and Henry Fuseli’s painting The Apotheosis of Penelope Boothby, which shows her ascent to heaven. Two further child subjects, Martin and Steven Barnham, feature in the painting dating from the late 1550s that illustrates the biography of their mother, the London silkwoman Alice Barnham (1523–1604), who stands between her sons in one of the earliest family portraits in England. As well as sitters, the May update also includes several influential artists, two of whom are closely associated with the Cornish artistic community of St Ives. For a decade (Charles) Adrian Scott Stokes (1865–1936) lived on the north Cornwall coast, becoming a leading member of the colony that gathered there to paint land- and seascapes. As a resident of St Ives, Stokes would have been familiar with the town’s marine stores, run in the 1890s by a former fisherman, Alfred Wallis (1855–1942), who gained international attention in the 1930s for his ‘primitive’ style of painting in which local coastal and townscapes were depicted in two dimensions and with a strong, simple palette. A third artist, Peggy Williams (1909–1958), initially made her living as a book illustrator, but it was for her subsequent career as the novelist Margiad Evans—and particularly for her depictions of the Welsh border community—that she was better known and is now once more read and studied.

Episcopal and monastic lives

In May we also continue our project to provide a complete listing of the pre-Reformation episcopate of England and Wales, and here we add eight new lives. Three of these—Gilbert Welton (d. 1362), William Percy (1428–1462), and Richard Scrope (c.1419–1468)—served as bishops of Carlisle during a period in which this relatively impoverished diocese experienced floods, Scottish raids, and a contest for supremacy between the region’s pre-eminent families, the Percys and the Nevilles. William Percy’s promotion to the episcopate aged just twenty-four may have been prompted by hopes that, as someone also closely related to the Nevilles, he would act as a peacemaker. In fact Percy sided with the Lancastrians and was the only bishop to attend Henry VI at the battle of St Albans in 1455, though he later submitted to the Nevilles after defeat by the Yorkists in 1461. In a career heavily shaped by national events Percy is also remembered for continuing the beautification of Carlisle Cathedral, work that his predecessor Gilbert Welton had done much to advance through the raising of funds and the supervising of reconstruction after the cathedral’s near destruction by fire in 1292. Another to suffer at the hands of the Neville family was Simon Sydenham (c.1370–1438), who as dean of Salisbury failed in his bid to become bishop when Robert Neville, a nephew of Henry Beaufort, received papal backing; Sydenham, an able and conscientious churchman, was in turn elected bishop of Chichester in 1431.

May’s update also adds two thirteenth-century bishops of Rochester, both of whose episcopates were characterized by discord with the monks of the cathedral priory. Though chosen for his peaceful nature, John of Bradfield (d. 1283) quickly alienated the priory, as did Thomas Wouldham (d. 1317), who, having refused the monks’ claims for exemptions and privilege, was finally reconciled with the prior on his deathbed. Monastic life is also explored in the biographies of two Augustinian canons, William Westkarre (d. 1486), who served as suffragan to the bishop of Winchester, and John Draper (d. 1552), whose attempts to save Christchurch Priory after the call for its dissolution in 1538 came to nothing, after which he observed scrupulous conformity to the Henrician regime. To some, of course, the upheavals of the 1530s presented an opportunity to be seized. Once such beneficiary was Thomas Salter (1477/8–1558), an unhappy Carthusian monk who used Thomas Cromwell’s intervention to escape the London Charterhouse, of which he later gave a stark and unromanticized account for which he is now remembered along with his remarkably detailed and insightful will.

Civilian heroes

A final set of lives allows us to consider changing attitudes to civilian heroism since the late nineteenth century. Our starting point is the story of Alice Ayres (1859–1885), a south London servant who died while attempting to rescue children from a house fire. Her conduct prompted extensive local commemorations and, two years later, was cited by the artist G. F. Watts in his campaign to establish a public memorial to the ‘heroism of everyday life’. His intention was a permanent record of those whose deeds he considered instructive for public morality, but which risked being overlooked when performed by ‘heroes of humbler life’. In 1900 Watts unveiled his Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice in Postman’s Park, London, where a tablet to Alice Ayres was installed two years later. Today there are thought to be thirteen public memorials worldwide to Wallace Hartley (1878–1912), another new addition in this update. Hartley was the leader of the eight-man orchestra on the RMS Titanic, which sank in April 1912 with the loss of more than 1500 lives. In the immediate aftermath of the disaster many survivors spoke of the heroic conduct of Hartley and his fellow musicians and gave rise to the story that they had played throughout the evacuation, concluding with the hymn ‘Nearer, my God, to thee’. In the coming weeks Hartley came to epitomize the heroism of the ordinary passengers and crew, his conduct being commemorated in scores of popular stories, postcards, songs, and concerts, and later in monuments from his home town of Colne, Lancashire, to Australia.

Growing appreciation of the possibility of everyday heroism also led to the introduction of national awards—notably medals—to provide civilian equivalents to the military Victoria Cross, instituted in 1854. One of the first recipients of the Albert Medal, awarded from 1864 ‘for gallantry in saving life’, was the boatman Mark Addy (1840–1890), whose rescue of more than fifty people from Manchester canals brought him local prominence and the rare accolade of being a recipient of the medal’s ‘first class’. In 1940 the Albert Medal was replaced with the George Cross, which remains Britain’s highest award for bravery by a civilian or by a military person where the VC is not applicable. GC recipients now added to the dictionary include the engine driver John Axon (1900–1957), who died trying to bring a runaway train under control; Axon’s life and actions were later commemorated in a pioneering radio documentary of songs and voices by the folk musicians Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger. He is joined by the air steward Jane Harrison (1945–1968), who is the only woman to have received the GC in peace time, following her death as she attempted to rescue passengers from a burning aircraft at Heathrow. Alongside these individual biographies the new update also includes a feature essay that brings together others included in the dictionary for acts of civilian and military courage over the past 200 years.

Groups: life-saving and high living

We continue the theme of civilian heroism with the first of ten new groups added in May 2010. Established in 1774, the Society for the Recovery of Persons Apparently Drowned sought to investigate the possibility of resuscitation for those who had suffered near fatal accidents. The society’s founders, an amalgam of physicians and nonconformist religious leaders, initially encouraged the public to bring them victims for resuscitation. But as the society grew its focus shifted from rewarding those who made resuscitation possible to those who rescued people from life-threatening situations: it is this role that the organization, subsequently renamed the Royal Humane Society, continues to fill. In addition to the three groups already mentioned—the Junta, and the Jamaica and Persia committees—new politically orientated networks include the competition wallahs (act. 1855–1891), whose recruitment to the Indian Civil Service through open competition, not patronage, marked them out as an identifiable category of administrators within the Anglo-Indian community. They are joined by the Young Scots’ Society, which fostered the recovery of Liberal Party fortunes after divisions over the conduct of the South African War had seen the party reduced to a minority of Scottish seats in the general election of 1900. As the Young Scots came to life, another network—the high-living Marlborough House set—was nearing its end with the succession of its patron, Albert Edward, prince of Wales, in 1901. The set, a fashionable social clique centred on the prince’s London residence Marlborough House, had emerged after Queen Victoria’s retreat from society in the wake of Prince Albert’s death. As the seat of the ‘reversionary interest’, Marlborough House performed an important political function but was, and remains, better known as the acme of the late Victorian frivolity, extravagance, and indulgence in which the prince led the way. By contrast, higher values were pursued, intellectually by the British idealists (act. 1850s–1920s), a diffuse affiliation of philosophers (also dubbed the English Hegelians) concerned with questions of universal reason, and culturally by two regional art groups, the Bristol school of painters, who worked in and around that city in the early nineteenth century, and the Penwith Society (act. 1947-c.1975), led by Barbara Hepworth, who championed abstract art in the Cornish artists’ community of St Ives.

As ever, readers with access to the complete Oxford DNB (and this includes members of almost every British public library) can search and browse among the 266 groups, 152 reference lists, and 57 feature essays 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 2010 update.

New portraits and picture searching

Finally, and alongside new biographies and groups, the May update offers the latest retrospective addition of portrait images to the Oxford DNB. This month we add just under thirty new images to illustrate existing biographies that have not previously carried a portrait. New recipients of likenesses include Captain Edward Smith, master of the RMS Titanic; the racing tipster Ras Prince Monolulu; the sixteenth-century school founder Agnes Mellers; the shadowy Tichborne claimant; and the first-century archaeological discovery Lindow Man. These, together with images added in May to illustrate new subjects, bring the total number of likenesses included in the Oxford DNB to 10,671, making the dictionary the country’s largest published collection of national portraiture. Online you can search the portraits by artist, location, and profession, allowing you to view (among many other possibilities) our 50 Gainsboroughs or 215 photographic portraits by Alexander Bassano; to locate monuments and portraits in Westminster Abbey or across the city of Glasgow; or to bring together portraits of, for example, medieval women or Georgian merchants to study how such figures were depicted. Future updates will continue to add portraits to existing entries, while here you can see further examples of portraits included in this release.

 

Our next online update

Our next online update will be published in September 2010 and will continue to extend the Oxford DNB’s coverage of men and women in all periods up to the late twentieth century. September’s update will include a special focus on policing in Britain and in the empire, and on black and Asian subjects who have shaped modern British life.

Back to top of May 2010 preface

September 2010 preface

New online contents, September 2010

Welcome to the eighteenth online update of the Oxford DNB, in which, as every May and September, we extend the dictionary’s coverage of men and women ‘from the earliest times’ to the twentieth century. The September 2010 update adds biographies of 101 individuals active between the eleventh and the late twentieth century, with a special focus on British policing (from Hanoverian police magistrates to the shapers of the modern service) and a first set of entries on notable black subjects, born or at some time resident in Britain, who left their mark on medical, political, artistic, and business life from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. In addition to these new biographies the update includes a further eight ‘reference’ articles—our selection of historical groups and lists—available (for those with subscriber access) in the themes area of the online edition.

As ever, full details of the September 2010 update are available from the new online contents page, and a free selection of extracts and highlights is available here. The complete dictionary (57,449 biographies and 483 theme articles) is available, free, in nearly all public libraries in the UK, with most now offering remote access that enables library members to log in at any time at home (or anywhere they have internet access). Elsewhere the Oxford DNB is available online, at any time, from schools, colleges, universities and institutions worldwide. Full details of participating British public libraries, and how to gain access to the complete dictionary, are available here.

Policing: Britain and overseas

Our focus in this release is on a national institution, the police, whose characteristics have often been held to be an important element of Britishness. The model of policing in Britain was founded on the idea of popular consent and (outside London) local control, and celebrated as such. But perhaps for this reason, individual police officers have received less historical attention than they deserve. In this update we include examples of noteworthy lives connected with policing in Britain from the late eighteenth century to the late twentieth century, and also extend the range to cover Britons involved in policing the empire, where rather different types of policing were used.

The update includes two magistrates who in mid-eighteenth-century London, along with the half-brothers Henry and John Fielding, promoted systems of full-time, paid patrols in the city. A wholesale grocer in the London parish of Bloomsbury, Saunders Welch (1711–1784) collaborated with the celebrated magistrate Henry Fielding in strengthening the forces available to tackle crime. Welch—an overlooked figure in the early history of policing—became a stipendiary magistrate at Litchfield Street, administering routine criminal justice in the 1760s and 1770s. The London bookseller and active magistrate Sir Nathaniel Conant (1745–1822) was an energetic promoter of the reformation of manners (to enforce laws against drunkenness, prostitution, and profanity on the Lord’s day). Concerned by rising crime, he drafted the famous Middlesex Justices Act of 1792, which created seven sub-divisions, each with stipendiary magistrates and a small force of paid constables, to provide policing for London on the model of Henry Fielding’s Bow Street patrol (founded in 1748). Conant himself was appointed to the office at Great Marlborough Street, and became an adviser to the Home Office during the revolutionary period of the Napoleonic wars. The Yorkshire exciseman William Dighton (1717–1769) reminds us of the dangers of law enforcement in these decades of elementary policing: having arrested the notorious coiner David Hartley (who already features in the dictionary) Dighton was murdered by Hartley’s accomplices in a case that led to a government inquiry and a toughening of laws against counterfeiting. George Ruthven (1792/3–1844) was a outstanding member of the Bow Street patrols, who achieved fame (and reward) for his arrest in 1820 of the Cato Street conspirators, who plotted to assassinate the cabinet. A fishmonger’s son from Southwark, Henry Goddard (1800–1883) rose to become principal officer successively of the Great Marlborough and Bow Street forces, ,operating in plain clothes to investigate crimes in London and further afield. After the Bow Street force was disbanded (1839) he became chief constable of the newly created county force at Northampton, but was evidently not a success in this role. He is best-remembered for his memoirs of the final years of the ‘old police’.

A leading figure in the new county forces was John McHardy (1801–1882), a former naval officer and coastguard commander, appointed in 1840 as the first chief constable of Essex. His organization of the Essex force was regarded as a model for others, and strengthened the case for the legislation that in 1856 made it compulsory for every borough and county to have a full-time paid police force. McHardy’s confident prediction that such professional police forces would be self-financing went unfulfilled. Having made the Oldham force ‘one of the smartest in the country’, Sir Robert Peacock (1859–1926) was appointed in 1898 to clean up the scandal-riven Manchester force. Peacock was one of the most prominent early police chiefs to have risen from the ranks, and brought his own experience of walking the beat to restoring public confidence in his force. His contemporary at Birmingham, Sir Charles Rafter (1857?–1935), recruited from the Royal Irish Constabulary, inherited a badly under-strength force. Rafter was thrust into the national spotlight in his first year of office, when the future prime minister David Lloyd George narrowly escaped with his life after a violent demonstration at Birmingham town hall against his ‘pro-Boer’ views. Rafter’s great achievement was in police training; under him, the Digbeth Police Training School became the largest in the country. Birmingham was also at the forefront of professionalizing municipal fire-fighting services, which had formerly been left to the police force. Appointed in 1879, Alfred Tozer (1853–1906) revolutionized the Birmingham fire service and, like Rafter in the police force, trained a generation of fire-fighters, included four of his sons, one of whom succeeded him. Rafter’s second-in-command and eventual successor, Cecil Moriarty (1877–1958), wrote what became the standard textbook for police training, Police Law, first published in 1929 and familiar to generations of police officers.

In London the Metropolitan Police leaders of the late nineteenth century were faced with an imminent terrorist threat, as the imperial capital became a target for a succession of plots, beginning with the Irish-American Fenian dynamiters in 1883. This threat called into being the Metropolitan Police special branch, which William Melville (1850–1918) joined in 1883, and of which he became the head in 1893. By then the threat had shifted to the activities of foreign anarchists based in London, responsible for attempted bombings and assassinations of visiting overseas rulers. Arthur Conan Doyle was among the contributors to a testimonial to Melville on his retirement in 1904; what was not known at the time, but has recently been discovered, was that Melville went on to head the detective side of the newly formed MI5, which monitored German agents in Britain. Another head of the special branch, James Monro (1838–1920), went on to become chief commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in 1888, but resigned in 1890 after a dispute with the Home Office over police pensions, which Monro thought insufficiently generous. Monro, who unlike his predecessors had a police rather than a military background, wrote an interesting account of how the London police had come to be accepted by the public as friends and protectors.

Relations between police and community are a theme in the lives of several of the chief constables included in the release. Lionel Lindsay (1861–1945), who succeeded his father as chief constable of Glamorgan, was from a south Wales landowning family with strong personal connections with the coalowners of the area. His policing of miners’ strikes at a time of considerable industrial turbulence was characterized by a preference for violent confrontation, and was criticized as brutal and partisan. In Surrey the new chief constable Mowbray Lees Sant (1863–1943), appointed in 1899 after an army career, challenged the London motorists who sped along his county’s rural roads, intimidating other road users and infuriating residents by throwing up clouds of dust. His systems of speed controls and vigorous prosecutions for speeding led to outright conflict with motoring organizations like the Automobile Association, whose patrolmen warned motorists of the presence of police speed traps. Although criticized by the London-based national press, Sant was supported by the Surrey communities he policed. Later in the twentieth century Sir Eric St Johnston (1911–1986), head of the Lancashire constabulary (the largest force outside London) from 1950 to 1967, turned to motorized patrols and the use of radio communication to tackle crime in the new towns of post-war Merseyside. He introduced unmarked crime patrol cars, which inspired the television series Z Cars, first broadcast in 1962, and the painted Panda cars, in 1965, intended to create an instantly visible police presence in urban areas. St Johnston made himself unpopular with his fellow chief constables by his support in the early 1960s for the amalgamation of provincial police forces. The case for greater central control had been strengthened by the row surrounding Athelstan Popkess (1893–1967), head for thirty years of the Nottingham city force. Like St Johnston a keen advocate of new technology, Popkess was a politically divisive figure in Nottingham, and his investigation into corruption allegations against local councillors led to his suspension by the local authority in the summer of 1959, and a local public campaign on his behalf. Appointed head of the Metropolitan Police in 1958, Sir Joseph Simpson (1909–1968) faced the problem of policing an affluent society. Greater prosperity was accompanied by rising property crime. Police pay had become unattractive in a period of full employment, leading to manpower shortages and poor morale. The protest movements of the 1960s, race issues, and conflicts between police and motorists undermined public confidence in the force. Simpson was caught between the need to defend his ranks, while bringing about much needed reform in an institution under increasingly hostile scrutiny, and soon to be weakened by corruption scandals in its specialist branches.

Detective work carried with it temptations and dangers, but also the opportunity for celebrity. Edinburgh’s thief-taker James McLevy (d. 1873) built up a network of informants in the lodging houses of the city’s Old Town and gained rewards, as well as extensive newspaper coverage, for his exploits in crime investigation. In retirement he wrote recollections of his detective career, the basis for a modern series of radio dramas. The Manchester detective Jerome Caminada (1844–1914), who met informants in the back pews of a Roman Catholic church, combined a remarkable memory for faces with a facility for surprise, as well as a physical toughness equal to tackling the most violent of criminals. He took pride in having cleaned up Manchester’s Deansgate, a centre of beer houses, betting dens, and brothels. His memoirs described fifty cases in which he had been involved. Sir Melville Macnaghten (1853–1921), brought into the Metropolitan Police by Monro, became chief constable of the Criminal Investigation Department in 1889 after the ’Ripper’ murders in east London. Adept at managing good relations with journalists, Macnaghten ensured favourable depictions of the competence of his detectives, one of whom was Walter Dew (1863–1947). As a detective chief inspector at Scotland Yard, Dew was on the brink of retirement when he took up his most famous case, the disappearance in 1910 of Cora Crippen. Dew discovered her remains and then, amid worldwide press attention, intercepted her fleeing husband and his mistress in Canada. This year is the centenary of Crippen’s trial and execution (November 1910), his prosecution having been led by the Old Bailey counsel Sir Richard Muir (1857–1924). Muir is one two leading prosecutors now added to the dictionary, the other being Mervyn Griffith-Jones (1909–1979), who in 1960 led the case against Penguin Books at the Lady Chatterley trial (further discussed later in this preface) when he famously asked whether an unexpurgated edition of Lawrence’s novel would make suitable reading for jurors’ wives and servants.

A year after the Crippen case Frederick Wensley (1865–1949), a detective based in Whitechapel, came to national attention having identified the perpetrator of the Clapham Common murder. While sometimes accused of using dubious methods, Wensley was credited with improving the professionalism of the detective branch, and with the formation after the First World War of a ‘flying squad’ of officers to pursue criminals across divisional boundaries. Wensley’s generation of detectives lacked the forensic resources provided by experts like Frederick Cherrill (1892–1964), Scotland Yard’s fingerprint expert from 1920. The bowler-hatted figure of Cherrill, who was reckoned to have solved more crimes than any other detective at Scotland Yard, was a familiar sight at crime scenes until his retirement in 1953. Cherrill also had a small part in the Ealing Studios film The Blue Lamp (1950). On the basis of two books written in retirement about his best-known cases Robert Fabian (1901–1978), who served on plain clothes duties from 1924 to 1949, was the subject of a BBC television series Fabian of the Yard (1954–6). Famous for his sharp-suited appearance, Fabian had come into contact with colourful underworld figures during his career in London’s West End, where he achieved his most notable success, the solving of the Antiquis murder case in 1947.

Throughout the history of the modern police there were members of the force who aired their discontents. One of the earliest was George Bakewell (1805–1883), who joined the newly created Birmingham force as a constable in 1840, but after being dismissed for drunkenness in 1841 wrote a critical account of the new, regimented system of policing, criticizing the force from a radical standpoint. Police discipline was attacked by the dismissed Metropolitan Police inspector John Syme (1872–1945), who for over three decades after his dismissal campaigned against the police authorities. Although Syme was involved in an early police union, his concerns were more with his own circumstances than those of the police collectively. More important in creating a vehicle for improving police conditions of service was the radical journalist John Kempster (1836–1916), who had organized London temperance demonstrations before conceiving the idea of a campaigning newspaper addressed to police officers. The Police Review, first published in 1893, successfully took up the issue of guaranteed weekly rest days, granted in 1910. Kempster also promoted the idea of a representative body for the police, though the Police Federation did not come into being until 1919, after his death.

Also in 1919 the Metropolitan Police began officially to employ women patrols. One of the first to be taken on, Lilian Wyles (1885–1973), was promoted to inspector to deal with offences against women and children, mainly involved in taking statements from victims. She participated in the case of Irene Savidge (1905–1985), a factory worker subjected to interrogation by detectives following her arrest for indecency with a former MP in Hyde Park, which gave rise to a tribunal to investigate the case. The first conference to represent policewomen serving in provincial forces was organized by Barbara Denis de Vitré (1905–1960) in 1937. By then there were still fewer than 200 policewomen in Britain. After 1945 de Vitré became responsible for advising chief constables on the training and deployment of policewomen. She was successful in persuading police chiefs to expand their use of women officers, whose number increased from 445 in 1945 to 2500 in 1960. From the age of three Yvonne Fletcher (1958–1984) had dreamed of becoming a police officer, and such was her determination that the Metropolitan Police’s recruiters relaxed the height requirement to allow her (at five foot two and a half inches) to join the force in 1977. Stationed at Bow Street, she was a beat officer at the time of her deployment in April 1984 to a demonstration outside the Libyan People’s Bureau. There she was killed by a shot fired from within the bureau. In 1985 a permanent commemoration was erected in St James’s Square on the spot where she fell and, twenty years on, a second memorial to 1600 police officers killed on duty was unveiled in central London.

A memorial in Peshawar, in modern Pakistan, commemorates Eric Handyside (d. 1926), an officer in the frontier constabulary killed in a shoot-out with outlaws in the North-West Province of India. Commanding a force of local Pathans, he gained a reputation for bravery in tackling bandits on the border with Afghanistan. He is among a selection of lives in the update covering the policing of overseas territories. Sir Charles Cunningham (1884–1967) trained as a banker before joining the Indian police in 1904; in 1928 he became commissioner of police in Madras, where he was responsible for policing the civil disobedience movement. Gordon Halland (1888–1981), a vicar’s son, joined the Indian police in 1908 after a period as a schoolmaster. He served in the Punjab as a prelude to an international policing career that included periods in Ireland, China, Ceylon in the Second World War—when he reorganized the police—and finally in occupied Germany after 1945. In between he spent time in Britain as first commandant of the short-lived police college at Hendon. A theory of imperial policing was set out by a retired army officer, Sir Charles Gwynn (1870–1963), in an influential book published in 1934 that described cases where the police alone might be insufficient to maintain order in colonial contexts. As inspector-general of the Ceylon police from 1913, Sir Herbert Dowbiggin (1880–1966) advocated the idea that the colonial police should be civilians in uniform, and that they should carry out civil rather than military duties. ‘The notebook is to the Policeman what his rifle is to the soldier.’ In the 1930s, as unofficial police adviser to the Colonial Office, Dowbiggin became a roving ambassador, touring colonial police forces. He was sent to Palestine in 1930 after an outbreak of serious disorder, and made recommendations for a complete overhaul of the force, which operated during the period of British rule under the League of Nations mandate. A former Indian police officer, Alan Saunders (1886–1964), was in temporary command in Palestine during the riots of 1929; he became inspector-general in 1937, after the Arab revolt, when there was increasing resort to military duties. Raymond Cafferata (1897–1966) spent most of his career as an officer in the Palestine police during the mandate period. He was the only British officer present at Hebron in August 1929, when Jews were attacked by Arab rioters, and was subsequently involved in managing a worsening security situation, becoming an assassination target for Zionist groups in 1946. Posted to Tanganyika in 1939, Michael Macoun (1914–1997) served in Africa during the period of decolonization, taking command of the Uganda force in 1959. He appointed Africans to command posts, and stayed on after independence. As police adviser for the dependent colonies, from 1966, he perpetuated British police methods in the post-colonial era. He also witnessed the fiasco in Anguilla in 1969, when Metropolitan Police were brought to the Caribbean island.

Imperial and Commonwealth lives

In this update we also continue our project to expand and deepen our coverage of people notable for their connections with the British empire and the Commonwealth. Among the highlights is a new article on the nawab begums of Bhopal, the female Muslim rulers of a central Indian principality from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth century. These four remarkable women were renowned for their administrative and social reforms, promotion of education (including female education), and public building projects. The last of the four, Sultan Jahan Begum (1858–1930), was notable also for her literary accomplishments, her subjects ranging from cookery and household management to biography, education, and social and religious questions. She was perhaps best known in Britain for her books Muslim Home (1916) and Al-Hijab, or, Why Purdah is Necessary (1922). Her predecessor, Shah Jehan Begum (1838–1901), is now remembered for founding the UK’s first purpose-built mosque, at Woking, Surrey, in 1889.

A contemporary of the first nawab begum, Ardaseer Cursetjee Wadia (1808–1877), came from the renowned family of Bombay shipbuilders already included as a ‘family’ entry in the dictionary. A talented engineer, Wadia introduced steam engines, gas lighting, photography, and electroplating to Bombay. After the first of his visits to Britain (where he was presented to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert) he was elected the first Indian fellow of the Royal Society, in 1841. He spent the last twenty years of his life in Britain, latterly in Richmond, Surrey, and was an important advocate of Parsi (Zoroastrian) rights. Also from a famous and fabulously wealthy family (which likewise has its own entry in the dictionary) was Dwijendranath Tagore (1840–1926), older brother of Rabindranath Tagore, and friend of C. F. Andrews and Mahatma Gandhi. Tagore was distinguished in many fields—as a mathematician, poet, philosopher, translator, and religious scholar—and might have published more had he not regarded his own creations with an engaging modesty and diffidence. A wealthy background also made possible the literary achievements of Bharatendu Harishchandra (1850–1885), who in his short life frittered away a fortune but whose activities as both writer and publisher earned him the accolade of ‘father of modern Hindi literature’. His relations with the British in India were ambivalent: he at first received support and patronage, but after he published an irreverent account of a levee held by the maharaja of Benares in honour of the viceroy, Lord Mayo, he was frozen out of official favour.

The contested political relationship between Britain and India features more widely in the biographies of three prominent Indian politicians. Virendranath Chattopadhyaya (1880–1937), brother of the poet and Gandhian Sarojini Naidu, came to Britain in 1902 to study for the Indian Civil Service examination, but was radicalized by his association with the ‘physical force’ nationalists clustered around India House in London. He left Britain in 1910, following Madan Lal Dhingra’s assassination of Sir Curzon Wyllie, and spent the First World War in Germany, agitating against British rule in India. Then, after periods in Sweden and again Germany, where he ran the League against Imperialism, he ended his life in the Soviet Union, caught up in one of Stalin’s purges. Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy (1892–1963) was a more moderate politician, though he is remembered now in part as the Muslim League chief minister of Bengal during the ‘great Calcutta killing’ of August 1946, which he was accused of fomenting, or at least of failing to prevent. After independence he was briefly involved in attempts to create an independent, united Bengal alongside India and Pakistan, before helping to form the Awami Muslim League in East Pakistan (modern-day Bangladesh). An advocate of parity between West and East Pakistan, he served briefly as prime minister of Pakistan in 1956–7. He was imprisoned by Ayub Khan’s military government, and died shortly after his release. Morarji Desai (1896–1995), a prominent Congress politician, was also jailed for his activities, twice by the British, and once by Indira Gandhi, whose ‘emergency’ rule he opposed. He went on to found the Janata Dal (People’s Party) and served as prime minister of India from 1977 to 1979. He attributed his long life to urine therapy, on which he wrote two books.

The complex transition from colonial rule to independence is also explored through the lives of two leading (and contrasting) figures from Lesotho, King Moshoeshoe II (1938–1996) and Ntsu Mokhehle (1918–1999). The former was called home from Corpus Christi College, Oxford, to become paramount chief of Basutoland in 1960, and king of independent Lesotho in 1966. Nevertheless his troubled relationship with the dominant political figure in Lesotho, Chief Leabua Jonathan, and his attempts to accrue more power, led first to a brief exile to the Netherlands in 1970 and then to his deposition and exile to Britain in 1990. He resumed the throne after South African mediation in 1995, but died shortly thereafter. Mokhehle was a more radical figure. Founder of the Basutoland Congress Party and leader of the opposition to Jonathan, he was cheated of victory in the 1970 election and went on to form an armed resistance, the Lesotho Liberation Army. He became prime minister in the first post-military elections, in 1993; briefly ousted by a further military coup in 1994, he remained in power until 1998.

September’s update also includes biographies of a number of individuals of British birth or descent included for their notable roles in the empire. Ethel Grimwood (1867–1928), born in India, was briefly a celebrity in Britain as the ‘heroine of Manipur’, having, as the wife of the political agent in that small north-east Indian principality, endured and then escaped a siege of the residency after a failed British attempt to arrest the head of the Manipuri army. (A larger force was subsequently successful in defeating the ‘rebels’.) As our entry makes clear, her heroism was questionable and her fame somewhat contrived, largely to assuage the insecurity of the British after their ignominious defeat. India also formed the background to the career of Sir James Hayes Sadler (1851–1922), who, after serving as an army officer and administrator there, was successively political agent and consul-general in the Somaliland protectorate, where he was the first to alert the British government to the activities of Muhammad ‘Abdallah Hasan (later known to the British as the Mad Mullah), then commissioner of Buganda, and commissioner of British East Africa (modern-day Kenya). In the latter capacity he was effective in crushing local opposition to British rule, but less so in dealing with the colony’s small community of European settlers, and ended his career as governor of the Windward Islands, a relative backwater by this time.

Sir Orfeur Cavenagh (1820–1891) also began his career as an Indian army officer, becoming the last governor of the Straits Settlements (Singapore, Malacca, and Penang) before their transfer from the India Office to the Colonial Office. A successful governor, he balanced the colony’s books, developed its infrastructure, and was described as ‘shrewd and above all approachable’. Hubert Berkeley (1864–1942) was a maverick but effective district officer of Upper Perak from 1904 to 1926, renowned throughout the Malay states and further afield for his eccentricity and defiance of higher authority: at one point he felled a large tree across the only road to his headquarters to prevent his superiors paying a threatened visit of inspection. He was deeply wedded to Malay traditions, to an extent unmatched even by the sultan himself. A rather different figure was the Methodist missionary William Shrewsbury (1795–1866), whose life nevertheless again shows the complexities of British relationships with their colonial subjects. He twice became something of a cause célèbre, first in Barbados, when white slave-owners destroyed his chapel and drove him from the island, suspecting him of promoting unrest and subversion among the slaves on the island, but then in Cape Colony. where by contrast (and largely, it seems, in response to Xhosa indifference to his religious message) he became notorious for his advocacy of violent reprisals against Xhosa tribesmen after the Cape Frontier War of 1834-6. He suffered the indignity of again having his chapel attacked while ministering in Yeadon, near Leeds, in 1852, though in this case the ‘mob’ comprised Methodist revivalists angered by his attempt to bar them from the chapel.

Black British lives

The cases of Wadia and Chattopadhyaya, as well as numerous others already included in the dictionary, show that extended periods of stay in Britain could sometimes be very significant in the lives of people whose primary importance nevertheless lies elsewhere. Historians have been increasingly interested, however, in the impact of people of black or Asian (or other non-European) descent on Britain itself. The dictionary currently includes the biographies of some 200 or so men and women of black or Asian descent included primarily for their activities in Britain itself. This update sees the publication of the first fruits of a project to extend this coverage.

Criminality is the reason that we now know of Ann Duck (bap. 1717, d. 1744), born in Cheam, Surrey, the daughter of a white woman and a black father, who fell into bad company, joined the notorious Black Boy Alley Crew in Clerkenwell, was frequently arrested and imprisoned, and was eventually hanged for theft. Her life was relatively unremarkable, but so too, it appears, was her colour, which was mentioned by witnesses mainly as a way of identifying her, suggesting that in the eighteenth century people of black or mixed descent were an accepted part of London society. By contrast another eighteenth-century figure, Amelia Lewsham (d. in or after 1798), a Jamaican albino woman described as a ‘white negress’, ‘as fair as the fairest among the Europeans’, toured the country as a ‘curiosity’, and was shown to the royal family and the Royal Society. Initially brought over to England as a slave, she subsequently absconded, married, had children, and supported her family by exhibiting herself; our entry suggests that in many ways she had a longer and more fulfilling life than might have been the case had she remained in Jamaica. In the following century the Afro-American conjoined twins Millie and Christine McKoy (1851–1912) were also exhibited widely, and performed for Queen Victoria (their speciality being to hold two separate conversations simultaneously, contemporaries assuming them to be a single person, ‘Millie-Christine’). They too came to Britain as slaves, but were freed by a court, which cited the 1772 James Somerset case; by later life they had accumulated sufficient wealth to become notable philanthropists back home in the United States. Another African-American, Henry ‘Box’ Brown (d. in or after 1878), was born a slave in Virginia, but escaped to the north by being posted to Philadelphia in a box. He subsequently made his career in Britain, initially as a charismatic anti-slavery speaker (who announced his arrival in a British town by leading a parade with a brass band; at one point he claimed to be earning £50 to £70 a week), and then, after emancipation and the American Civil War, as a magician and mesmerist.

More conventional (and, in contrast to Amelia Lewsham and the McKoys, to modern eyes more acceptable) forms of entertainment distinguished other individuals now included in the dictionary. Thomas Rutling (1854–1915) was born into slavery in Tennessee, but after emancipation enrolled at the newly founded Fisk University, and came to Britain in 1873 as one of the renowned Fisk Jubilee Singers, formed to raise funds for the university, who introduced British audiences to the gospel music of the American south. After the disbandment of the original Jubilee Singers (they were later revived as a purely commercial venture) he remained in Britain, giving recitals and working as a voice teacher; he spent his last years in Harrogate, surrounded by a devoted circle of British friends. Another African-American singer, John Payne (1872–1952), arrived in Britain in 1919 and made the country his home, performing at Buckingham Palace as well as the Wigmore and Aeolian concert halls with the Royal Southern Singers, and later forming and leading the Negro Choir, which performed for three weeks at the Albert Hall. His home in Regent’s Park Road became a popular meeting place for artists of African-American and Caribbean descent (he was credited with starting Paul Robeson on his musical career), and later in life he became a popular figure in Cornwall, where he had retired. Bert Williams (1874–1922), born in the Bahamas but brought up largely in the United States, mesmerized British audiences with his comic dance routines and gave a royal command performance at Buckingham Palace in 1903; he was at one point probably the most famous, and highly paid, black entertainer.

A contemporary of Williams, Connie Smith (1875–1970), born in South Carolina, came to Britain in 1895 and made her home in the country, first as a music-hall entertainer and then as an actress, becoming a mentor and inspiration to many younger black actors and actresses; she continued working in the theatre until the age of eighty-six. Also from South Carolina was Edmund Thornton Jenkins (1894–1926), who first visited Britain in 1914 to play at the Anglo-American Exposition in London, as part of the Famous Piccaninny Band. He stayed on, spending seven years at the Royal Academy of Music, writing compositions that were performed by a young John Barbirolli among others, and forming an early jazz band that included both Jack Hylton and Ted Heath. Another composer and conductor included in this update is Avril Coleridge-Taylor (1903–1998), born in Croydon, the mixed-race daughter of the acclaimed composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor; she published her first composition at the age of twelve and went on to write more than ninety pieces of music. She initially considered herself ‘an Englishwoman, not coloured’, but the experience of discrimination in South Africa brought home to her the consequences of her African ancestry.

Film and the theatre provided the means by which two immigrants from the Caribbean, Ernest Trimmingham (1880/81–1942) and Frank Singuineau (1913–1992), made their living. Trimmingham is most notable as the first black actor known to have appeared in a British film, The Adventures of Dick Turpin: the King of Highwaymen (1912), in which he played a character called Beetles. He also appeared as Pete in Jack, Sam, and Pete (1919), one of the first westerns made in Britain, as well as on stage in a variety of character parts. More memorable as an actor was Singuineau, who between the early 1950s and the 1980s made frequent appearances on film and television and in the theatre. Among his more interesting roles was as Lucas, the disillusioned shop-owner whose values are despised by his son Colin, in Horace Ové’s Pressure (1975), believed to be the first feature film drama made by a black film-maker in Britain.

Also included in this update are three Nigerians who came to Britain as seamen and contributed significantly to musical and theatrical life, and to west African community life, in this country. The earliest of the three, John Adetayo Otolorin (c.1886–1963), arrived in 1919, and settled first in Cardiff, then in Camden Town. He obtained small parts in films including Sanders of the River (1935), but was more significant as a theatrical agent, finding work for other black actors. He also built up a substantial property empire in Camden Town, providing accommodation for newly arrived immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean, and was an important community leader and organizer of social events, playing host to the likes of Kwame Nkrumah, Chief Abafemi Awolowo, and Nat ‘King’ Cole. Brewster Hughes (1912–1986) arrived on the eve of the Second World War, in 1939, and played a key role in introducing British audiences to Nigerian highlife music, as part of the acclaimed West African Rhythm Brothers and subsequently in other bands. Many of the clubs he played at were run by another Nigerian, Samson Olabowale Dosunmu (1914–1991?), who also arrived in 1939, and ran a succession of gambling dens and nightclubs in Soho, one of them, the Abalabi, being immortalized as the Beni Bronze in Colin MacInnes’ss City of Spades. Unlike Otolorin and Hughes he eventually returned to Nigeria. Across the Atlantic, jazz such musicians as Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, and above all Thelonious Monk, received the support of the musical patron Pannonica de Koenigswarter (1913–1988), a member of the Rothschild banking family who was known as the Jazz Baroness for her devotion to Monk and New York’s be-bop scene.

Although the emphasis in this set of black British lives is on music, acting, and other forms of entertainment, we also include biographies of four other individuals of black or mixed-race descent notable for their achievements in other fields. James Risien Russell (1863–1939), born in British Guiana of mixed-race parentage, was an eminent neurologist, described by Macdonald Critchley as ‘one of the most important and colourful figures within the medical profession of Great Britain’. He published widely on nervous disorders, treated a number of famous people (including the novelist Mrs Humphry Ward and the explorer Henry Stanley), appeared as an expert witness in numerous court cases involving lunacy, chaired the National Society for Lunacy Law Reform, and earned enough to afford a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce and to employ a small orchestra for his dinner parties. His contemporary Dusé Mohamed Ali (1866–1945), born in Egypt of mixed Egyptian and Sudanese descent, was less successful in his numerous business ventures, or indeed as an actor and poet (in 1902 he published The Hull Coronation Ode, a history of Hull in verse), but he deserves recognition for his book In the Land of the Pharaohs (1911), a scathing and widely circulated attack on British rule in Egypt, and for his journal the African Times and Orient Review, which at one point employed Marcus Garvey (who acknowledged his debt to Ali).

A more conventional figure was Sir Herbert McDavid (1898–1966), a Liverpudlian of mixed-race descent who rose to become chairman of the Glen Line and played a key role in the planning of sea transport for the allied landings in north Africa, Sicily, Italy, and Normandy during the Second World War, and later during the Suez crisis. Finally, this update includes the biography of Billy Strachan (1921–1998), also of mixed-race descent, from Jamaica, who served as a bomber pilot during the Second World War and then became an active member of the Communist Party, secretary of the London branch of the Caribbean Labour Congress, and publisher and editor of the pioneering Caribbean News. He meanwhile pursued a career as a magistrates’ clerk, and left the Communist Party on becoming senior chief clerk to the justices for London west central division; he published textbooks on the law relating to drinking and driving, matrimonial proceedings, and adoption, and his disquisition Natural Justice (1976) was published with a foreword by Lord Justice Scarman.

Ecclesiastical, political, and creative life, c.1230 - 1650

Our coverage of the middle ages and early modern period is headed by a further selection of pre-Reformation bishops in what is the penultimate set of lives to be included before this particular research project is completed. Of those added this September, three—William Barrow (d. 1429), John Kyngescote (c.1414–1463), and Roger Leyburne (1465/6–1507)—were bishops of Carlisle. Common to all of their lives was the intertwining of religious and political themes, with each serving as political agent or beneficiary of political patronage or broader diplomatic manoeuvring. The disappearance of his register means that details of William Barrow’s episcopate are scarce, though episodes of lay activity are traceable through surviving documents, most prominently his mission to the borders in 1429 in an attempt to broker peace with the Scots. By the time John Kyngescote was elected to the vacant see in 1462 the diocese of Carlisle was war-ravaged, impoverished, and militarily vulnerable—factors that demanded a bishop favourable to the Yorkist cause in this politically sensitive region. As with his predecessors, Roger Leyburne’s register has not survived and as a result more is known of his lay than ecclesiastical affairs after his election in 1503. Indeed Leyburne’s later years were shaped far more by his involvement at Henry VII’s court, with considerably less time being spent in the north-west than at Westminster. Here he established himself as a royal chaplain and councillor, an influential administrator of royal finances, and a member of Henry’s ‘council learned in the law’. A fourth churchman in September’s update, Louis de Luxembourg (d. 1443), served as bishop of Ely, holding that see in commendam with the archdiocese of Rouen. Notwithstanding his many ecclesiastical preferments, Louis too is principally remembered as a political actor: in his case a talented statesman and diplomat who, as chancellor of France for the English, served as one of England’s most valuable foreign allies in the later stages of the Hundred Years’ War. Arnost, a monk of the abbey of Bec in Normandy, was well-regarded by Archbishop Lanfranc of Canterbury, at whose instance he came to England and was subsequently appointed bishop of Rochester; but he survived just six months as bishop before his death in 1076.

Interactions of political and ecclesiastical life are also evident, from an alternative perspective, in the career of the thirteenth-century administrator John of Crakehall (d. 1260). Originally from Richmond in the North Riding of Yorkshire, Crakehall served as steward of the diocese of Lincoln, forming a strong and long-running bond with his influential bishop, Robert Grosseteste. It was Crakehall who supplied the account of the bishop’s death later used by the chronicler Matthew Paris. After a period of semi-retirement he returned to public life as a highly effective treasurer of the realm, an appointment he probably owed to Simon de Montfort, a friend of Grosseteste’s. At odds with the careers of men like Louis de Luxembourg and John of Crakehall, that of the Suffolk landowner John Hopton (c.1405–1478) was not one of high politics or diplomacy, but instead of the steady acquisition of the status of a substantial country gentleman through good fortune and careful management. Though notably well-documented, Hopton’s life was, as his biographer comments, ‘quiet …in an unquiet time’. In contrast to many of his peers in the Oxford DNB Hopton was unaffected by civil strife and for that reason worthy of record: ‘a reminder that the fifteenth century was not all blood and roses’.

Four more biographies, from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, trace artists and craftsmen who left their mark on the creative life of the English regions rather than the metropolis. Almost all of the known work of Lambert Barnard (d. 1567/8), for example, is found in Sussex. Barnard is now considered one of the most talented provincial artists of the mid-Tudor period. His best-known works are the vast and striking historical panel paintings at Chichester Cathedral depicting former bishops and kings of England (1535–6), now the subject of a major restoration campaign. A generation on, Rowland Buckett (bap. 1571, d. 1639) and George Cottington (d. in or before 1648) were leading members of the Painter–Stainers’ Company of London; Buckett was a prominent in the company’s activities from the beginning of its records in 1623, while Cottington used his membership to oppose competition from unlicensed foreign-born painters. Despite their involvement in company affairs, both artists left their creative mark beyond London, Buckett as a decorative painter, most notably for Robert Cecil at Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, and Cottington as a portraitist whose best-known commissions (now thought lost or destroyed) were for the Kent landowner Sir Edward Dering and his family. Further from London was John Souch (bap. 1594, d. 1645?), a Lancashire-born artist who worked entirely in the north-west and whose career demonstrates the vitality of portraiture here and in north Wales, particularly among middling families seeking symbols of status. Souch’s best-known work (now in Manchester City Art Gallery) is a striking depiction of Sir Thomas Aston at the deathbed of his first wife (1636) in which Lady Aston appears twice—in life as a younger woman as well in death—in a canvas that combines heraldic symbolism with hints of a more naturalistic style then being promoted by European painters in London.

Themes: Lady Chatterley to the Lucasian chair

Policing and justice, which feature prominently in this update, are also the subject of two new theme articles: a reference list recording commissioners of the Metropolitan Police (1829-2006), and a group entry on the participants in the Lady Chatterley trial, which took place fifty years ago this October at the Old Bailey. One of the best-known cases in post-war legal history, the Chatterley trial brought together a remarkable slice of contemporary intellectual life, including the writers E. M. Forster, Rebecca West, and C. Day Lewis, the politician Roy Jenkins, John Robinson, bishop of Woolwich, and the literary critic Richard Hoggart, who each in turn defended Penguin’s decision to publish an unexpurgated edition of Lawrence’s novel. That we remember the trial owes much to its standing in post-war discussions of standards of public decency, but also to Penguin’s publication of the court transcript, which provides a complete account of the personalities and opinions of those who took the stand. Creative talents were also to the fore in the Film Society, an inter-war gathering of London-based enthusiasts and critics who sought to promote film as both an art form and a medium of communication. Members toured continental Europe and the Soviet Union in search of new work, while early participants—including Augustus John, Julian Huxley, and Ellen Terry—were treated, along with weekly audiences in their thousands, to first-time screenings of Fritz Lang’s Doctor Mabuse and Sergei Eistenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. Though always controversial, and from the 1930s under pressure from commercial cinema, the society’s influence is seen in the development of the British documentary genre, most notably in the Crown Film Unit’s output during the Second World War. Fifty years earlier the Cornish town of St Ives had played host to another creative gathering—this time of British and overseas artists—who established the St Ives colony as a centre for landscape and marine painting. Their arrival transformed St Ives from what, in the mid-nineteenth century, had been a dirty, noisy fishing port into an internationally recognized art centre—a reputation subsequently fostered by the modernist Penwith school (another recent addition to our selection of groups), and one it continues to enjoy today.

Far less secure were the efforts of the Darien investors and colonists of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. By August 1696 almost 1500 Scots had subscribed to the newly formed Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies, now better known as the Darien Company on account of its attempts to establish a colony, New Caledonia, at Darien on the isthmus of Panama. The company’s surviving subscription books provide detailed evidence of its sponsors, among whom aristocratic women, city merchants, and civic officials led the way, followed later by Scotland’s male élite, who gradually abandoned fears of offending William III in favour of Scottish national ambition. It was this ambition that prompted the expedition to Darien, which company members advocated as a solution to Scotland’s economic difficulties. However, the expedition ended in failure—destroyed by Darien’s harsh climate, disease, and resistance from the English and Spanish.

A century on from the collapse of Darien came the death, in September 1806, of the politician Charles James Fox. For nearly twenty-five years Fox led a group of MPs and political sympathizers, labelled the Foxite whigs, who considered themselves heirs of the true whig tradition and upholders of constitutional rectitude. Reinvigorated by the French revolution, which they initially saw as an expression of whig ideals, the Foxites suffered when the revolution’s violence prompted schisms within whiggism and repression by Pitt’s wartime government. Opportunities remained limited even after Pitt’s fall, though to a degree this allowed core Foxite values, uncompromised by office, to survive well into the new century. Two final themes in this update take us back to mid-seventeenth-century investigations of natural philosophy. The first, a list of the Lucasian professors of mathematics at Cambridge, records holders of the most prestigious academic post in the history of British science. All of its holders, from Isaac Barrow to the penultimate and current incumbents Stephen Hawking (b. 1942) and Michael Green (b.1946), are readily identifiable. Less certain are members of our final group, the Invisible College, who are said to have gathered in 1646–7 for the pursuit of useful knowledge dedicated to the public good. Evidence derives from just four written statements by the young Robert Boyle, and nothing is known of the college’s membership—aside from Boyle’s involvement and that several of his correspondents were clearly not involved. Other claims to membership and meeting places remain subjects of informed speculation, though more certain is the understanding that the college was not (as had been suggested since the eighteenth century) an antecedent of the Royal Society, which marks its 350th anniversary this November.

As ever, readers with access to the complete Oxford DNB (and this includes members of almost every British public library) can search and browse among the 272 groups, 154 reference lists, and 57 feature essays now available in the themes area of the online edition—addition to the 57,449 lives also available. A selection of existing group essays is also freely available, along with some highlights from the new groups in the September 2010 update.

Our next online update

Our next online update will be published on Thursday 6 January 2011 and will add biographies of 215 people who died in the year 2007.

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