2011 updates: introductions

• January 2011 preface
• May 2011 preface
• September 2011 preface

January 2011

• Journalism and broadcasting
• Entertainment
• Sport
• The creative arts
• Politics
• Business
• Public service, the armed forces, and religion
• Charity founders and campaigners
• Scholarship and education
• Engineering, science, and medicine
• Our next online update

New online contents, January 2011

Welcome to the nineteenth online update of the Oxford DNB, which adds 207 new articles and, in total, 216 new biographies to the dictionary. All but one of these 216 people died in 2007. Of those who died in 2007, 41, or one in five, were women. The earliest born, in December 1903, was Sir Arthur Marshall, aviator and industrialist; the latest, born in August 1968, was the rally driver Colin McRae. The majority, some 120 or 56 per cent, were born in the 1920s and 1930s.

Among those added to the dictionary in this update are distinguished groups of journalists, broadcasters, and entertainers. As the modern media have expanded and presented new opportunities, the boundaries between these categories have broken down: journalists have become broadcasters, and broadcasters have become entertainers. Several figures added to the dictionary in this release exemplify this trend. We also include a group of Conservative politicians whose careers reached their climax in the 1980s and whose biographies offer different views of the history of Margaret Thatcher’s administrations.

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 (57,665 biographies and 483 theme articles) is available, free, in nearly all public libraries in the UK, most of which now offer remote access that enables their 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.

Journalism and broadcasting

In Bill Deedes, Baron Deedes (1913-2007), the dictionary now includes a journalist, celebrity, and Conservative politician in one. Said to have been the model for Evelyn Waugh’s hapless young reporter Boot in Waugh’s novel Scoop, Deedes was also Bill in Private Eye’s fictionalized letters to him from Sir Denis Thatcher, ‘Dear Bill’, in which the prime minister’s husband presented his distinctive view of life in 10 Downing Street and on the golf course. Yet Deedes had achievements beyond the merely fictional; he saw action in the Second World War, rose to become editor of The Daily Telegraph, was a Conservative MP, and was briefly a minister under Harold Macmillan. By the end of his life he was a noted broadcaster and all-round national treasure. One of Deedes’s colleagues on The Daily Telegraph was its obituaries editor Hugh Massingberd (1946-2007), who is credited with reinventing the obituary as a daily feature in British newspapers and a notable genre of contemporary writing. Keith Kyle (1925-2007) was a journalist on The Economist and The Observer; a well-known face on the BBC’s early evening programme Tonight and the author of a highly regarded book on the Suez crisis of 1956. He may be contrasted with journalists of a different stripe: Richard Stott, or Stotty (1943-2007), edited both the Daily Mirror and The People not once but twice in each case, and was also editor of the newspaper Today, though only once. He did not employ Nigel Dempster (1941-2007), the famous gossip columnist on the Daily Mail, but in the 1980s Dempster was more famous than any newspaper editor; he had the inside track on any story, every affair, and on most scandals, and he became a celebrity in his own right.

The so-called Sage of Cricklewood, Alan Coren (1938-2007), had a long career as a humorist in such publications as Punch and on BBC Radio 4, where, in the later stages of his career, he was a fixture on the News Quiz. The sports journalist and broadcaster Ian Wooldridge (1932-2007) was a sage of another sort, whose best work was marked by his knowledge and sense of the history and traditions of sport. Michael Jackson (1942-2007)—who spent much of his life explaining that he was not the Michael Jackson—was this country’s most knowledgeable and influential writer on beer and whisky and helped widen the British experience of drink and its pleasures. The cartoons of Welsh life by Gren (Grenfell) Jones (1934 2007), in which he saw the humour in his fellow countrymen, certainly did not fail to present those pleasures alongside other aspects of Welsh life from rugby to male voice choirs. We can only speculate about cartoons that Gren might have drawn of the eccentric fashion editor Isabella Blow (1958-2007), who was noted for her remarkable hats.

Our update includes the biographies of several television executives. Peter Orton (1943-2007) was the founder of HiT Entertainment, which owned the rights to the television versions of, among other shows, Bob the Builder and Thomas the Tank Engine. Peter Graham Scott (1923-2007) was responsible for the highly popular seafaring saga of the 1970s The Onedin Line. Aubrey Singer (1927-2007) was a highly accomplished intellectual leader in the BBC, responsible for such influential programmes of the 1960s as Horizon and Tomorrow’s World, specializing in science and technology respectively, who became managing director of BBC television in the 1980s.

This leaves a knot of broadcasters who straddled all the lines. David Hatch (1939-2007) performed in the Cambridge Footlights and then in that seminal radio comedy of the 1960s, I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again. As a BBC executive he was controller of both Radio 2 and Radio 4, and then managing director of BBC radio. Magnus Magnusson (1929-2007) will forever be associated with the line ‘I’ve started, so I’ll finish’, which he coined as question-master on the BBC 1 programme Mastermind; but he was also a broadcaster, an Icelandic scholar, and a conservationist in his adopted home of Scotland. Ned Sherrin (1931-2007) was variously a film, theatre, and television producer, a comic writer, and an authority on the history of the theatre. He was the inspiration of that most important programme, That Was The Week That Was, which, in launching ‘satire’, broke the mould of British television (and simultaneously broke the careers and reputations of several politicians) in the year that divided the new from the old in British popular culture, 1962. Up to his death he was to be heard consistently on radio, notably on the programme he devised and chaired every Saturday evening on Radio 4, Loose Ends. Barbara Kelly (1924-2007) was the feisty Canadian wife of Bernard Braden, also a broadcaster, who became as famous and perhaps more celebrated than her husband on television in the 1960s. And at a time when Dr Who has re-emerged to entertain us on Saturday evenings (and send children scrambling behind the sofa once again) it is fitting that we remember Verity Lambert (1935-2007), who was the first producer of the programme in the 1960s and who went on to make a string of successful series including Rock Follies in the 1970s.

Entertainment

Many of these figures from radio and television became entertainers in their own right. Arguably more famous figures in this update made their reputations as film stars in the 1940s and 1950s. Whatever happens to her other films, Deborah Kerr (1921-2007) will always be remembered for one famous scene in From Here to Eternity, set in Hawaii at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941: her passionate embrace in the surf with the American actor Burt Lancaster is perhaps the most famous in cinematic history. Pat Kirkwood (1921-2007), another screen actress, is known as much for her alleged liaisons off-screen as for her roles on-screen. The multi-talented Moira Lister (1923-2007) was a star of the stage and television as well as film; as our article notes, ‘in the often anodyne British cinema of the 1950s she was injecting something spikier’. There was nothing anodyne about the British film of the next decade Zulu; one of the cameo performances in it was provided by Ivor Emmanuel (1927-2007), the Welsh singer and actor who sang ‘Men of Harlech’ at the height of the battle of Rorke’s Drift and who is added to the dictionary in this release. We also include the film producer Aida Young (1920-2007), whose credits include several Hammer horror films and such prehistoric shockers as She and One Million Years BC.

We also include less familiar names from the film world whose skills in making films were awarded the highest accolade of their profession, an Oscar. Freddie Francis (1917-2007) won two, indeed, for his cinematography on Sons and Lovers (1960) and for his work on the best film made so far on the American Civil War, Glory (1989). Peter Ellenshaw (1913-2007) won his Oscar for his work as a visual effects artist on Mary Poppins (1964). And Peter Handford (1919-2007) won his as the sound recordist on the 1985 epic Out of Africa.

Ian Richardson (1934-2007) was an accomplished stage actor who did much of his best work with the Royal Shakespeare Company; yet he was better known later in his life for his cameo roles on television as the reforming master of a resistant Oxbridge college in Porterhouse Blue (1987), based on the novel by Tom Sharpe, and as the corrupt prime minister Francis Urquhart in the adaptation of Michael Dobbs’s political satire House of Cards (1990), with his famous line ‘You may think that; I couldn’t possibly comment.’

From the theatre we also include the director who revived the Oxford Playhouse in the 1960s, Frank Hauser (1922-2007); the drama and opera director Steven Pimlott (1953-2007); and the theatre critic and theatrical biographer Sheridan Morley (1941-2007), the son of the actor Robert Morley. The fields of popular music are represented by a number of people and their different styles. Ronnie Hazlehurst (1928-2007) was a television musical arranger who wrote the theme tunes to such series as The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin and Last of the Summer Wine. Wally Ridley (1913-2007) was a songwriter and record producer who produced Vera Lynn’s radio series during the Second World War and found for her perhaps the most resonant popular song of the twentieth century, ‘We’ll Meet Again’. George Browne (1920-2007), the singer, songwriter, and actor, is remembered for his calypso ‘I Was There’ at the time of the 1953 coronation. William Johnson, known as Peerie Willie (1920-2007), was an influential folk musician from Shetland. And the incomparable George Melly (1926-2007) was a jazz singer, comic writer, and all-round personality dedicated to the business of cheering us up.

Don Arden (1926-2007), the so-called Al Capone of Pop and father to the television celebrity of today Sharon Osbourne, was a colourful and controversial pop music promoter. Michael Henshaw (1930 2007) was the accountant to the musical stars and a figure in his own right in the counter-culture of the 1960s. We also include two contrasting club owners: Mark Birley (1930-2007) owned Annabel’s in London and left estate valued at more than £100 million, whereas Tony Wilson (1950-2007) owned the Haçienda Club in Manchester and the Factory Records label, and hosted the pop music programme So It Goes. Yet Wilson’s business empire collapsed and the musical and cultural influence of the man known at its height in the late 1980s as Mr Manchester declined precipitously. Lily Kwok (1918-2007) also pioneered a new style in Manchester as one of the first successful Chinese restaurateurs in the city and in the country more generally. The comedian Bernard Manning (1930-2007), notorious for his blue language and the racism of his jokes, was also from the north-west. Terence Hall (1926-2007) was an entertainer of quite a different type who was better known as the ventriloquist behind that hero of children’s television, Lenny the Lion.

Sport

The most important of the sporting lives now added to the dictionary is that of Alan Ball (1945-2007), a member of the world cup-winning England football team, who amassed more than seventy caps for England before moving into team management, at which he was, like so many inspirational players, less successful. Many consider him to have been man of the match in the world cup final at Wembley Stadium in 1966. He is joined by another footballing personality of that era, Derek Dougan (1938-2007), who played for many years for Wolverhampton Wanderers and Northern Ireland. The dictionary adds two ‘old pros’ from the world of cricket, both of whom played a few games for England but are better known for their stalwart service to their county sides: Tom Cartwright (1935-2007) from Warwickshire and Arthur Milton (1925-2007) from Gloucestershire. Milton was the last man to play both cricket and football for England, while Cartwright became a successful county coach at Somerset. Bob Woolmer (1948-2007), who played for Kent and England as an opening bat and medium-pace bowler also enjoyed a distinguished career, but the uncertainty surrounding his unexpected death after the humiliating defeat of the Pakistan national team of which he was the coach may linger longer in the memory than his exploits on the field. Ray Gravell (1951-2007), who played in the Welsh rugby team that won four five nations championships between 1975 and 1979, went on to enjoy a notable career as a broadcaster and actor; Colin MacRae (1968-2007) was the first Briton to win the world rally championship, in 1995. The life of Andy Norman (1943-2007) was far more complicated: allegations that he was a bully who had made illegal payments to athletes made him a controversial figure in his role as an athletics administrator. In the fields of exploration and endurance the polar explorer Sir Wally Herbert (1934-2007), who in 1969 made the first surface crossing of the Arctic, stands out.

The creative arts

This release includes the biography of R. B. Kitaj (1932-2007), the American Jewish painter who lived for many of his most creative years in Britain, where he explored what he termed ‘diasporism’ in his art. He is joined by the portrait painter John Ward (1917-2007), five of whose portraits illustrate articles in the Oxford DNB, and the figurative artist Steve Campbell (1953-2007), regarded as one of the leading Scottish painters of his generation. The potter Colin Pearson (1923-2007), the jeweller Andrew Grima (1921-2007), and Richard Guyatt (1914-2007), the graphic designer who introduced that very term into English, are also included. The art dealer Andras Kalman (1919-2007) and the artists’ muse, collector, and hostess Natalie Bevan (1909-2007) are in this release. So too are Sir Norman Reid (1915-2007), the director of the Tate Gallery in the 1970s, Norbert Lynton (1927-2007), the head of exhibitions at the Arts Council, and Sir Oliver Millar (1923-2007), the surveyor of the queen’s pictures. Among architects, Sir Colin St John (Sandy) Wilson (1922-2007), most famous for his design of the new British Library, is included: the controversy surrounding the library had almost entirely evaporated by the time of his death and his work there is now acclaimed. James Michie (1927-2007), the poet and publisher, Michael Hamburger (1924-2007), the poet and translator, and Vernon Scannell (1922 2007), the poet and boxer, are now added to the Oxford DNB. Welsh letters are represented by the poet and critic Roland Mathias (1915 2007) and the historical novelist Marion Eames (1921-2007); Scottish letters by the storyteller and singer Duncan Williamson (1928-2007). The British-based Lebanese author and publisher Mai Ghoussoub (1952 2007) is included as well. Literary criticism is represented through the life of Tony Nuttall (1937-2007), a Shakespearean scholar of wide interests, noted for his work on the relation of literature to philosophy.

Musical lives include the opera director Colin Graham (1931-2007); the authority on Verdi and Puccini Julian Budden (1924-2007); and the authority on Schumann Joan Chissell (1919-2007), who wrote for The Times. Another Joan, Joan Ingpen (1916-2007), the musicians’ agent, is credited with launching the career of the great tenor Luciano Pavarotti. We also include the clarinettist Dame Thea King (1925-2007) and Celia Franca (1921-2007), ballet dancer and founder of the National Ballet of Canada.

Politics

The politicians we are adding largely reached the apex of their careers during the Thatcher era of the 1980s, though not all of them were her natural supporters. John Biffen, Baron Biffen (1930-2007), was leader of the house between 1982 and 1987, and a monetarist and Eurosceptic, but he became critical of Thatcher’s style of leadership. Ian Gilmour, Baron Gilmour of Craigmillar (1926-2007), her first lord privy seal, was a notable critic of the prime minister in later years and a leading tory moderate or ‘wet’. And Arthur Cockfield, Baron Cockfield (1916-2007), who was in Thatcher’s early cabinets, ‘went native’ as a European commissioner and was largely responsible for driving through the Single European Act in 1986. Nicholas Bethell (1938-2007), fourth Baron Bethell, was another committed pro-European and MEP. Jack Weatherill (1920-2007) was the tailor who became speaker of the House of Commons. And George Jellicoe, second earl Jellicoe and Baron Jellicoe of Southampton (1918-2007), was a member of the SAS during the Second World War, a diplomat, and a minister, but had his career cut short by a call-girl scandal in 1973. From the other side of the house this release also includes the life of the left-wing Labour MP and journalist Lena Jeger, Baroness Jeger (1915-2007), who had the misfortune to be chairman of the Labour Party as it pulled itself apart after the election defeat of 1979. And we include two more maverick political figures: the former paramilitary David Ervine (1953-2007), leader of the Progressive Unionist Party in Northern Ireland, and the former prime minister of Rhodesia, Ian Smith (1919-2007). The Oxford DNB includes those leaders of former British colonies who came to prominence in the process of decolonization and the transition to independence. No single colonial figure was more prominent in the course of the 1960s than Smith, who unilaterally declared Rhodesian independence in 1965 under a white minority government and thereby precipitated fifteen years of diplomatic and guerrilla conflict until the black-majority Zimbabwe was born in 1980. Smith came to personify the issues of post-colonial Africa and was as well-known a politician in Britain as any British leader of the 1960s and 1970s.

Business

The best known and the most inspiring (though also controversial) of the businessmen and businesswomen included in this release was the founder of the Body Shop chain, Dame Anita Roddick (1942-2007), who supported numerous good causes, most notably the ending of the testing of cosmetics on animals. She is joined by another very successful woman entrepreneur, Susan Williams-Ellis (1918-2007), who launched the Portmeirion Pottery in Wales. Charles Forte, Baron Forte (1908-2007), the Italian-born caterer and hotelier whose businesses reached their peak in the 1970s, died in 2007. So too did Sir Campbell Fraser (1923-2007), an executive with Dunlop and with Scottish Television, and president of the Confederation of British Industry; Sir Brian Wolfson (1935-2007), of Wembley Stadium and the National Training Task Force; Sir Alfred Shepperd (1925-2007) of the Wellcome Foundation; Derek Bonham (1943-2007) of Hanson, Imperial Tobacco, and Marconi; Scott Bell (1941-2007) of Standard Life; Richard Hornby (1922-2007) of Halifax Building Society; and the bankers Sir Peter Leslie (1931-2007) of Barclays International and Christopher Reeves (1936 2007) of Morgan Grenfell. Sir Leslie Murphy (1915-2007) was the Labour-supporting chairman of the National Enterprise Board between 1977 and 1980. This release also includes two businessmen involved with cars, but on different scales: Harry Webster (1917-2007) was an automotive engineer and a leading figure in the British company Standard Triumph, while Jack Odell (1920-2007) was the toy manufacturer who produced the wonderful Matchbox cars, once a boy’s delight.

Public service, the armed forces, and religion

The release also includes three notable figures whose lives were bound up with aviation. Sir Arthur Marshall (1903-2007) was a pilot, an instructor, and an industrialist who founded and built up the Marshalls aviation business and aerodrome outside Cambridge. Sir Lewis Hodges (1918-2007), later an air chief marshal in the RAF, flew a series of daring missions into occupied France for SOE during the Second World War. The RAF officer Neville Duke (1922-2007) shot down twenty-eight enemy aircraft during that conflict and went on to break the world speed record as a test pilot flying the transonic Hunter aircraft.

Other figures from the armed forces include the Royal Marines officer Sir Jeremy Moore (1928-2007), who was commander of land forces during the Falklands War; Sir John Akehurst (1930-2007), who had commands in several colonial conflicts of the 1950s and 1960s; and Sir John Stanier (1925-2007), chief of the general staff from 1982 to 1985. Sir Tasker Watkins (1918-2007) won the VC in France in 1944 in action in the Falaise gap and was later deputy chief justice. Tony Brooks (1922-2007) was one of the most successful SOE officers in France, whose Pimento network successfully delayed and sabotaged German reinforcement of Normandy from the south of France in June 1944. Sir Arthur Hezlet (1914-2007) and Sir Ian McGeoch (1914-2007) were both submariners decorated in the Second World War who went on to leading careers in the Royal Navy.

Among civil servants we include Philip Allen, Lord Allen of Abbeydale (1912-2007), the permanent under-secretary at the Home Office in the 1960s under Roy Jenkins; Sir Samuel Goldman (1912-2007), the Treasury statistician and mandarin; and Christopher Train (1932-2007), who was director-general of the prison service at the time of the Strangeways riots in 1990. Sir Alan Campbell (1919-2007) was ambassador to Italy at the height of the terrorism of the Red Brigades in the late 1970s; Sir Edward Tomkins (1915-2007) was ambassador to France when the United Kingdom entered the European Economic Community in 1973.

After a year, 2010, in which the issue of public probity and behaviour, focused still on the expenses of MPs and peers, continued to occupy an important place in public debate, we include the law lord and the first chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, Michael Nolan, Baron Nolan (1928-2007). He is joined by three other law lords: Nigel Bridge, Baron Bridge of Harwich (1917-2007), was the presiding judge in the trial of the supposed IRA terrorists the Birmingham six, but should also be remembered for his more liberal judgments in civil liberties cases; Peter Oliver, Baron Oliver of Aylmerton (1921-2007), an expert on chancery law; and the Scottish judge Charles Jauncey, Baron Jauncey of Tullichettle (1925-2007). Other leading lawyers added to the Oxford DNB include Dame Joyanne Bracewell (1934-2007), the High Court judge and expert on family law; Sir Michael Fox (1921-2007), chancery lawyer and judge in the Court of Appeal; Sir Vincent Evans (1915-2007), a judge at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg; Sir Tony Hetherington (1926-2007), the director of public prosecutions who launched the crown prosecution service; and Sir Arthur Watts (1931-2007), international lawyer and arbitrator, expert on Antarctic law, and the organizer of the most southerly cricket match yet held. The solicitor Bernard Sheridan (1927-2007) subsidized his human rights cases with the profits from high-profile media cases. The forensic psychiatrist Jim McKeith (1938-2007) worked on the issue of false criminal confessions; and the policeman and anti-terrorist officer Jim Nevill (1927-2007) was in command of the 1975 Balcombe Street siege, which ended with the surrender of IRA gunmen.

From among the different faiths and styles of religion in modern Britain we are adding Mary Garson (1921-2007), the founder of the Benedictine sisters of Grace and Compassion; the Methodist minister and evangelist Rob Frost (1950-2007); and the Congregational minister and church historian Geoffrey Nuttall (1911-2007), known as ‘the last of the puritans’. We also include three religious scholars and thinkers: the leading exponent of the thought of Karl Barth, Thomas Torrance (1913-2007); the New Testament scholar Charles Moule (1908-2007), and the prolific and influential systematic theologian Ian Macquarrie (1919-2007).

Charity founders and campaigners

The close relationship between post-war religious practice and social welfare is shown in the lives of two prominent charity founders now added to the Oxford DNB. Conditions faced by the homeless became the life’s work of the Presbyterian minister, Bruce Kenrick (1920-2007), who in 1963 founded the Notting Hill Housing Trust and three years later the national housing charity Shelter. A decade earlier, the Anglican clergyman Chad Varah (1911-2007) had established the Samaritans ‘to befriend the suicidal and the despairing’. The organization was initially run by Varah alone in his office, and at a time when attempted suicide remained illegal. By his death it had become a national institution with 200 branches and 17,000 trained volunteers who answered more than 5 million contacts annually. Charity of a more modern kind shaped the later years of the fund-raiser and athlete Jane Tomlinson (1964-2007) who was diagnosed with cancer aged 26, and then given only six months to live. This prompted her to raise funds for medical research and there followed a remarkable series of marathons, triathlons, and cycle rides across Britain, continental Europe and, finally, from San Francisco to New York in summer 2006. At the time of her death Tomlinson had raised over £1.75 million for cancer research, a cause for which many thousands continue to run in her name. Another charity to endure—the ‘Women of the Year Luncheon’—originated in 1955 with Tony Kerr, marchioness of Lothian (1922-2007) who sought to provide women with a platform for status and recognition. Other charity founders and campaigners now added to the Dictionary include Sir John Smith (1923-2007), founder of Landmark Trust; John Cox (1920-2007), who launched the National Register of Organ Donors; and Margaret Bramall (1916-2007) who oversaw the creation of the National Council for One Parent Families.

Scholarship and education

The biographies we are adding from the worlds of scholarship and education, coupled with those from science, engineering, and medicine, show both the breadth and depth of British academic culture in the second half of the twentieth century. From among classical scholars we include Peter Marshall Fraser (1918-2007), who published works on Greek, Roman, and Ptolemaic history; Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood (1945-2007), known for her original studies of Athenian religion; and J. L. Ackrill (1921-2007), a historian of philosophy and authority on Aristotle. Peter Ucko (1938-2007), a key figure in the emergence of ‘world archaeology’, the archaeology of indigenous and colonized peoples, is joined by the architectural historian Sir Howard Colvin (1919-2007). The historian of millenarianism and utopianism, Norman Cohn (1915 2007), is joined by the historian of food, Reay Tannahill (1929-2007), and the historian of the English language, Richard Hogg (1944-2007). There are several linguists in our list, including the scholar of modern French literature Malcolm Bowie (1943-2007); the Italian scholar and author Luigi Meneghello (1922-2007); and Farquhar Macintosh (1923-2007), who promoted Gaelic. The Sinologist Lisa Croll (1944-2007) was an expert on gender issues in China.

Adam Watson (1914-2007) specialized in international relations. Terence Hutchison (1912-2007) was a historian of economics. The Oxford economist Andrew Glyn (1943-2007) came from an aristocratic background and a family that had made its money in banking, but he was one of the most forthright and effective supporters of the economic case put forward by the striking coalminers in 1984 5. Dame Mary Douglas (1921-2007), author of Purity and Danger, was a world-famous anthropologist. The philosopher Susan Hurley (1954-2007) was the first woman to be elected a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. George Brandt (1920-2007) pioneered film studies in Britain. A trio of educationists concerned themselves with British schools: Carol Adams (1948-2007) became the first chief executive of the General Teaching Council for England; Jean Rudduck (1937-2007) wrote about pupil empowerment; and Margaret Parkes, Lady Parkes (1925-2007), concentrating on the classroom, campaigned successfully for the introduction of design and technology as a compulsory school subject. We include a historian of Scottish education, the philosopher George Davie (1912-2007), and also an analyst of higher education policy, Maurice Kogan (1930-2007). Frank Cass (1930-2007), who managed to make money out of publishing academic books, is joined by the antiquarian bookseller Peter Jolliffe (1947-2007).

Engineering, science, and medicine

Three leading engineers are included in this release. Sir George Macfarlane (1916-2007) made contributions to the development of radar in the Second World War, conducted research into electronics and semiconductors, and then had a career as a senior civil servant. John Cox (1920-2007) was the highways engineer who oversaw the construction of the Preston by-pass, the first stretch of motorway in the UK. Peter Wolf (1918-2007) was the civil engineer and hydrologist who led the investigation of the Lynmouth flood disaster of 1952. They are joined by one of the founders of the modern discipline of materials science, Robert Cahn (1924-2007), a Jewish refugee from Germany; the metallurgist and expert on steels Sir Robert Honeycombe (1921-2007); the chemists Leslie Orgel (1927-2007), who also worked on the origins of life, and Stephen Mason (1923 2007); the astrophysicists Bernard Pagel (1930-2007) and Michael Seaton (1923-2007); and the physicists Roger Blin-Stoyle (1924-2007), who studied ß-decay, and Sir Gareth Roberts (1940-2007), who was also vice-chancellor of Sheffield University and president of Wolfson College, Oxford. The statistician David Kendall (1918-2007) is joined by two computer scientists: Donald Michie (1923-2007), who worked on machine intelligence, and Karen Spärck Jones (1935-2007), who worked on the information-retrieval systems underlying all internet searching.

In the life sciences the Oxford DNB will now include the botanists Jack Hawkes (1915-2007), an expert on the humble potato, and Sir John Burnett (1922-2007), who also became vice-chancellor of Edinburgh University. Sir Eric Denton (1923 2007) and Alan Southward (1928-2007) were both marine biologists: the former worked on vision and camouflage in fish and the latter on climate-driven change in marine ecosystems. Winifred Pennington (1915-2007) undertook pioneering studies of post-glacial vegetation history. Molly Badham (1914-2007) was the founder of the Twycross Zoo, which was home to the chimpanzees used in the Brooke Bond PG Tips tea advertisements from the 1960s to the 1980s.

As always our update includes a range of scientists and practitioners involved in medicine: the geneticists John H. Edwards (1928-2007) and Dame Anne McLaren (1927-2007); the virologist June Almeida (1930-2007); the immunologist Ted Boyse (1923-2007); the neurologist John Newsom-Davis (1932-2007); the malariologist Sir Ian McGregor (1922-2007); and the geriatrician John Wedgwood (1919-2007). The physiologist Denis Melrose (1921-2007) was the inventor of the heart-lung machine, so crucial in complex modern surgery. The paediatrician Beryl Corner (1910-2007) was famous for her care of the Good sisters, the first quadruplets to survive a birth by caesarean section. Ann Dally (1926-2007), meanwhile, was twice found guilty of professional misconduct by the General Medical Council for over-prescribing opiates to addicts (the issue of their medical care remains a live one none the less). We also include biographies of Sir Abe Goldberg (1923-2007), an expert on public health, and Sir Raymond (Bill) Hoffenberg (1923-2007), who was expelled from South Africa, became president of the Royal College of Physicians, and devoted his professional energies to the improvement of medical education.

Making a purely personal choice from all of these many fascinating biographies, two stand out as particularly remarkable. In 2010 we have commemorated the seventieth anniversary of the battle of Britain and it is fitting to remember the unsung exploits of Alex Henshaw (1912-2007), test pilot. Henshaw was already an experienced and renowned aviator by 1939 and fully expected a commission in the RAF when the Second World War started. But the service had other ideas and turned Henshaw, with his experience of racing planes, into a test pilot who tested more than 10 per cent of all the Spitfires made in the war, more than 2300 of them in total. He is not entered among the famous aces of the air battles of 1940; his name does not appear among those of ‘the few’. Yet his contribution in another way was just as great as theirs. We also include the horticulturist John Pilkington Hudson (1910-2007), who undertook pioneering studies of plant growth and held a chair in horticultural studies at the University of Bristol. He should also be remembered for his two George medals as a bomb disposal officer in the Second World War, the second awarded in 1944 when he defused the first V1 flying bomb that landed intact.

Our next online update

Our next online update, which will be published on Thursday 26 May 2011, will continue to extend the Oxford DNB’s coverage of men and women active from the middle ages to the late twentieth century. May’s update will mark the conclusion of the project to complete the dictionary’s coverage of medieval bishops, and will also include a selection of lives of Victorian genre artists, together with a range of subjects connected with modern Wales.

Back to top of January 2011 preface

May 2011

• New themes searching
• Completing the bishops
• Victorian painters of everyday life
• Modern Wales
• Other lives: Antarctica to Greater Birmingham
• Themes: merrie men to magic circle
• New portraits and picture searching
• Our next online update

New online contents, May 2011

Welcome to the twentieth 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 twenty-first century. The May 2011 update adds biographies of 103 individuals active between the eleventh and the late twentieth century, with a special focus on people who shaped the history of modern Wales, and on nineteenth- and twentieth-century genre painters whose well-known and popular works may be seen in art galleries across the British Isles. May’s update also brings two important developments, first, concerning new opportunities for searching the Oxford DNB online, and, second, for the dictionary’s medieval coverage; both developments are further discussed below in the section on ‘New themes searching’ and ‘Completing the bishops’. In addition this update includes a further fourteen ‘reference group’ articles—charting connections between historical figures—available (for those with subscriber access) in the themes area of the online edition.

As ever, full details of the May 2011 update are available from the new online contents page, and a free selection of extracts and highlights is available here. The complete dictionary (57,768 biographies and 497 theme articles) is available, free, in nearly all public libraries in the UK, most of which now offer remote access that enables their 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 other institutions worldwide. Full details of participating British public libraries, and how to gain access to the complete dictionary, are available here.

New themes searching

Oxford DNB updates are principally intended to extend the dictionary’s biographical coverage. But in May 2011 we also introduce an important new feature that extends the capacity to search the dictionary’s website. Since 2005 the addition of new biographies has run alongside a project to compile a series of contextual ‘theme’ articles that take three forms: lists of office and place-holders, essays on prominent historical groups, and feature essays on well-known events. Nearly 500 theme articles are now available, intended to help with quick reference (for example checking who held a particular public office at a certain date) or by making connections between figures discussed individually in the main dictionary (for instance in group articles showing how people came and worked together in formal and informal networks).

In May 2011 we introduce a new search facility that will automatically alert readers to the theme articles in which a subject’s name appears. From now on routine enquiries from the ‘quick search’ box will, where relevant, present readers with two options: first (as before) a list of people with entries in the Oxford DNB; second, details of the theme articles (lists, groups, and feature essays) in which people with this name appear. Readers who are interested simply in an individual can, as ever, consult the relevant biography. But the new theme option makes it easier to see how a particular person was involved in the offices or networks of the day. To give a couple of examples: a quick search for ‘Dr Johnson’ offers (as previously) a results page headed by the biography of the eighteenth-century lexicographer and critic Samuel Johnson, as well as a second ‘themes’ tab that records the lists, group articles, and feature essays in which Johnson is mentioned, including the bluestocking circle and his own Literary Club. Likewise a search for ’Winston Churchill’ will identify the three people of this name in the Oxford DNB, and also the thirty-three theme articles in which reference is made to Winston Churchill, among them reference lists of UK prime ministers and Conservative Party leaders, group articles on the ‘guilty men’ and the ‘few’, and feature essays on 1930s appeasement and the Suez crisis. We hope that this new search facility will create new opportunities for readers interested in tracing personal connections between historical individuals, so making the Oxford DNB a resource for charting people ‘in action’ as well as recording their individual life stories.

Completing the bishops

Regular readers of these prefaces will know that over the last four years we have been running a research project to complete the dictionary’s coverage of the pre-Reformation episcopate of England. When the Oxford DNB was first published in 2004 it contained accounts of nearly 360 bishops who occupied English dioceses between the Norman conquest and the break with Rome under Henry VIII. These constituted roughly three-quarters of the medieval episcopate of England and, thereafter, it was decided to commission entries for the remaining bishops to provide a complete English record from the late eleventh to the mid-sixteenth century. In regular instalments since 2007 we have therefore added entries on a further 95 bishops who did not appear in the 2004 edition, along with four suffragans as examples of the men upon whom bishops devolved many of their routine activities in the later middle ages. Now, with the addition of the final 12 of these biographies, May’s update concludes the project to provide a complete (and unique) biographical listing of the leaders of the medieval and early modern church in England.

Archbishops and bishops were very important figures in medieval English society. Through rulings in cases involving wills, marriages, and sexual morality, they regulated the everyday lives of the laity. This authority was supplemented by considerable temporal power; bishops were lords of more or less extensive estates and many served as royal advisers and diplomats and, as became increasingly common from the late thirteenth century, as members of parliament. Now, with a complete series of biographies in place, it will be possible to study the medieval episcopate as a whole, asking questions about bishops’ education, routes to power, relations with kings and popes, and so on. To begin the process the editor responsible for this research project, Dr Henry Summerson, has written an article—Born to rule? —that considers what the full record can tell us about the diverse, and changing, social origins of the medieval episcopate. In addition, to mark the completion of this project, we offer a gallery of portraits selected from the biographies of the 460 medieval bishops now available in the Oxford DNB.

Among the last twelve bishops added in this update three spanned the years of the Norman conquest, with differing fortunes. Æthelmaer (d. after 1070), bishop of Elmham from the late 1040s, was removed from his see—a victim of William’s wish to ‘appoint men of his own race’ after Anglo-Saxon resistance to the conquest in 1070. By contrast the Norman bishop Stigand (d. 1087) was a beneficiary of the king’s policy, becoming bishop of Chichester in 1075, while Æthelwine (d. in or after 1071), bishop of Durham from 1059, was initially received and employed by William, before turning against the king after William’s despoiling of his church in 1070.

Closer relations with later monarchs were achieved by John Gilbert (d. 1397), bishop of St David’s, for whom the peak of royal service was his two terms as treasurer of the realm during the 1380s and 1390s, the longevity of his career as a diplomat and administrator in politically turbulent times marking him as intelligent and resourceful. So too William Wells (d. 1444), bishop of Rochester, who served Henry VI as an ambassador and diplomat, and Richard Medford (d. 1407), bishop of Salisbury, whose career, first in politics and then as an ecclesiastic, is an outstanding example of a late medieval royal administrator who experienced both the risks and rewards of proximity to court. The quality of his surviving household accounts also brings out Medford’s character—notably his love of craftsmanship and theatricality—in a way that is impossible when sources (as for another new addition, William Heyworth, d. 1447, bishop of Coventry and Lichfield) have since been lost. Whereas a man like Medford was first and foremost a royal administrator, Thomas Kemp (c.1414 1489), albeit a trusted, if not a leading, member of Edward IV’s council, was ultimately an ecclesiastic, remembered after his death as an able, generous, and devoted diocesan who characteristically bequeathed 10s. to each of the servants who had kept watch around his sickbed. Another fondly remembered bishop was Richard Praty (c.1390-1445) of Chichester, whose seven-year rule was active and practical, the mark of a man remembered in the king’s letter to the pope as ‘most literate, polished, modest, pious and just’. Lengthy diocesan service was likewise a characteristic of John Chandler (d. 1426), who was provided to a canonry and prebend at Salisbury in the mid-1370s, became dean in 1404, and was finally elected bishop (at the second attempt) in 1417. By then Chandler was in his sixties and age impeded his ability to conduct visitations across his large diocese. Those that he did perform took their toll of his health, as did the political and episcopal duties of Chandler’s near contemporary Thomas Spofford (d. 1456). When Spofford, for many years abbot of St Mary’s, York, became bishop of Hereford he made regular requests for assistance in his diocese, and finally declared himself a ‘worthless bishop’, ill at ease with his new responsibilities and eager to return to the monastic life.

Victorian painters of everyday life

The dictionary’s coverage of art is extended with a selection of painters active in the Victorian period, who enjoyed wide popularity at the height of their careers, but whose critical reception was more qualified. Many survived into a period when their work had become extremely unfashionable, and died in relative obscurity. This was the fate of one of the most characteristic of them, George Bernard O’Neill (1828-1917), who produced a series of unpretentious scenes of domestic and rural life, many of them painted at Cranbrook, in Kent, where he was a member of the Cranbrook colony of artists, one of the group entries also included in this update. O’Neill was popular with collectors, whom he sympathetically represented in his Public Opinion as art enthusiasts crowded around a painting in a public gallery, though he failed to win over the critics. Even the young women in high society settings and rich fashions, set off by vibrant new paint colours, painted by Jacques Joseph Tissot (1836-1902) during his eleven-year residence in London were mainly confined to private collections until 1937, when The Ball on Shipboard was purchased for the nation under the terms of the Chantrey Bequest. Tissot’s works in this London period sold as rapidly as he could paint them, but this earned him the hostility of the metropolitan art establishment; he never became a naturalized British subject, and left for Paris immediately after the funeral of his model and partner Kathleen Newton (c.1854-1882), with whom he had lived in St John’s Wood.

While Tissot concentrated on high society, other artists were drawn to the bustling scenes of contemporary life. Public transport was the subject of the best-known works of William Maw Egley (1826-1916) and Charles Rossiter (1827-1897). Egley’s depiction of the passengers crowded inside an omnibus at Westbourne Grove, London (Omnibus Life in London), using friends and relatives as models for the passengers, was based on a reconstruction of an omnibus in a builder’s yard, and a wooden model in his garden. Rossiter depicted the vagaries of third-class rail travel for passengers in open-sided carriages in his To Brighton and Back for 3s 6d. Henry Courtney Selous (1803-1890), a commercially successful painter of enormous canvas panoramas that were exhibited at London’s Leicester Square Rotunda, produced a famous large-scale oil painting entitled The Opening of the Great Exhibition. George Elgar Hicks (1824-1914) painted those gathered in the public institutions of the capital city, in works like Dividend Day, Bank of England and The General Post-Office: One Minute to Six. He also depicted private, domestic life, defining female roles in Woman’s Mission. Romantic genre scenes, featuring proposals of marriage and lovers’ quarrels, became a staple of Marcus Stone (1840-1921), who exhibited at the Royal Academy in every year from 1858 to 1920.

Known as the Barefoot Baronet on account of his avoidance of footwear, except on social occasions, Sir Robert Ponsonby Staples, twelfth baronet (1853-1943), produced group scenes of late Victorian public events, whether a cricket match (Australia v England), the National Rifle Association championships (Last Shot at Wimbledon), or Gladstone introducing the second Irish Home Rule Bill in the House of Commons. Cricket also featured in the work of Albert Chevallier Tayler (1862-1925), who as a member of the Newlyn school had been at the forefront of British plein air painting. The soap manufacturer William Lever purchased Tayler’s A Dress Rehearsal, in which a country bride tries on her wedding dress, to advertise his products, along with a set of watercolours by Tayler of famous cricketers. The religious piety of Cornish fishermen was a favourite theme of William Holt Yates Titcomb (1858-1930), who (though he was often associated with Newlyn) settled at St Ives, where he depicted worshippers in the Fore Street Methodist chapel in his Primitive Methodists at Prayer (1889). One of the most familiar artists to late Victorian and Edwardian audiences was Arthur John Elsley (1860-1952), whose sentimental images of children and pets were reproduced in vast print-runs of ephemera. Dorothy Stanley (1855-1926), whose artistic talent was encouraged by her mother, the society hostess Gertrude Barbara Rich Tennant (1819-1918), produced joyous scenes of London’s street children at play; her ‘ragamuffin’ paintings were intended as a deliberate corrective to the ‘piteous’ depictions of ‘ragged’ children in the works of social observers. Dorothy Stanley’s sister Eveleen Myers (1856-1937) became a noted amateur portrait photographer.

Other artists in the release turned to earlier historical periods for their material. John Seymour Lucas (1849-1923) specialized in history painting, with a marked preference for the Spanish Armada and the English Civil War. His success enabled him to have a studio built in Hampstead, with a studio for his wife Marie Elizabeth Seymour Lucas (1850-1921), also a painter of historical genre scenes. His reputation was sealed by After Culloden: Rebel Hunting. A feature of his work was an emphasis on the historical accuracy of his props, for which he acquired a large collection of armour, historical costume, and brass and pewter objects, purchased by the Museum of London in 1911. William Shakespeare Burton (1824-1916) made his name with one picture, drawn from the civil-war period. A Wounded Cavalier, shown at the Royal Academy in 1856, proved his greatest success. It appeared in other exhibitions later in the century, but by then Burton, dogged by money troubles, was largely forgotten, and even thought to be dead; the acquisition of his major work by the Guildhall Art Gallery in 1911 restored him to the public eye. Burton was associated with Pre-Raphaelitism, as were John Roddam Spencer Stanhope (1829-1908), a Yorkshire squire, and John Melhuish Strudwick (1849-1937). Stanhope’s Thoughts of the Past, tracing a young woman’s descent into prostitution, was painted in a room below Rossetti’s studio in Blackfriars. Heavily criticized in 1877 for his Love and the Maiden, now seen as possibly his masterpiece, he emigrated to Italy and gave up painting, donating his most ambitious work, The Waters of Lethe, to Manchester Art Gallery in the hope that future generations would acknowledge his artistic standing. Strudwick was for a time Stanhope’s studio assistant, and was regarded as little more than such, even as late as the 1960s, though by the turn of the millennium collectors re-evaluated his works, with an appreciation of their craft and meticulous detail. The works of John William Godward (1861-1922) enjoyed a similar revival in popularity (and value). Late in his life modernist movements swept aside the classical subject painting that was his staple, and his death passed with little notice. His speciality was women in classical drapery, set in an interior in the style of Pompeii or on a marble terrace overlooking a Mediterranean sea, painted in his garden studio in Chelsea.

Among Scottish artists of the period to be included in the release is the Aberdeen painter Sir George Reid (1841-1913), who studied in the Netherlands and pioneered the introduction of European realism into Scottish art in the early 1870s, to the consternation of the art establishment. Turning to portraiture, he became extremely popular with Scottish sitters. One of his best-known portraits was of the golfer Tom Morris. In later life he became president of the Scottish Academy, and in contrast to his own youthful radicalism he then denounced the attempts of Scotland’s young artists to follow modern French art as ‘simply an impertinence’. Robert Gibb (1845-1932) depicted Scottish historical themes. His most famous work, The Thin Red Line (1881), shows the 93rd Highlanders facing Russian cavalry at Balaklava in the Crimea in October 1854. Later works depicted battles in the Crimea, the Napoleonic wars, the north-west frontier of India, and the First World War. For some of his paintings he constructed a temporary studio on the Pentland Hills, and used soldiers from the Edinburgh garrison as models. A wooden hut on wheels enabled the Aberdeenshire landowner Joseph Farquharson (1846-1935), famous for his paintings of sheep in snowy landscapes, to paint in all seasons and in the severest weather. His trademark subject, still popular on Christmas cards, earned him the nickname Frozen Mutton Farquharson. Robert Gemmell Hutchison (1855-1936) produced sentimental scenes of Scottish rural life, and specialized in images of children and childhood, often in coastal settings in Fife and Forfarshire, where he liked to paint in the open air.

Two artists in the release produced works that came to be adopted as statements of nationality. John Henry Lorimer (1856-1936) was noted for his skilful handling of light. His scenes of Scottish life included an Edwardian mother and her daughters watching the flight of the swallows at the end of summer. His The Ordination of Elders in a Scottish Kirk (1891) was widely reproduced in Scotland. Now in the National Gallery of Scotland, it has been described as one of the most national pictures ever painted. Sydney Curnow Vosper (1866-1942) was of Cornish descent, and frequently visited Brittany, where he spoke Breton. Like Titcomb, he painted a chapel scene, Bretons at Prayer, that prefigured his most famous work, Salem, showing the interior of Salem chapel at Cefn Cymerau in Merioneth. The scene was peopled with worshippers, modelled by local people. Reproductions featured prominently in Welsh homes, and the work came to be regarded as a national icon.

Modern Wales

Welsh themes are explored in a selection of lives connected with Wales since 1800. Industrialization is represented by David Thomas (1794-1882), who ran the ironworks at Ystradgynlais, in Wales’s anthracite basin, and who in 1837 found a way of smelting iron using anthracite. Entrepreneurs in Pennsylvania employed him to supervise an anthracite blast furnace on the Lehigh river, and his innovations spread through the American iron industry. The engineer Benjamin Piercy (1827-1888) built railways through the Cambrian mountains to the coast, notably the mountain section at Talerddig, where he built what was then the deepest cutting in the world. Like Thomas, his expertise was sought overseas, and he won contracts to engineer railways through the mountainous terrain of Sardinia. The mountain scenery of Snowdonia captivated the Manchester-born artist Henry Clarence Whaite (1828-1912), who settled in the Conwy valley. A devout nonconformist, he perceived a close relationship between painting the unsullied mountain landscape and meditation on God’s purpose in creation.

The landowner Christopher Rice Mansel Talbot (1803-1890), born at Penrice Castle, inherited the huge family estate at the age of twenty-one, developed the town of Aberafan and created modern dock facilities, giving his family name to Port Talbot. He was an MP for fifty-five years but rarely spoke in the House of Commons. His daughter and heir Emily Charlotte Talbot (1840-1918) was a notable benefactor of the area, and made land available for extensions to the Port Talbot docks, which attracted the new steelworks in 1901. Another landowner, Godfrey Morgan, Viscount Tredegar (1831-1913), one of only two officers to survive the charge of the light brigade at the battle of Balaklava, developed Newport’s docks. He promoted Welsh cultural events and emphasized Monmouthshire’s Welsh character. A statue of him on his charger stands in Cathays Park, Cardiff. A statue in Cardiff also commemorates John Batchelor (1820-1883), a businessman, leading nonconformist, and mayor, prominent in radical campaigns, who blamed the marquess of Bute, whose interests then dominated Cardiff, for his business failures. A later mayor of Cardiff, Alfred Thomas, Baron Pontypridd (1840-1927), helped to secure the National Museum of Wales for the city. He became Liberal MP for East Glamorgan in 1885 and in 1892 introduced a bill to create the office of Welsh secretary of state and an elected national council for Wales.

Welsh musical traditions are a strong thread running through this release. John Ambrose Lloyd (1815-1874), born in Mold, had no musical training but began composing while still a boy. Aged twenty he published an early version of his hymn tune ‘Wyddgrug’, which is still sung. His hymn tunes have found their way into all Welsh-language hymnals. Another native of Flintshire, Edith Wynne (1842-1897), born at Holywell, toured Wales aged twelve with her renderings of Welsh airs. Her London début, in 1862, was in a concert of Welsh national music. Known as Eos Cymru (the Welsh nightingale), she was the first Welsh concert singer to gain popularity outside Wales, and her success paved the way for others. She toured North America in 1871 and 1874. Daniel Protheroe (1866-1934) grew up in the lively musical culture of the Swansea valley. In 1886 he emigrated to Scranton, Pennsylvania, where there was a large Welsh community. He became musical director at the Central Church, Chicago, and established a Welsh male voice choir; he conducted the massed choir on ‘Wales day’ at the Chicago world fair in 1933. Another emigrant to the USA was Evan Rowland Jones (1840-1920), who left the family farm at Tregaron, Cardiganshire, in 1855 to seek his fortune in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he formed an anti-slavery society among the Welsh community. He enlisted in the federal army in May 1861, shortly after the outbreak of the American Civil War. His memoirs described his meeting with Abraham Lincoln, whom he admired. After returning to Britain he became American consul for south Wales.

Rapid population growth in the south Wales coalfield during the boom years of the mid-nineteenth century is reflected in lives connected with different forms of mass leisure. Dan Davies (1859-1930), brought up in a Welsh-speaking nonconformist household in Dowlais, created a choral society known as the Dowlais Invincibles, who became feared opponents in choral competitions. After notching up a string of victories over choral rivals Davies (‘the Wellington of choral singing’) was branded a traitor when he left Dowlais to conduct the Merthyr Philharmonic Choir. A bad loser, he warned a judge who had failed to award Merthyr the prize at Llandudno in 1896 ‘never to set foot in Wales again’. Harry Evans (1873-1914) became organist in a chapel at his home town of Dowlais aged only ten and later succeeded Dan Davies as conductor of the Dowlais Harmonic Society. He concentrated on voice production, intonation, and purity of tone, in contrast to the ‘fire’ and ‘exaggeration’ preferred by some conductors. Arthur Vincent Linton (1868-1896) was brought up in Aberaman, where he started work aged twelve as a door boy in the colliery. Having saved to buy a bicycle, he was by 1890 known as a crack racing cyclist, his stamina and speed ascribed to the hilly roads where he trained. During the cycle craze of the 1890s he raced on Paris tracks, competing against the best European riders, and became a hero in Wales. Jimmy Michael (1875-1904), also brought up in Aberaman, developed stamina riding a heavy bicycle on his errands as a butcher’s boy. By 1893 he was one of the best racing cyclists in south Wales, and the trainer ‘Choppy’ Warburton took him to Paris, where his track-racing exploits, combined with his diminutive stature and nonchalant riding style he balanced a toothpick in his mouth even during the most furiously paced race made him a celebrity. Like Linton he died in circumstances that created suspicions that performance-enhancing drugs were involved. Brought up on her family’s farm in Cardiganshire, Moylon, from which she derived her literary pseudonym Moelona, Elizabeth Mary Jones (1877-1953) trained as a teacher and taught in elementary schools in south Wales. She began her literary career writing stories for children and romances for women. Her novella for children Teulu bach Nantoer won a prize at the national eisteddfod of 1912 and proved a bestseller. Her novels for women addressed the themes of female education, emancipation, and suffrage. Joseph Keating (1871-1934), the son of Irish immigrants to Mountain Ash, began work in a colliery aged fourteen. Largely self-taught, he became a junior newspaper reporter and began to write novels based on his experiences of manual work in industrial Wales, and then an autobiography that was admired by the Welsh Liberal politician David Lloyd George.

The political generation that rose to prominence with Lloyd George included John Hugh Edwards (1869-1945), who was born and educated in Aberystwyth and was ordained a Congregational minister. Elected Liberal MP for Mid-Glamorgan in 1910, he became one of the few nonconformist ministers to have sat in the House of Commons. His writings on Lloyd George provide a picture of Liberal Wales on the eve of the rise of Labour as did, from an opposing political standpoint, the cartoons of Joseph Morewood Staniforth (1863-1921), which appeared at least five days a week in the Western Mail and were placed on the front page of the Sunday News of the World. Staniforth’s cartoons interpreted their times to a mass readership over three decades. Brought up on his father’s Carmarthenshire farm, Sir Daniel Lleufer Thomas (1863-1940) undertook investigations of Welsh rural life, which remain quarries of information. He promoted Welsh cultural institutions, and was influential in the decision to site the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth. As stipendiary magistrate for the Rhondda, from 1907, he became preoccupied with social and industrial conditions in the valleys. The lives of John Vyrnwy Morgan (1860-1925) and Charles Butt Stanton (1873-1946) deviated from their expected trajectories. Ordained in the Congregational ministry, Morgan was pastor to the men building the Vyrnwy dam, and became a rising star of the nonconformist pulpit and Welsh political nationalism, but after serving a Baptist pastorate in Omaha, Nebraska, he became estranged from the culture of Welsh nonconformity and Liberalism, and wrote books critical of both revivalism and Welsh nationalism. Stanton gained a reputation as a coalfield militant, and was imprisoned for firing a revolver during a strike in 1893, but on the outbreak of the First World War was ferociously patriotic. At the by-election for Merthyr in November 1915 he stood as a pro-conscription candidate, defeating the miners’ union and Labour party candidate. Arthur Owen Vaughan (1863-1919), better known by his pseudonym of Owen Rhoscomyl, was brought up in Manchester by his Flintshire-born grandmother, who inspired him with romantic tales of Welsh martial heroes; he fought with British irregular units during the South African War and scripted the National Pageant of Wales held in Cardiff in 1909, which presented his version of Welsh history. During the First World War, when he served on the western front, he advocated that Wales raise a distinctly national unit.

Representing an opposing tradition, George Maitland Lloyd Davies (1880-1949), born into Liverpool’s expatriate Welsh community, became a pacifist and was imprisoned as a conscientious objector in the First World War. Ordained in the Calvinistic Methodist church, the first president of the Welsh National Pacifist Society, and a friend of many of the founders of Plaid Cymru, he was a charismatic figure. Lewis Edward Valentine (1893-1986), the son of a Denbighshire quarryman, carried out non-combatant duties with the Royal Army Medical Corps during the First World War, when he suffered from the effects of shell blast. Later the minister of the Baptist chapel at Llandudno, he began to promote Welsh cultural nationalism and in August 1925 became the first president of the Welsh National Party. He was the party’s first ever parliamentary candidate, gaining 609 votes (the ‘glorious 600’) when he stood for Caernarvonshire in 1929. In a celebrated incident at Porth Neigwl in September 1936 he and other members of the party set fire to workmen’s huts on the site of an RAF pilot training base. He was imprisoned for nine months in Wormwood Scrubs. His funeral service concluded with the singing of his own hymn ‘Dros Gymru’n gwlad’ (‘For Wales our country’). Before her marriage a schoolteacher in Aberdâr, Rose Davies (1882-1958) became an Independent Labour Party activist, with a particular interest in improving maternity services. In 1925 she became the first woman member of Glamorgan county council. A leading peace activist, she helped to organize the peace memorial signed by 400,000 women in Wales and presented to the women of the USA at a ceremony in Washington in 1924. When aged only eighteen Ness Edwards (1897-1968) was elected chairman of his lodge of the South Wales Miners Federation . After imprisonment as a conscientious objector in the First World War he became a full-time union official and helped rebuild the position of ‘the Fed’ in the south Wales coalfield after the defeat of 1926. Labour MP for Caerphilly from 1939 until his death, he was postmaster-general in Attlee’s post-war Labour government, and in 1954 opposed commercial television.

Economic depression in inter-war Wales overshadowed many lives included in the release. The artist Evan John Walters (1892-1951) was born on the edge of the western Welsh coalfield, into a Welsh-speaking nonconformist family. He showed unusual ability at drawing as a child, and attended art evening classes in Swansea, gaining a scholarship to the school of art. He regarded his The Welsh Funeral Hymn (1926), a meditation on the social trauma in the valleys of south Wales in the year of the general strike, as his best and ‘most Welsh’ work. Dai Francis (1911-1981), who had a Welsh-speaking, chapel-going upbringing in the Dulais valley, entered the coal industry in 1926, at the end of the six-month lock-out. He joined the Communist Party and became an official of the South Wales Miners Federation, and in 1963 was elected general secretary in Wales of the National Union of Miners. Opposing pit closures in the 1960s, he took a leading part in the successful national strikes of 1972 and 1974. He helped to found the Wales TUC, and chaired its inaugural meeting in Aberystwyth in 1974. Menna Gallie (1919-1990) was born in the mining community of Ystradgynlais, where she did not know any English until the age of eight, and grew up during the privations that followed the general strike, later the subject of her first novel, Strike for a Kingdom (1959).

The Rhondda valley’s contribution to post-war culture is represented in three entries. A miner’s son from the valley, David Wynne (1900-1983), left school at twelve and joined his father down the mine. An aptitude for music led to a scholarship to study at Cardiff, and he began to compose during the 1940s and 1950s; his later work experimented with both structure and language. Two artists of the Rhondda group, Ernest Zobole (1927-1999) and Robert John Roydon Thomas (1926-1999), met on the daily train journey to the art school in Cardiff. Zobole, born into a family of Italian shopkeepers, began exhibiting in 1950. Among his notable works Llwynypia, showing Partridge Square in the Rhondda town of Llwynypia, was the culmination of a series of blue-dominated pictures that he produced in the early 1950s. Thomas, the son of a coal hewer, did war service in the mines as a ‘Bevin boy’ before studying art. He made bronzes and full-length statues of his heroes, whom he celebrated in public spaces. His standing figure of Aneurin Bevan became a Cardiff landmark. He was the only sculptor for whom Diana, princess of Wales, sat.

The successes of Welsh rugby were recorded by John Brinley George Thomas (1917-1997). Born in Pontypridd, he left a civil-service job in Cardiff to take up rugby journalism, working on the Western Mail staff from 1946 to 1982. He was remembered as a shrewd analyst of the game, and cultivated the Welsh selectors, whose team selections he was believed to influence. In 1968 Merthyr-born Howard Winstone (1939-2000) became Britain’s first world featherweight boxing champion. His early enthusiasm for Merthyr’s rich pugilistic tradition had been encouraged by his father, and he won three Welsh schools titles on his way to the world title. His right hand was injured in an industrial accident when he was seventeen, but his fine technique, speed, and skill compensated for limited hitting power. In 1969 the singer Donald Peers (1909-1973), born in Ammanford, returned to the music charts with ‘Please Don’t Go’. After starting out as a music hall singer he was a headliner in Moss Empires’ variety tours, and became a singing sensation in the late 1940s with his recording of ‘In a Shady Nook by a Babbling Brook’. His popularity was challenged in the rock ‘n’ roll era, and it was a tribute to his talent that he made a comeback in the face of changing musical fashion. Wales’s ‘first television superstar’ was Ryan Davies (1927-1977), who after a somewhat nomadic upbringing, mainly in west Wales, trained as a teacher in Bangor. Radio and television producers spotted his talent at the national eisteddfod in the early 1960s. His comedy double-act with Ronnie Williams, Ryan a Ronnie, was an instant hit with Welsh viewers in 1967 and earned them a contract with BBC1. Another former schoolteacher, Alun Oldfield-Davies (1905-1988), a minister’s son from Clydach, studied at Aberystwyth and joined the BBC Welsh radio service in 1937 as a schools organizer. For over twenty years, from 1945 to 1967, he led the BBC in Wales. Although seen by many as a somewhat conservative figure, he is acknowledged as the creator of Welsh language television. J. E. Caerwyn Williams (1912-1999) always felt a deep affinity for his quarryman father’s home village of Groeslon in the Nantlle valley in Caernarvonshire. In 1953 he became professor of Welsh at Bangor, and in 1979 director of the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies at Aberystwyth. Probably the most accomplished Celtic scholar of his generation, he was concerned for the future of Welsh as a community language, and was a supporter of the Welsh Language Society.

Other lives: Antarctica to Greater Birmingham

Following on from the medieval bishops, other new additions to the Oxford DNB maintain a focus on later religious lives. The Independent minister Isaac Toms (1710-1801) became a noted campaigner for the Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor while, as dean of Chichester, Arthur Duncan-Jones (1879-1955) brought colour and new life to what became known as the ‘people’s cathedral’ from the early 1930s. The Guernsey-born Pierre Houédard (1924-1992) combined religious observance as a Benedictine monk with a literary career as a leading exponent of ‘visual’ or ‘concrete’ poetry that drew him increasingly towards ecumenism. Poetry was also a focus of the life of the literary critic Vivian de Sola Pinto (1895-1969), who as professor of English at Nottingham University developed that institution’s collection of material relating to D. H. Lawrence, achieved note as the co-editor of Lawrence’s poetry, and gave evidence in favour of the author at the celebrated Lady Chatterley trial in 1960.

Earlier lives include the soldier and courtier Sir Edward Woodville (d. 1488), a man whose enthusiasm for combat cast him both as a loyal servant of Henry Tudor and then as a defier of Henry’s orders when, in July 1488 and against royal wishes, he led a force to Brittany to resist an invading French army. Defiance was also the distinguishing attribute of the lawyer Hugh Pyne (d. 1628), whose spoken opinion of Charles I—that he was ‘as unwise a king as ever was’ and ‘no more fit to be king’ than Pyne’s shepherd—led to his trial for treason. Pyne faced a gruesome death if convicted, but survived when a panel of senior judges ruled that words by themselves could not constitute treason. William Butterworth (1769-1834) ran away to sea at the age of sixteen and was persuaded to join the crew of a slave ship, on which he served for two years. His eyewitness record, published in 1823, is one of the few accounts by a common seaman of the horrific middle passage; but a misattribution in contemporary sources has, for over 150 years, obscured his authorship. Careers in different branches of modern science were followed by the clinical neurologist Roger Gilliat (1922-1991), who was responsible for nurturing most of the country’s professors of neurology in the mid- to late twentieth century, and of the computer manager Raymond Thompson (1907 1976), who played a central role in the development of the LEO (Lyons Electronic Office), which from 1953 operated as the world’s first stored-programme computer to undertake a full clerical job. A phenomenal success, LEO was a project with which Thompson was involved from the start, though his contribution was marginalized after business disputes.

Two biographies mark the centenaries of events in which their subjects played a part. To many who observed him during Captain Scott’s two expeditions to Antarctica, William Lashly (1867-1940) seemed almost certain to be chosen for the team that would make the final, and fateful, attempt on the south pole in 1911-12. Though he was not chosen, Lashly’s own return journey across the ice was remarkably eventful and dramatic. And it was he who returned in November 1912 to search for and find the bodies of Scott and his fellow explorers after news of their deaths reached base camp. Lashly’s almost exact contemporary John Nettlefold (1866-1930) was a prominent advocate of housing reform in Birmingham with a particular interest in using undeveloped land around the city for new low density developments. Nettlefold’s achievement was the Greater Birmingham Act, passed a century ago this month (and effective from November 1911), which extended the city’s boundaries to a size three times that of Glasgow and twice that of Manchester and Liverpool, so establishing Greater Birmingham’s standing as Britain’s second city after London. Finally, a legal landmark is remembered through the lives of four women, Gwyneth Marjory Bebb (1889-1921), Karin Elizabeth Conn Costelloe (1889-1953), Maud Isabel Ingram (1889-1965), and Lucy Frances Nettlefold (1891-1966), who campaigned against women’s exclusion from the legal profession. In 1913 they commenced legal actions seeking a declaration that each was entitled to be admitted to the examinations for entry to the solicitors’ profession; that brought by Bebb was taken as the test. Although the action was unsuccessful, the ban was lifted in 1919, but Bebb (by then married) died following childbirth, before she was able to complete her studies for the bar.

Themes: merrie men to magic circle

The theme articles added in May 2011 chart the membership and activities of fourteen clubs, groups, and networks linked by politics and social reform, music, art, literature, or—in the case of the 1930s Happy Valley set—the pursuit of pleasure. Together their activities span more than 900 years of British history, with most flourishing for a matter of months or a few years. By contrast, two more unusual additions may be said to have been in ‘existence’ over the whole of this period, originating in the twelfth and still in good health in the early twenty-first century. These are King Arthur’s knights of the round table and Robin Hood’s band of merrie men, perhaps two of the best-known ‘groups’ in British history, whose ability to be sustained and recreated in new guises gives them a coherence and historical significance worthy of comment. Both share a number of attributes, being largely fictional associations, though with some historical antecedents in relation to their central figures—Arthur, Merlin, Robin Hood, and Friar Tuck—who all have entries in the Oxford DNB. Traceable to the twelfth century, the origins and personnel of both associations were discussed and disputed by early antiquarians, before both gained a new life with the Victorian fashion for medievalism. More recently Arthur’s knights and Robin’s men have attracted new audiences, having successfully adapted to modern forms of technology, including cinema, television, and latterly video games.

In contrast to these long-lived historical networks, two additions to our political coverage, the magic circle (act. 1963) and the gang of four (act. 1980 1983), proved much more fleeting associations. For its originator, Iain Macleod, the ‘magic circle’ were the nine Conservative grandees who came together in October 1963 to guarantee that the party’s leadership, and the British premiership, passed from Harold MacMillan to Alec Douglas-Home, rather than to R. A. Butler, whom Macleod considered the cabinet’s first choice. Macleod’s accusations of a deal among the party’s élite did immense damage to the Conservatives, and was identified by Home as the reason for their defeat at the general election of 1964. Nearly twenty years on the gang of four, a quartet of discontented Labour politicians, sought to occupy the middle ground in British politics at time when the Conservative and Labour leaders were pulling respectively to the right and left of the political spectrum. The quartet’s new party, the Social Democratic Party (SDP), enjoyed brief success as an independent force, though it quickly succumbed to the British electoral system; even so, its legacy may be seen both in the rise of New Labour and in the revival of centre party fortunes as witnessed at the 2010 general election. Other political associations in May’s update include the founders of the Primrose League (act. 1883 c.1918), who initially came together to support Randolph Churchill’s Fourth Party. The league’s ability to reach out beyond Westminster, and to gather extra-parliamentary support for the principles of ‘tory democracy’, led to a mass organization boasting a membership of one million by 1891, bound together by the primrose regalia associated with the movement’s champion, Benjamin Disraeli. Reform-minded politics were the aim of the so-called Roscoe circle (act. 1760s 1830s), a political and intellectual grouping of Liverpool Unitarians who gathered around the historian and poet William Roscoe to campaign for dissenters’ rights, promotion of the arts, and the abolition of slavery.

Liverpool was also the home of the musicians, artists, and poets who contributed to what became known in the 1960s as the Mersey sound. A remarkable coming together of talents, ranging from the Beatles to performance poets, the Mersey sound or Merseybeat artists established Liverpool’s lasting reputation for modern music and popular creativity. Similarly keen to innovate, and sometimes to shock, were the directors of British new wave cinema (act. 1959-1963), who, emerging from a documentary tradition, created a series of social realist feature films. Films including Room at the Top, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and A Kind of Loving offered a cinematic variation on the contemporary realist movements in art (the Kitchen Sink School) and the theatre (the angry young men) already covered in the Oxford DNB’s series of groups. Earlier manifestations of the capacity of new art forms to unsettle may be seen in two Victorian literary networks, the spasmodic school of poets (act. 1830 1854) and the fleshly poets (act. c.1866-1880). These were loose affiliations of writers principally defined from without by critics alarmed by their members’ excessive interest in physical sensuality, epitomized by the apparent deviance and effeminacy of works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Swinburne. More conventional were two other mid- to late Victorian groupings: the Cranbrook colony of painters (act. c.1854-1900), named for their place of residence in Kent, who specialized in genre works of a domestic and rural setting, and the Cambridge Camden Society (act. 1839 1868), whose membership sought to study and restore Gothic forms of ecclesiastical architecture. Though ostensibly an antiquarian movement, the Cambridge Camden (or Ecclesiological) Society was motivated by a second, more contentious, purpose: seeking to push the church to higher forms of Anglicanism by recreating medieval architectural settings for worship.

Not all gatherings are motivated by high moral, political or intellectual purposes, as two final networks remind us. Even in an age closely associated with conviviality, the Sublime Society of Beefsteaks (act. 1735-1768), a gathering of twenty-four dancers, painters, singers, and others, stood out for their love of food, drink, and a good time as enshrined in the club’s motto ‘Beef and liberty’. Similarly it was freedom from what they saw as the restrictions of inter-war Britain that prompted the Happy Valley set (act. c.1924-1941) to establish an alternative society in the Wanjohi region of Kenya. What these escapists created was a network notorious for its parties, adultery, alcoholism, violence, and murder—activities that have since gained a wide audience through the diaries of those who took part, and in popular literary and cinematic recreations, notably of the murder, in 1941, of Happy Valley’s leading figure, Lord Erroll.

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 286 groups, 154 reference lists, and 57 feature essays now accessible in the themes area of the online edition, in addition to the 57,768 individual lives available. A selection of existing group essays is also freely available, along with some highlights from the new groups in the May 2011 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 37 new images to illustrate existing biographies that have not previously carried a portrait. New recipients of likenesses range from the medieval subjects Richard of York (1411-1460) and Margaret of Denmark (d. 1486) to the early modern Essex witches and the actress Brenda Paul (1907-1959).

These, together with images added in May to illustrate new subjects, bring the total number of likenesses included in the Oxford DNB to 10,820, 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 43 Van Dycks or 17 photographic portraits by Lord Snowdon; to locate monuments and portraits in St Paul’s Cathedral or across the city of Liverpool; 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 on Thursday 22 September 2011 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 modern British architects, as well as a continuation of our series on black and Asian subjects who have shaped British life.

Back to top of May 2011 preface

September 2011 preface

• Modern British architects
• Black and Asian lives
• Military lives: remembrance
• Military lives: forgotten conflicts
• Linguists, languages, and European culture
• Geographers
• Other lives: Eadgyth to Electric Ladyland
• Our next online update

New online contents, September 2011

Welcome to the twenty-first online update of the Oxford DNB, in which, as in every May and September, we extend the dictionary’s coverage of men and women ‘from the earliest times’ to the twenty-first century. The September 2011 update adds biographies of 106 individuals active between the tenth and the late twentieth century, with a special focus on modern British architects.

September’s release also continues two long-term research projects (begun last year) to extend the dictionary’s coverage of teachers and promoters of modern languages, and of black and Asian figures who shaped national life. In this update you’ll also find new entries on the founders of the Royal British Legion, which marks its ninetieth anniversary in 2011; on army officers involved in two often forgotten campaigns—the Third Anglo-Afghan War of 1919 (a reminder of Britain’s long-term military involvement in that region) and the Burma campaign of 1942 5; and a selection of teachers and researchers who fashioned the academic disciplines of physical and human geography.

As ever, full details of the September 2011 update are available from the new online contents page, and a free selection of extracts and highlights is available here. The complete dictionary (57,874 biographies and 500 theme articles) is available, free, in nearly all public libraries in the UK, most of which now offer 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 from schools, colleges, universities, and other institutions worldwide. Full details of participating British public libraries, and how to gain access to the complete dictionary, are available here.

Modern British architects

On its completion in May 2012 Renzo Piano’s Shard, London Bridge, will become Britain’s (and the European Union’s) tallest building at 1017 feet. In doing so it rises above several former tallest buildings—the Blackpool Tower (1894), the New Brighton Tower (1898), and the Post Office Tower (1965)—whose creators are among thirty new architects now added to the Oxford DNB.

One hundred and twenty years ago this month work began on the Blackpool Tower. Modelled on the Eiffel Tower, Blackpool’s structure was designed by the Manchester partnership of James Maxwell (1838-1893) and Charles Tuke (1843-1893), who had previously made their name with designs for seaside towns along the north-west coast. The tower’s architects both died prior to its completion, Maxwell on the day that the flagstaff was lowered into position. When finished, the Blackpool Tower stood 518 feet 9 inches, and comprised 5 million bricks, 2500 tons of steel, and 90 tons of wrought iron. On its first day open to the public it attracted 70,000 visitors. Following the deaths of James and Charles, the firm of Maxwell and Tuke was continued by Maxwell’s son, Frank Maxwell (1863-1941), who oversaw the construction of a second, taller tower at New Brighton, near Liverpool. Completed to a similar design as Blackpool’s, the New Brighton Tower was 567 feet 6 inches tall and stood over what was then the country’s largest theatre outside London and a ballroom in which 1000 couples could take to the floor. However, the fortunes of the two towers were markedly different: while Blackpool’s became a national landmark, New Brighton’s fell into disrepair and was dismantled in 1921, leaving (until its final destruction by fire in 1969) the theatre as the focal point of an amusement park.

By the late 1960s Britain’s tallest building was the Post Office Tower, London, designed by Eric Bedford (1909-2001), on which work began fifty years ago in June 1961. The tower was required to project microwaves for telecommunications at a height above London’s rising skyline and over outlying geographical features. Completed in 1965, Bedford’s 620 foot structure remained Britain’s tallest until the opening of the NatWest Tower in 1981. The first message was broadcast by Harold Wilson in October 1965 and the tower was opened to the public a year later by Tony Benn and Billy Butlin. In its first year it attracted 1.5 million visitors, many of whom made use of the viewing platforms and the rotating thirty-fourth-floor restaurant which offered diners a city panorama every twenty-two minutes. Bedford’s other designs included the new British embassy in Washington, DC (completed 1961), and a much-hated government office complex at Marsham Street, Westminster; dubbed the ‘ugliest building in London’, it was pulled down in 2003 to make way for Terry Farrell’s new Home Office.

In the 1950s many of the country’s finest, and most ambitious, young architects joined the London county council’s architects’ department to work on public housing schemes. Among them was Colin Lucas (1906-1988), who made his name in the 1930s with influential modernist houses and his experimental use of concrete as a building material. This was also a favoured form of another London architect, Sir Anthony Cox (1915-1993), one of the founders of the highly influential, and still flourishing, Architects’ Co-Partnership, which came to international prominence with the Bryn-Mawr rubber factory (1946-51), comprising nine concrete domes enclosing a giant working space. Post-war, Colin Lucas turned his attention from bespoke private homes to mass housing schemes such as that at Alton West, Roehampton (1959). Lucas favoured the ‘hard’ design forms promoted by the French architect Le Corbusier and was a determined critic of the ‘soft’ Scandinavian styles adopted by other architects on the Roehampton site—a distinction later characterized as the clash of the Corbusian ‘carnivores’ and the Scandinavian ‘herbivores’. Mass public housing was also the life’s work of Edward Hollamby (1921-1999), who was responsible for the Brandon estate, Kennington; the Pepys estate, Deptford; and the early designs of what became the Thamesmead estate. With its combination of forty low-rise and six eighteen-storey point blocks—together with community centres, shops, and streets—Hollamby’s Brandon estate (1960) saw the first use of residential high-rise in the capital. Housing was also a focus for Charles Quennell (1872-1935), who, with the Crittall window manufacturers, designed a series of modernist-style ‘model villages’ in Essex during the 1910s and 1920s. Forty years on, the partnership of Donald McMorran (1904-1965) and George Whitby (1916-1973) combined work on London housing developments with a series of police stations and an imposing extension to the Old Bailey (1960-72). Meanwhile housing of a rather more refined kind was the life’s work of Patrick Gwynne (1913-2003), who attracted attention in his late twenties for The Homewood, Esher, Surrey—an elegant private house (built for Gwynn’s parents) which introduced British audiences to the domestic possibilities of Le Corbusier’s and Mies van der Rohe’s modernism.

Two very different visions for post-war London emerged from the work of Warren Chalk (1927-1987) and the designer and conservationist Theo Crosby (1925-1994). Chalk was a member of the radical Archigram group (1961-1973), a sextet of young designers who sought to combine architecture with comic art, space technology, and pop culture. The result was futuristic visions of a ‘walking city’ and a ‘plug-in city’ which, while literally unbuildable, influenced designs such as the Pompidou, Paris, and, more recently, appreciation of the use of transitory, multi-purpose structures. Contemporaneously with Chalk’s and Archigram’s radicalism the Pentagram designer Theo Crosby pioneered an urban conservation movement which argued for existing buildings to be made sustainable and viable in a climate keen to pull down and begin anew. Crosby found an ideal expression for his interests from the early 1970s as architect of the New Globe theatre on London’s South Bank—a building he refused to construct using modern methods, and which required London’s first use of thatched roofing since the great fire of 1666.

It was in his native Prague that Eugene Rosenberg (1909-1977) gained a love of the white tile as a simple, modernist decoration. Rosenberg came to Britain just before the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia and joined Francis Yorke and Cyril Mardell in creating the celebrated architectural practice YRM. It was YRM, and Rosenberg in particular, who pioneered the use of the white tile in Britain, often to impressive effect as at Rosenberg’s St Thomas’s Hospital, London (1962-76), and the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford (1964-72). Equally striking, though more controversial, was his use of tiling at the new Warwick University. Here the design led to student protests against what was seen as an impersonal corporate finish, a situation worsened when sections of the tiling began to fall from the walls. More practical—and less controversial—was the design in the early 1970s of the Open University, Milton Keynes, by the pioneering female architect Dame Jane Drew (1911-1996). Drew made her name (working with her husband, Maxwell Fry) with a series of commissions in Nigeria and Ghana that culminated in University College, Ibadan (1948 57). During the 1950s she also designed housing, shopping areas, and the hospital for Chandigarth, the new capital of Indian Punjab, where she worked with Fry and Le Corbusier. Institutional commissions were also a major part of the work of the Welsh architect Sir Alex Gordon (1917-1999), whose modernist, often challenging, designs provoked mixed responses: some like his work at Cardiff University proved popular, while others—notably his grey concrete Welsh Office (1972-9)—were condemned as symbolizing ‘closed, inaccessible government’.

The impact of individual architects across Britain is seen in the lives of other new additions to the Oxford DNB. In Liverpool the legacy of John Alexander Brodie (1858-1934) includes his huge ‘circumferential boulevard’, Queen’s Drive, which joined the north and south of the city, and on which Brodie’s successor as city architect, Sir Lancelot Keay (1883-1974), built new low-rise housing as part of a programme of slum clearance and modernization. Keay also introduced Berlin-style inner-city high-rise (notable for its use of ‘healthy’ external balconies) and construction from the 1930s of the ultimately unsuccessful Speke new town to the south of the city. As a pioneer of concrete-based structures John Alexander Brodie had also planned a network of intercity highways and worked on the first English trunk road between Liverpool and Manchester. In the 1920s he came out of retirement to work as co-architect of the Mersey Tunnel, which became the world’s longest and largest underwater road tunnel when finished in 1934. Brodie’s, however, was a remarkably varied career since he is also remembered as the inventor of the football goal net—his ‘pocket in which a ball may lodge after passing through the goal’—which was awarded a patent in 1890. Within a year nets had become compulsory for all FA league matches. The career of Sir Arnold Thornely (1870-1953) was also spent principally in Liverpool, where he designed the waterfront Port of Liverpool building, the first of the so-called ‘Three Graces’. However, his best-known work is Parliament Buildings, Stormont (1926-33), commissioned for the government and parliament of the new Northern Ireland. Classical, conservative, and imposing, Stormont became a controversial symbol of political change, and more recently home to the new Northern Ireland assembly.

Other architects with strong local associations include Sir George Oatley (1863-1950), whose career was spent in his native Bristol where he built extensively for the university—most famously the Wills Memorial Tower (1912-27), one of the largest and finest examples of modern Perpendicular Gothic, and one of Britain’s last great secular Gothic designs. In Norfolk Oatley’s contemporary George Skipper (1856-1948) made his name with exuberant baroque designs for Cromer seafront, with Edwardian country homes such as Sellowes for the Cook family of travel agents, and in Norwich with the Norwich Union building (1906). In Nottingham, T. Cecil Howitt (1889-1968) drew on the neo-Baroque for his Council House, Market Square (1927-9), which sought to combine the spirit of nineteenth-century Milan with the domed grandeur of St Paul’s Cathedral. By contrast the domestic and industrial designs of Gordon Ryder (1919-2000) and Peter Yates (1920-1982) were characterized by an elegant modernism, best seen in their Norgas House (1963-5), near Newcastle.

A final selection of architects is remembered for contributions to ecclesiastical design, both as creators and conservationists. After commissions for several Roman Catholic churches, which he undertook in his trademark modernist style, Francis Pollen (1926-1987) began work on a new abbey church for the Benedictine community at Worth, Sussex, for whom he created a large, austere domed structure, consecrated in 1975. In marked contrast to Pollen’s modernism the three churches of Randall Wells (1877-1942)—of which the largest is St Andrew’s, Roker, Sunderland (1906)—are widely considered the finest examples of arts and crafts church design, displaying Wells’s characteristic attention to local craft traditions and materials. Ecclesiastical restoration, meanwhile, shaped the careers of Frederick Eden (1884-1944), who specialized in church interiors and stained glass, and of the York-based architect George Pace (1915-1975), who is best known for his restoration and remodelling of Llandaff Cathedral after wartime bomb damage. Though himself an architect of modest productivity and reputation, Hugh Thackeray Turner (1853-1937) is known today principally as a conservationist. As the long-serving secretary to the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (founded by William Morris in 1877) Turner travelled the country to impose Morris’s vision in architectural preservation and his belief that buildings were, and should remain, unmediated expressions of the societies in which they were built. By contrast the writing of Robert Furneaux Jordon (1905-1978) offered a far less sympathetic interpretation of the synthesis of architecture and social history. Principal of the Architectural Association from 1949, Jordan was a champion of left-wing students (including Anthony Cox) and a provocative teacher, television broadcaster, and writer—nowhere more so than in his Victorian Architecture (1966), which described a ‘self-assured and vulgar’ age but was itself widely attacked for its perceived political agenda.

Black and Asian lives

In September 2010 Oxford DNB editors began a research project to extend the dictionary’s coverage of noteworthy black and Asian subjects who shaped national life, within Britain and overseas. Then our focus was on black Britons. Here we continue this theme while also introducing figures from the Indian sub-continent and Far East. They include the dancers Uday Shankar (1900-1977) and Ram Gopal (1912?-2003), both of whom were born in India and spent periods of their life there but who came to prominence as performers in London. Shankar, whose career was launched in the 1920s with the help of Anna Pavlova, went on to form a dance company to emulate Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, performing at Dartington Hall in the inter-war period. Having arrived in London in 1939, Ram Gopal soon attracted widespread acclaim for his classical choreography, while his flamboyance and dramatic temperament brought him many admirers in the post-war years. It was as the lead in Alexander Korda’s Elephant Boy (1937) that the Mysore-born film actor Sabu Dastagir (1924-1963) came to the attention of British audiences. Sabu was chosen as the film’s star after he had been seen fearlessly riding an elephant across a swollen river, and he was one of the few Indian actors Korda brought to London to continue the making of the film. Thereafter Sabu worked predominantly in Hollywood, though he returned to Britain for a small but memorable role in Michael Powell’s Black Narcissus (1947). Other people with ties to the Indian sub-continent include the author Govindas Desani (1909-2000)—whose experimental novel, All About H. Hatterr (1948), is now considered an important development of the Indian English novel—and the anthropologist Cedric Dover (1904-1961), who, having settled in London in 1934, wrote on eugenics and theories of race.

It is for their creative achievements that several others are now added to the dictionary. Isaac Dickerson (d. 1900) was born into slavery in Virginia but gained note as one of the Fisk Jubilee Singers who toured Britain in the 1870s, receiving praise from Queen Victoria and requests to perform in Westminster Abbey. Dickerson’s fellow American and close contemporary Henry Downing (1846-1928) spent twenty-two years in Britain during which time, in novels, plays, and film scripts, he sought to develop the economic and political status of Africans. It was as a champion of Britain’s black communities that the author and physician Robert Cole (1907-1995), born in Freetown, Sierra Leone, became the president of the League of Coloured Peoples in 1947. Cole combined his interest in Anglo West African relations with a successful medical career, being the first black doctor to practise in Newcastle upon Tyne and, in 1944, the first black fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. In 1933 the South Carolinian singer and actress Nina McKinney (1912-1967) became the first black artist to be seen on British television and earned a reputation as the ‘black Garbo’ for headline music hall and film appearances later in the decade. It was as ‘the bronze girl with the charming voice’ that the singer Ida Shepley (1908-1975) was known to radio listeners in the 1930s and 1940s. She was born in Cheshire, the daughter of a west African herbalist, and her career later developed to include theatre and television performances. Entertainment of a different kind was provided (often at the expense of English cricket fans) by the Barbadian bowler Malcolm Marshall (1958-1999), whose fast, aggressive deliveries skittled batsmen around the world, but also delighted followers of Hampshire county cricket where he played for fourteen years in a career that saw over 2000 test and county wickets. Other West Indian figures now added include the social anthropologist Michael Garfield Smith (1921-1993), noted for his studies of the Rastafarian movement in Jamaica and theories of racial pluralism in Britain, undertaken as a scholar at UCL London and Yale University.

Of the remaining additions, two were born in China and two in Sudan. It is as a Sussex landowner and philanthropist that John Hochee (1789-1869), born in Ho Chi, Canton, is remembered—being the beneficiary of his employer’s will in which he was bequeathed over 500 acres of farmland. At his own death Hochee left an estate valued at almost £40,000, part of which funded the creation of almshouses that now bear his name. By contrast Ping Lun (c.1861-1904), a member of Liverpool’s Chinese community, achieved note as the defendant in a widely reported murder trial in 1904. Ping Lun’s conviction prompted calls for the death sentence to be commuted on the grounds that a ‘Chinaman’s view of life’ was quite different from that of an Englishman. The case was rejected by the Home Office, and Ping Lun’s death established the principle that the court’s treatment of ‘people of colour’ should be equal to that of English defendants, which was not then the case in the British empire or the United States. Our two Sudanese figures are Selim Aga (c.1826-1875) and Salim Wilson (c.1859-1946), both of whom were born into slavery. Purchased by the British commercial consul in Alexandria, Selim Aga travelled in Britain, where he published an autobiographical study that provides the only known first-hand account of north African Muslim slavery. Resident in London from the 1840s, he later accompanied the explorer Richard Burton on expeditions along the Nile, Niger, and Congo rivers. As a child Salim Wilson was likewise brought to England by his master, and in the mid-1880s (amid the excitement of the Gordon relief exhibition) toured northern England dressed in turban and leopard skin, as a slave freed by Gordon. Like Selim, Wilson later returned to Africa on missionary expeditions, and continued this work for the Methodists in Scunthorpe, where he lived, was buried, and is now commemorated as one of the first Sudanese to find refuge in Britain.

Military lives: remembrance

2011 is the ninetieth anniversary of the creation of the Royal British Legion. To mark the anniversary the latest edition of the Oxford DNB includes biographies of two men—Sir Frederick Lister (1886/7-1966) and Sir Jack Cohen (1886-1965)—who were principal figures in its formation in 1921, and central to its activities in the decades to come. Having been severely wounded and discharged from the army in 1916, Frederick Lister, a lance-bombardier in the artillery, experienced the hardships of veterans. In 1918 he was appointed president of the National Federation of Discharged and Demobilized Sailors and Soldiers, and was instrumental in bringing together the various campaigning bodies that had been formed during the war. From these unity conferences came the British Legion in July 1921, of which Lister (alongside Earl Haig) can rightly be considered a co-founder. As its first chairman Lister was not overawed by men senior in age and rank, and ensured that the British Legion developed to become the nationally recognized organization for former servicemen and women.

Jack Cohen was, like Lister, severely wounded during the First World War and, prior to the British Legion’s creation, served as a representative of the Officers’ Association and as MP for Liverpool (Fairfield) from 1918. As an attendee of the unity conferences Cohen shaped the legion’s constitution and thereafter was known as its representative in parliament. He presented to parliament the legion’s public petition of 1925 (the largest since the Chartist campaigns of the 1840s) to raise awareness of inequities in the provision of war pensions. A campaigner for disabled ex-servicemen, Cohen was also well known for his appearances at the annual Remembrance day procession, in which he participated in his motorized wheelchair.

A concern for the service widows and orphans left by late-Victorian colonial wars had prompted the charitable efforts of a militia officer, Sir James Gildea (1838-1920), who in 1885 founded the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Families Association. Its greatest early challenge came in 1899, with the outbreak of the South African War, during which it distributed about £1,250,000 to 200,000 families. During that conflict the quarrelsome Sir Arthur Paget (1851-1928) upset both the Australian and New Zealand volunteers in his force, as well as his superiors, and proved to be an unfortunate personality to hold command in Ireland during the home rule crisis of 1914. His reports sparked the Curragh mutiny of officers unwilling to coerce Ulster into a home rule Ireland. During the First World War his command was limited to the Salisbury Plain training area.

Military lives: forgotten conflicts

September’s release also contains a selection of lives of soldiers whose careers were mainly spent in India. George Reynolds Scott Burrows (1827-1917) held administrative posts in the Bombay army for thirty-five years until, in 1880, he was placed in command of a brigade during the Second Afghan War. Outnumbered, outgunned, and in the heat of summer, he launched an attack at Maiwand which led to a disastrous defeat, whose circumstances were and remain debated. Broken by the disaster, Burrows spent the rest of his life in obscurity. On the outbreak of the Third Afghan War in May 1919, Sir Arnold Barrett (1857-1926), who had served in India since 1875, was appointed commander of the north-west frontier force. The war followed the seizure of Kabul by Amir Amanullah, whose declaration of jihad led Afghan troops and Pathan tribesmen to invade British India. Barrett’s command proved extremely challenging given the intense summer heat and the shortages of men and equipment faced by the post-war British army. Sir Skipton Climo (1868-1937), who had served in the tribal wars on the north-west frontier in the 1890s and the Mesopotamian campaign during the First World War, was appointed commander of a British force to suppress the 1919 tribal rising in Waziristan. The operation proved difficult and Climo’s forces—young, inexperienced, and with limited training—were almost defeated in December 1919 before a settlement was reached with the tribesmen in the following May. The officer Climo appointed to lead the suppression was Sir Andrew Skeen (1873-1935), whose command was severely tested by the conditions and the limited resources available to him. During his professional career Skeen reckoned that he had walked or ridden most of the terrain on India’s north-west border with Afghanistan, and in retirement he codified his experiences of frontier soldiering for the benefit of young officers starting their careers in the region. Passing it On: Short Talks on Tribal Fighting on the North-West Frontier went through four editions in the twentieth century and has recently been republished.

Three of the commanders of the so-called ‘forgotten army’, who fought in the Burma campaign (1942-5) and who are included in the release, had taken part in the Waziristan border campaigns between the world wars: David Cowan (1896-1983), Thomas Wynford Rees (1898-1959), and Sir Harold Briggs (1894-1952). As commander of the 17th Indian division Cowan was instrumental in regrouping the British forces in India following their retreat from the Japanese in 1942. In the ensuing assault in 1945 Cowan led the bid to cut the Japanese supply lines, allowing General Slim’s Fourteenth Army to capture Mandalay. Cowan’s was the longest continuous tenure of divisional command among the western allies during the Second World War, almost all of it in direct contact with the enemy. Rees was given divisional command in Burma, where he took part in the allied advance in 1945. Briggs had fought with the Eighth Army in north Africa before being given divisional command, serving under Slim. Brought out of retirement in 1950 in response to the Malaya emergency, he became best known for drawing up the so-called ‘Briggs plan’ to eliminate the Communist insurgents who threatened the British presence in Malaya, though he did not live to see the successful implementation of his strategy. When Sir Montagu Stopford (1892-1971) arrived in Burma in 1944 he was ordered to relieve the garrison at Kohima, and he followed this success by leading the assault on Mandalay and Rangoon in 1945. Stopford later negotiated the Japanese surrender at Rangoon and was British representative at the ceremony in October 1945.

Linguists, languages, and European culture

Another research project started in 2010 considers people notable for studying and observing the languages, literatures, and cultures of continental Europe. On that occasion we published the first twenty entries and here we continue the project with the release of further biographies highlighting the lives of scholars and translators between the mid-nineteenth and late twentieth centuries.

Hispanists are particularly prominent in this latest selection, of whom the earliest is the priest and translator Lorenzo Lucena (1807-1881). Born in Cordoba, Lucena was appointed teacher of Spanish at the Taylor Institute, Oxford, in 1858—forty years before modern languages became a degree subject at the university. Lucena’s contribution was to equip the Taylorian Library with an extensive collection of Hispanic works—history, philology, and archaeology as well as literature—which laid the foundations for Spanish studies at Oxford. Other Hispanists closely associated with universities include Marguerite Hamilton (1907 1982) of King’s College, London, and Walter Starkie (1894-1976), professor of Spanish at Trinity College, Dublin, and translator of Don Quixote (1964), who combined scholarly life with wanderings (with his violin) across continental Europe. Catherine Hartley (1866/7-1928) was another who travelled extensively in Spain, publishing widely on art history until a change of direction saw her become a prolific commentator on sex, marriage, and motherhood, interests she shared with her one-time husband and fellow traveller Walter Gallichan (1862-1946), who, after books on Galicia (and his divorce from Hartley), became a pioneer of sex education literature. Born in Barcelona, John Gili (1907-1998) moved to England in 1934 where he established the Dolphin Book Company and bookshop which, during the Spanish Civil War, became a centre for republican supporters and exiles—to such an extent that Gili received threats from the Franco regime. (It is an distinctive feature of this update that it also includes an entry on Gili’s son, the film-maker Jonathan Gili (1943-2004), whose many works included documentaries for the BBC’s 40 Minutes and Timewatch series.)

Away from the Iberian peninsula the dictionary’s latest release adds two notable translators and teachers of Scandinavian languages, Mary Sandbach (1901-1990), best known for her editions of Strindberg, and Inga-Stina Ewbank (1932-2004), who combined English literary criticism with translations of Ibsen. It was as a supreme interpreter of Diderot that Jean Seznec (1905-1983) is now remembered in a career that culminated in his appointment as Oxford’s Foch professor of French literature in 1950, while it is as an archaeologist, Byzantinist, and Greek scholar that Romilly Jenkins (1907-1969) made his mark at Cambridge, London, and Harvard. In Erich Fried (1921-1988) we have someone who is known principally as a creative artist, rather than an interpreter of the works of others. Having arrived as a refugee from Vienna in 1938, Fried spent the rest of his life in England where he combined a career at the BBC German Service with writing political poetry for which (though still little known in Britain) he received numerous awards in the German-speaking world. An earlier political refugee from France, Ferdinand Gasc (1826-1904), became a schoolmaster in Brighton before compiling dictionaries of English and French which became widely used by English students of French in the early twentieth century. Julius Kettridge (1876-1951), the son of an Austrian subject who settled in east London, became an accountant, but relatively late in life turned to compiling French English dictionaries, which continued to be reprinted after his death.

Geographers

The dictionary’s coverage of the social and physical sciences is extended with the addition of entries on sixteen British geographers, many remembered within the discipline as influential university teachers and proponents of new fields of study. Among the physical geographers now included is the Arctic specialist William Balchin (1916-2007), who oversaw the subject’s introduction and growth at the University of Wales; the Oxford scholar Robert Beckinsale (1908-1998), an expert in landforms and environmental litigation; the geomorphologist and climate change specialist George Dury (1916-1996); the Edinburgh cartographer and glaciologist Alan Ogilvie (1887-1954); and Joseph Jennings (1916-1984), another geomorphologist whose claim that the Norfolk broads were naturally formed was later disproved by Joyce Lambert (herself a recent addition to the Oxford DNB)—a revision to which Jennings responded with characteristic generosity and intellectual enthusiasm.

Africa was the focus of other scholars noted for their contributions to the study of human societies: among them were Robert Steel (1915-1997), the Liverpool and later University of Swansea scholar of tropical peoples, and Peter Gould (1932-2000), who was at the forefront of the quantitative revolution in human geography, as well as a remarkable range of topics ranging from the AIDS pandemic, the Chernobyl disaster, and his own discipline in books such as The Geographer at Work (1985). Others with a strong association with place include the London academic Francis Carter (1938-2001), who became an expert on the Balkans and eastern Europe, before and after the collapse of the communist regimes; the LSE’s Llwellyn Jones (1881 1947), whose North America (1924) offered the first serious regional geography of the continent; the Cambridge historical geographer Robert Donkin (1928-2006), whose interest in Latin America led to studies on the global dispersal of cochineal, one of the most valuable exports of the Spanish Indies; and the China specialist Keith Buchanan (1919-1997), whose work drew on the related disciplines of history, sociology, and economics—as did that of a fellow New Zealander, Robert Buchanan (1894-1980), whose early work on pastoralism developed in to wider studies of economic geography.

Closer to home was the research by Charles Fawcett (1883-1952), whose work on British regionalism made a powerful case for reform of England’s then archaic administrative structure; and the Newcastle scholar John William House (1919-1984), who oversaw the expansion of the university’s geography department while pursuing studies of industrial Teesside and international migration more generally. Finally the work of Lionel Lyde (1863-1947) and Norman Pounds (1912-2006) is remembered principally for its contribution to the study of geography in schools and by general readers. As an instructor of students taking non-subject-specific degrees, and of schoolteachers enhancing their qualifications, Lyde produced a series of geography textbooks that sold 4 million copies by his death. Norman Pounds likewise began his career as a schoolteacher and, having moved to Indiana University, maintained his enthusiasm for communicating his subject through numerous popular texts and lectures which he continued to give for the University of the Third Age until the age of ninety-two.

Other lives: Eadgyth to Electric Ladyland

Of the 106 people included in the September update, the earliest is Eadgyth (c.911-946), daughter of the Anglo-Saxon king Edward the Elder, whose marriage to Otto I, king of the East Franks, gave Eadgyth and her sisters a central role in continental dynastic politics. In 2008 remains excavated at Magdeburg Cathedral were identified as those of the queen, providing remarkable insights into Eadgyth’s life including her approximate age at death, probable diet, and childhood illnesses. In the starkest possible contrast is the musician Noel Redding (1945-2003), who achieved fame in the late 1960s as bass player with the Jimi Hendrix Experience, but whose later life was dogged by legal disputes and creative disappointments. In the intervening 1000 years, the update extends the dictionary’s medieval and early modern coverage with two earls of Oxford, Thomas (d. 1371) and Richard de Vere (1385-1417), both of whom prospered from, and were enthusiastic participants in, conflict—Thomas with the resumption of war with France in 1369 and Richard with the reopening of the Hundred Years’ War in 1412. Prominent female subjects include Jaquetta de Luxembourg (c.1416-1472)—who married John, duke of Bedford, and then benefited from wise use of her late husband’s fortune, enabling her to thrive under both the Lancastrian and Yorkist courts—and Annas Keith (c.1540-1588), wife of James Stewart, earl of Moray, whose similarly assured handling of the Moray estates permitted her husband to withdraw from Scotland after Lord Darnley’s murder in 1567. Other early modern figures include a trio of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century printers and booksellers: William White (d. 1618), who made a significant contribution to the publication of Shakespeare’s plays; Joseph Barnes (1549/50-1618), the Oxford bookseller who in 1584 was loaned £100 to establish a printing house (from which grew the university press); and Thomas Yate (c.1604-1681), the Oxford college head who, following the restoration of Charles II, implemented ambitious plans for the expansion of the press and its running on behalf of the university.

Finally, among later literary lives, we include the D. H. Lawrence scholar Vivian de Sola Pinto (1895-1969), one of those who testified in 1960 in favour of an unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and the historian Iris Origo (1902-1988), best known for her diaries of life in wartime Italy and for the renovation of the gardens at La Foce, Tuscany. And a last artistic life returns us to the Blackpool Tower with which we began. Situated at the foot of Maxwell and Tuke’s structure, the Tower Ballroom became, and remains, a popular venue for millions of dancers. Here, from 1930, visitors were entertained by Reginald Dixon (1904-1985), a Sheffield-born former cinema organist who was given a year to prove himself on the ballroom’s new Wurlitzer, the first to be installed in the UK. His jaunty or ‘bouncy’ playing style proved a hit, capable of carrying the music across a large, crowded floor, and he stayed for forty years. From the 1930s Dixon also made numerous recordings and radio broadcasts and was best known for his signature tune, ‘I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside’ (composed in 1909), a performance that gave rise to the nickname ‘Mr Blackpool’.

Our next online update

Our next online update will be published on Thursday 5 January 2012 and will add biographies of 213 men and women who died in the year 2008.

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