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2012 updates: introductions

January 2012

New online contents, January 2012

Welcome to the twenty-second online update of the Oxford DNB, which adds 209 new articles and, in total, 220 new biographies to the dictionary. Of these, 217 died in 2008 and thirty-eight were women. The earliest born, in December 1909, was the historian Frank Walbank; the latest, born in November 1960, the racing motorcyclist Robert Dunlop. The vast majority—189 or 87%—were born before the outbreak of the Second World War; 25, or some 11.5%, were born before the outbreak of the First World War. The January release contains notable figures from all areas of public life the arts, the media, science and scholarship, medicine and law, politics and the civil service, and many other categories beside. But among those who died in 2008, and who are now added to the dictionary, are a group of remarkable figures associated with drama and the stage in Britain whose careers interlocked and coincided from the 1950s to the present decade.

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 (58,094 biographies and 500 theme articles) is available, free, in nearly all public libraries in the UK, most of which offer remote access that enables 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.

Ralph Evans (1949-2011)

It is with great sadness that we must begin by recording the death of Ralph Evans, a long-serving member of the Oxford DNB’s staff, in September 2011 following a short illness. Ralph was a member of the production team at Oxford University Press who prepared the new 60-volume edition of the Oxford DNB for publication in 2004. He then took on the role of production editor for the online edition and played a pivotal role in turning the texts submitted by our authors into the articles that are published in our three annual updates. Ralph co-ordinated the production of new biographies in the dictionary, linking together authors, copy editors, proofreaders, data engineers, typesetters, and all the many specialists whose services are required for online publication. He had both technical and academic skills. He had trained as a historian of late-medieval economy and society and he published several works on the period. He co-edited the volume on late-medieval Oxford for the History of the University of Oxford (OUP, 1992) and edited a volume of essays in memory of the historian Trevor Aston in 2004. He also wrote Aston’s biography for the Oxford DNB. Many contributors to the Oxford DNB will have corresponded with Ralph: all will have been edited by him and owe the final form of their articles to his thoughtful and meticulous approach. Ralph worked on the early stages of the January 2012 update, planning its production and editing parts of the text. We dedicate it to him.

Theatre, cinema, dance, and entertainment

Among the most notable figures added to the dictionary in the January update are those drawn from the worlds of theatre, cinema, and entertainment. Pride of place must go to Harold Pinter, Nobel laureate for literature in 2005 and variously a playwright, screenwriter, director, and actor. He came swiftly to prominence with a series of plays in the late 1950s and early 1960s, including The Birthday Party (1957), The Caretaker (1960), and The Homecoming (1965), which were notable for their unsettling characters who expressed themselves in a sparse, staccato language (as famous for its pauses as for its dialogue), and for the underlying sense of menace which these works thereby engendered. Later, Pinter wrote celebrated screenplays for films, including the adaptation in 1981 of John Fowles’s novel, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and directed a variety of plays written by his friends and associates. He also became a vocal and public critic of the foreign policies of Britain and the United States. Pinter’s private life was often played out in the public arena, but Michael Billington’s memoir of him reminds us of the man himself, his humble roots, and the group of boyhood friends who helped sustain him through his life.

One of those playwrights whose works Pinter directed was Simon Gray, famous for Butley (1971), Close of Play (1979), Quatermaine’s Terms (1981), and The Late Middle Classes (1999), the last three directed by Pinter. Their friendship survived Gray’s thinly-disguised portrait of Pinter as Harold Duff, ‘the world’s greatest living playwright’, in Unnatural Pursuits (1993). Gray was latterly famous also as a diarist whose final volumes wittily and poignantly chronicled his struggle with lung cancer. Another of those included in this release who collaborated with Pinter is the director David Jones who moved easily between theatre and film, directing a string of acclaimed arts programmes for the BBC and plays for the Royal Shakespeare Company. He directed Pinter’s television play Langrishe, Go Down in 1978 and Pinter’s first feature film, from his play Betrayal, in 1983. The actor Terence Rigby also had a productive relationship with Pinter: one of his first roles was Joey in The Homecoming. He was frequently on television, notably as a policeman in the BBC detective series Softly, Softly and as Dr Watson in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1987). He twice played the role of Stalin: in the National’s Theatre’s production of State and Revolution (1977) and in the film Testimony (1988).

They are joined by Paul Scofield, one of the most talented and praised of British post-war actors. He is best remembered as Sir Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons (1960) which became a highly successful film six years later and for which Scofield won an Oscar. He was also a triumphant Hamlet and Lear (playing the latter in Peter Brook’s 1971 film) and Salieri in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus (1979). Uninterested in the trappings of celebrity and noted for the simple and understated manner in which he lived, he was known in the acting profession as ‘Saint Paul’ and he turned down a knighthood on several occasions.

Another Oscar winner included now is the director Anthony Minghella who grew up on the Isle of Wight. He also moved between film, theatre, and television and won his Academy Award in 1996 for the romantic saga The English Patient set in North Africa and Italy before and during the Second World War. He was also nominated three years later for what many will consider his best film, the adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel, The Talented Mr Ripley.

The cinematographer David Watkin began his career with the Southern railway film unit before working on a string of hit films including the Beatles’ Help! (1965), The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), Chariots of Fire (1981), and Out of Africa (1985), for which he too won an Oscar. Meanwhile Russell Lloyd, a film editor, earned a nomination for the 1975 adventure based loosely on a Rudyard Kipling short story, The Man Who Would be King. This came towards the end of a career which had started at Alexander Korda’s Denham Studios in the 1930s and which included Lloyd’s work on the film Moby Dick (1956). January’s update also includes the film producer John Daly who co-founded Hemdale Productions with that quintessential figure from the 1960s, David Hemmings, and who was executive producer for David Puttnam’s film Melody (1971) and the late Ken Russell’s version of Tommy (1975). Daly later moved to the United States where his successful productions included Terminator (1984) and the Vietnam War film, Platoon (1986).

The theatre director Frith Banbury championed the work of new playwrights including Rodney Ackland, John Whiting, and Errol John. He directed John’s Moon on a Rainbow Shawl in 1958, the first West End play with an all-black cast. Among actors now added to the dictionary are Elizabeth Spriggs, who was a stalwart of the RSC and National Theatre and frequently seen on television in such series as Poirot, Lovejoy, and Midsomer Murders, and Eileen Herlie, who was Gertrude to Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet on film in 1948 and went on to a successful career on Broadway and in American television, appearing in nearly seven hundred episodes of the popular show All My Children between 1976 and 2008. They are joined by the singular Hazel Court, described by contemporaries as ‘pert’, who found her particular niche as Hammer Horror’s ‘scream queen’ in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and subsequent films.

This update also includes four subjects from the worlds of ballet and dance. Nadia Nerina appeared frequently on television in the 1950s and 1960s and famously created the role of Lise in Frederick Ashton’s La Fille Mal Gardée (1960): she was acclaimed as the most virtuosic British ballerina of her generation. The choreographer and ballet director Norman Morrice was co-director of the Ballet Rambert, and later a long-serving director of the Royal Ballet, while the Canadian-born dancer and choreographer Laverne Meyer founded the Northern Dance Theatre. Clive Barnes was the Times’s first specialized dance critic who later moved to New York and became a dance and drama critic for the New York Times and New York Post. He wrote many books on ballet.

Music

The January 2012 update includes the biographies of composers, singers, and musicians drawn from a wide range of musical genres. Two academic composers head our list. The Welsh composer Alun Hoddinott enjoyed a long and distinguished career in the music department at University College, Cardiff, and wrote the music for the investiture of Charles as prince of Wales in 1969, and a fanfare for his marriage to Camilla Parker-Bowles in 2005. Wilfrid Mellers was a musicologist and the first head of music at the new University of York from 1964 to 1981. He combined composition in varied styles with published work on Bach and Beethoven on the one hand, and the Beatles and Bob Dylan on the other. Another composer, Tristram Cary, whose later career was spent at the University of Adelaide, is described as ‘the father of British electronic music’; he not only composed scores for Dr Who and the cult British science fiction film Quatermass and the Pit (1967), but also developed a range of synthesizers for rock and pop bands in the 1970s, notably his VCS3 as used by Pink Floyd.

Several figures were particularly closely associated with conducting and playing British music. The conductors Vernon ‘Tod’ Handley, who was a protégé of Sir Adrian Boult, and Richard Hickox were both promoters of the music of Vaughan Williams, Elgar, Arnold, Bliss, and others. The opera singer Marjorie Thomas, who was particularly renowned for her recordings with Sir Malcolm Sargent, was an acclaimed interpreter of Gilbert and Sullivan, Britten, and Vaughan Williams. Peter Glossop, a mainstay of Sadler’s Wells and then the Royal Opera, was also noted for his interpretations of Britten. Among instrumentalists we include the leading oboist of her generation, Evelyn Rothwell, the author of a classic study on oboe technique, who married the conductor John Barbirolli. There is also the clarinettist and basset horn player, Georgina Dobreé, who was indefatigable in playing, recording, and commissioning works for her chosen instruments.

Folk music is represented through the lives of Alexander ‘Eck’ McEwen who is included with his brother Rory, and Cliff Hall. Coming from an aristocratic background, McEwen popularized Scottish and English folk music in Britain and the United States in the 1950s and early 1960s but was eclipsed by the rise of rock’n’roll. Hall, meanwhile, was born in Cuba of Jamaican parents and became the guitarist and singer for The Spinners, probably the first multi-racial group to achieve major success in Britain. Through Hall the group added calypso and other Caribbean influences to their folk sound. Davey Graham, from a mixed race background, was one of the most influential guitarists of the last fifty years, eclectic in influences but remarkably original in approach. His career was cut short by a heroin addiction. Another performer whose career pre-dated the pop era was Lita Roza, who had hit records with the bands of Ted Heath and Don Lusher and is best known for that most annoying jingle, ‘How Much is that Doggie in the Window?’ (1952). She was regularly voted favourite female vocalist at this time. She was friendly with the notorious Kray twins and sang in their London nightclubs, but, perhaps wisely, she declined to marry Ronnie Kray.

Neil Aspinall began his career in pop music from the unpromising position of driver to the Beatles. But after the death of Brian Epstein in 1967 he became their indispensable manager and chief executive of their company, Apple Corps. He also sang on ‘Yellow Submarine’ and played the harmonica on ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite’. Mike Smith was the keyboard player and vocalist for the Dave Clark Five who reached number one in 1964 with ‘Glad All Over’ and who, in a long career, sold more than a hundred million records. But even this number was eclipsed by Pink Floyd, the ‘psychedelic’ band which emerged in the mid-1960s and whose keyboard player, Rick Wright, now joins another of the band’s founders, Syd Barrett, in the Oxford DNB. Though differences between band members led to a period of six years in the 1980s when Wright was not a part of Pink Floyd, he was a crucial element in their distinctive style, often when playing the VCS3 synthesiser invented by Tristram Cary, above. Finally, the third and last member of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the drummer John ‘Mitch’ Mitchell, now joins Hendrix himself and Noel Redding in the dictionary.

Broadcasting and journalism

Our first entrant to the dictionary under the heading of broadcasting and journalism might equally well be categorized under jazz music. Humphrey Lyttelton combined one career of over fifty years as an acclaimed trumpeter at the head of several bands specializing in ‘trad jazz’ with another as a broadcaster who helped to popularise jazz on the radio and as a humorist who was best known as the chair of the long-running comedy radio series I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue. ‘Humph’ was playing music and keeping order on Radio 4 right up to his death. Similarly, Miles Kington was a keen jazz musician and jazz critic, but better known as a television and radio presenter and as a humorist writing for newspapers and magazines such as Punch and The Oldie. Over his numerous books of Franglais we must draw a veil.

Our list of leading journalists is headed by Sir Charles Wheeler whose biography has been written by the late Anthony Howard. Decorated during the Second World War, Wheeler joined the BBC and served as a correspondent in Berlin, Washington, and New Delhi. From 1980 to 1995 he presented Newsnight for the BBC; thereafter he continued to make the most interesting and distinguished programmes on current affairs and recent history, and his craggy features topped with a mane of silver hair made him one of the most instantly recognizable and respected figures on television. The Irishman Conor Cruise O’Brien enters the dictionary for two reasons: his high profile as a writer and columnist in Britain and his period as editor of The Observer from 1979 to 1981. He was also a diplomat, politician, academic, and author with wide experience of international affairs and a strong antipathy to the IRA and the reunification of Ireland. William Frankel was editor of the Jewish Chronicle for almost two decades, during which time he modernized the weekly paper, widened its appeal, and made it a respected commentator on aspects both Jewish and British. He was also a prominent supporter of Louis Jacobs in the most notable theological controversy within the Anglo-Jewish community during the twentieth century.

Other journalists added to the dictionary include John Whale, who was ITN’s first resident Washington correspondent and later head of the BBC’s religious programmes and editor of The Church Times, and David Chipp who, as a Reuters correspondent, was the first western journalist to report from Communist China. Later Chipp was a modernising editor-in-chief of the Press Association and a campaigner for press freedom. The photojournalist Philip Jones Griffiths was best known for his photographs of the Vietnam War and was one of those photographers credited with changing American and western opinion towards that conflict. Much closer to home, Bob Crampsey combined careers as a teacher, broadcaster, and sports journalist. Linking these, he was a prolific author of books on Scottish sporting history. A winner of the BBC’s Brain of Britain, he was the original ‘anorak’, described as ‘Google before Google, Wikipedia before Wikipedia’. Alan Brien presented early television chat shows in the 1950s but later won plaudits as theatre critic of the Sunday Telegraph and as a witty columnist for The Times among other newspapers.

Television executives and directors are represented in several lives now added to the dictionary. Bryan Cowgill joined the BBC in 1954, working on Sportsview before launching the hugely successful Grandstand and Match of the Day, staples of Saturday programming for decades afterwards. Cowgill introduced the term ‘action replay’ to the language. He was later the controller of BBC1 and then managing director of Thames Television. Sir Geoffrey Cox was an early recruit to ITN, launched the station’s flagship News at Ten, and then became deputy chairman of Yorkshire Television and chairman of Tyne Tees Television. Sir Bill Cotton was the son of the famous bandleader of the same name, whose television shows he produced early in his career. He went on to launch Top of the Pops, The Two Ronnies, and the Morecambe and Wise Show, and rose to become managing director of BBC Television. Mark Shivas joined Granada Television in 1963 but on moving to the BBC five years later was responsible for a remarkable list of high-quality dramas, becoming head of BBC drama between 1988 and 1993 and then head of BBC films. Like many he despaired of the more recent decline in the quality of television programmes.

Jonathan Routh, an inveterate practical joker, launched the pioneering reality TV show, Candid Camera, on BBC television in 1960. He is joined by a later exponent of this genre, Jeremy Beadle, who, in 2001, was voted the second most hated man in Britain (after Saddam Hussein). His programme Beadle’s About revived the Candid Camera format and in the later You’ve Been Framed! the public sent him their humorous clips and films. Beadle was also a tireless raiser of funds for charity. Geoffrey Perkins was a comedy writer who produced distinguished work for both radio and television. He produced The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for BBC radio in 1978 and 1980 before co-founding Hat-Trick Productions and producing a string of successful comedies including Drop the Dead Donkey, Father Ted, and Have I Got News for You. But the broadcaster and writer who must take pride of place in this long list is surely Oliver Postgate, whose television series and books in the 1960s and 1970s, including Ivor the Engine, Noggin the Nog, The Clangers, and Bagpuss (which was later voted the most loved children’s television series ever made), delighted a generation of children and their parents with a winning combination of simple images, gentle humour, and a charming narrative delivered in a kind and avuncular tone.

Art, architecture, and design

Another very popular figure who died in 2008 was the self-taught artist, Beryl Cook. She came to art relatively late in life but developed a highly original, comic style, and her ‘fat ladies’ (and not a few fat men as well) were instantly recognizable and hugely popular, reproduced on posters, tea towels, and greetings cards in Britain and abroad. She is joined by Pauline Baynes, who illustrated the books of J.R.R. Tolkein and C.S. Lewis; the potter Robert Fournier, who was noted for his ‘pebble’ pots and use of vibrant colours, later becoming an historian of modern studio pottery; and the leading goldsmith and silversmith Gerald Benney who revived the art of enamelling in strong colours and whose work was notable for its contrasting polished and rough textures. The letter carver and sculptor, Ralph Beyer, who was an apprentice of Eric Gill, was noted for his work in the new Coventry Cathedral, especially the eight ‘Tablets of the Word’. He is joined by the typographic designer, Robert Harling, an authority on Gill, and a powerful influence over the design of newspapers and magazines who was later the editor of House & Garden. A designer of a different type was the so-called ‘tailor to the stars’ from the 1960s to the 1980s, Doug Hayward, who re-defined the classic men’s suit in that era.

We include several architects of different types. The conservation architect Sir Bernard Feilden oversaw the restorations of Norwich Cathedral and York Minster among many other projects and was widely regarded as the founder of this new discipline within modern architecture. He may be contrasted with Stefan Buzás, who specialised in high-modern interiors and designed Manchester’s Ringway airport terminal and Standard Bank in Northumberland Avenue, off Trafalgar Square, and with Ann MacEwen, included with her husband Malcolm, the architectural journalist, who specialized in town planning and was a leading advocate for national parks.

We also include a selection of notable art historians and critics. Sir Michael Levey was an expert on Renaissance and Italian art who became director of the National Gallery at a time of unprecedented expansion and modernisation. Levey wrote widely, was frequently called on by the media for his strong opinions, and was married to the writer Brigid Brophy. Jerzy Zarnecki was a leading authority on medieval art and especially Romanesque sculpture. Michael Podro, notable for his interest in the relationships between art, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, had been a student of Ernst Gombrich and played a crucial role in reviving interest in the German foundations of art historiography. Another of Gombrich’s pupils was Michael Baxandall, the author of influential books on art theory and Renaissance art history. The art critic John Russell spent long periods reviewing for both the Sunday Times and the New York Times, while the publisher Andreas Papadakis, who was owner and also editor of Architectural Design and Academy Editions, was a notable supporter of both post-modernism and neo-classicism.

Literature and language

Sir Arthur C. Clarke was one of the leading writers of science fiction in the twentieth century. Best known for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), his masterpiece may well be the remarkable story of contact with a superior race, Childhood’s End (1953). He was also known for his wide-ranging writing on science and is credited with foreshadowing the development of telecommunications satellites. While science journalism and science fiction more recently has been devoted to prophecies of doom, Clarke’s work displayed the optimism of an earlier age in which technology, space travel, human abilities, and reason could be harnessed for progress and mutual benefit. Clarke may be contrasted with other writers working in quite different genres and with a different view of man’s destiny. George Macdonald Fraser was the author of the swashbuckling adventures of the phenomenally successful Flashman series. Two British-based writers who drew on their Caribbean inheritance are also added to the dictionary: the novelist Roy Heath drew extensively on his Guyanese background in his fiction and was the author of acclaimed memoirs, Shadows Round the Moon (1990), and the poet and novelist E. A. Markham, who had been born on Montserrat, produced works which contributed to debates about an emerging multicultural Britain. The poet, playwright, and left-wing activist Adrian Mitchell made many interventions in public life, usually in impassioned lyrics of which the most important was his poem ‘To Whom It May Concern (Tell Me Lies About Vietnam)’, written and first read publicly in the mid-1960s. Mitchell played an important role in the popularization and performance of poetry in Britain. Meanwhile the literary agent Pat Kavanagh, whose biography has been written by Hermione Lee, was not only outstandingly successful but was credited with nurturing the careers of many of Britain’s best known writers of today.

Several scholars of English are added to the Oxford DNB in this release. Derek Brewer was an expert on Chaucer, a Cambridge academic, and co-founder of the publisher, Boydell and Brewer. George K. Hunter was a Shakespeare scholar and authority on other Elizabethan playwrights. Ian Jack’s interests were in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and he was an authority on Keats, Browning, and the Brontës. Another of Keats’s biographers was Joanna Richardson, but as a literary biographer she was better known for her studies of nineteenth-century French writers for which she was awarded the Prix Goncourt for biography, the first woman and the first person from outside France to be honoured in this way. She is joined by scholars of less familiar languages: the Persianist, Ann Lambton; the Russian and Slavonic scholar Monica Partridge, an authority on Herzen, and author of a standard Serbo-Croat primer; the Turkish scholar, Geoffrey Lewis; and the Swahili Scholar, Yahya Ali Omar.

Scholarship

Several archaeologists and experts in the history and culture of the Near East are among those entering the dictionary in January 2012. They include Nicolas Coldstream, the leading archaeologist of the Aegean who was interested in the trading and cultural connections of ancient Greece; John Barron, who combined the study of Greek archaeology with numismatics, sculpture, and literature, and who in 1987 led an influential review of the teaching of classics in British universities; Frank Walbank, the pioneering ancient historian with a special interest in Polybius; Iouliane Chrysostomides, who wrote on many aspects of Byzantine history; and Elizabeth Eames, a medieval archaeologist and expert on medieval building techniques, who made a special study of medieval tiles from her base at the British Museum. Henry Chadwick, meanwhile, was the leading scholar of early Christianity of his generation and the author of key works on Origen, Augustine, Boethius, and Priscillian of Avila. According to his biographer, Henry Mayr-Harting, he ‘relished conflict ... in a past age as much as he hated it around him’. As an ecumenist he worked for Anglican-Roman Catholic reconciliation; as a polymath and churchman he was a college head, successively dean of Christ Church, Oxford, and master of Peterhouse, Cambridge.

Alongside this great scholar of religion we add two historians of science. John North’s interests ranged from medieval astrology and horoscopes to twentieth-century astronomy. He defended the detail of his works on the grounds that ‘the need for [completeness] in such a work as this should be as evident as the need to include uninteresting people in telephone directories’. Meanwhile Tom Whiteside was acclaimed for his work on Newton’s mathematical papers, which helped to transform our understanding of the mathematics in the seventeenth century. Among historians dealing with more recent events we include the noted popularizer Christopher Hibbert, whose main aim was ‘to entertain and tell a good accurate story’, and Angus Calder, author of the pioneering account of the Second World War, The People’s War (1969), as well as a poet and essayist, and a fine lecturer who never turned down an invitation to enlighten an audience. His final years were clouded by alcohol and tobacco though his judgement was not impaired: ‘It’s been a helter-skelter existence, and mainly my own fault’. Denis Cosgrove was a cultural geographer who worked with the past, exploring imaginative geographies—geographies of the mind—through history. International relations expert Bill Gutteridge was a leading scholar in two areas: the role of the military in new (especially African) states, and international arms control. Sir Bernard Crick was a political scientist who became a public intellectual and commentator, noted for his work on the place of politics in the school curriculum. His early classic, In Defence of Politics (1962), has been read by generations of students; his later biography of George Orwell (1980) was a detailed and careful account which attained critical success.

Science and engineering

Among life scientists, we include Brian Burtt, the plant taxonomist who had the satisfaction of identifying some 570 new plant species during his career. Sir Leslie Fowden’s work on amino and imino acids in plants had important implications for the production of biocides. Later, as director of Rothamsted Experimental Station, Fowden led research into new biotechnologies of use in developing countries. The marine ecologist David Cushing undertook important work on zooplankton and fish population dynamics, and the entomologist Philip Corbet was a world authority on dragonflies. Corbet also made key advances in identifying the mosquito vector of o’nyong-nyong fever which at one time affected two million people in East Africa, and was called upon to identify and eliminate the nuisance caused by biting flies on the St Lawrence River before the world’s fair in Montreal, Expo '67.

The evolutionary biologist Tony Bradshaw demonstrated evolutionary differentiation in grasses and later became a pioneer of restoration ecology (the use of plants to reclaim toxic and derelict sites). The cytogeneticist John Thoday demonstrated the importance of genetic flexibility for evolutionary potential through his work on Drosophila (fruit flies), confirming the hypothesis of ‘disruptive selection’ first noted by Darwin. The biochemist Sir Jim Baddiley conducted research on the teichoic acids and their role in the functioning of bacterial cells. Jeremy Knowles, a chemist, worked on the evolution of enzymatic catalysis and chemical enzymology and rose to become dean of Harvard University. And the microbiologist Sir Howard Dalton worked on the co-oxidation properties of methane monooxygenases which had important implications for ‘green chemistry’ and biocatalysis. Later, as chief scientific advisor at Department for the Environment and Rural Affairs, he was instrumental in drawing attention to the implications of climate change.

Another scientist to work on climate change was the glaciologist and polar explorer Fritz Koerner, who repeated transects on Devon Island and elsewhere in the Arctic over many years, thereby providing crucial data on the thinning and shrinkage of sea ice in the polar region. His study of ice cores also revealed summer climates dating back to 9000 BC, which provided crucial data for the debate on climate change. The geologist and sedimentologist Perce Allen overturned previous theories on the formation of the Weald. In 1959 he also predicted the existence of extensive oil reserves under the North Sea. Working in other parts of the world, the geomorphologist John Thomas produced important work on the evolution and management of Mediterranean landscapes and on nutrient and hydrological aspects of the tropical rainforests.

The pure mathematician Graham Higman was renowned for his work on group theory. The applied mathematician Philip Saffman made notable advances in the study of fluid mechanics and turbulence, with implications, for example, for the dispersal of turbulent vortices in the wake of aircraft take-off. And the physicist and Cambridge college head, Sir Brian Pippard, explored low-temperature superconductivity and proved the existence of the Fermi surface.

Automotive engineering is especially well-represented in the January update and illustrates well the interconnection of modern business and technology. Tony Rolt was a champion racing driver who later established his own engineering company, pioneering advances in four-wheel drive and other advanced automotive technologies. Fred Hart was the engineer responsible for the best-selling car of the 1960s and 1970s, the Ford Cortina; later he was involved in designing advanced vehicles for disabled drivers. But drivers then and now may have mixed feelings about the achievements of Frank Blackmore, who was responsible for the concept and introduction of the mini-roundabout, and then the later refinements of the concept such as the infamous ‘magic roundabout’ in Swindon, a complex of several mini-roundabouts designed, or so it would seem, to bamboozle the poor motorist. Christopher Tremlett was a boat designer and manufacturer responsible for introducing new manufacturing methods which resulted in faster power boats produced at a fraction of their previous cost, contributing greatly, and for good and ill, to the popularity of the sport. On terra firma, the construction engineer Alec Sandberg pioneered materials testing, and was much in demand as an expert witness in cases involving poor quality construction materials.

Medicine

The range and importance of contributions from Britain to medical understanding and treatment is evident in the number and variety of medical biographies we are adding to the Oxford DNB in this release. Sir Robert Shields was one of the country’s leading surgeons and made Liverpool University a leader in the treatment of diseases of the liver, intestinal tract, and breast. Patrick Lawther was an expert on environmental medicine and particularly the effects of air pollutants on health. He provided much of the scientific evidence leading to the Clean Air Act 1956 (which ended London’s smog). The neurologist Peter Kynaston Thomas worked on human peripheral nerve disease and inherited neuropathies. The neurosurgeon Bryan Jennett was the first practitioner to describe a ‘persistent vegetative state’ and established the ‘Glasgow coma scale’ to assess the extent of brain damage. Bill Keatinge, a physiologist, made major advances in the understanding of the mechanisms of temperature stress and in the measures which could be taken to reduce mortality in cold and hot spells.

The neuroscientist and pharmacologist J. Murdoch Ritchie did important work on the action of local anaesthetics. We also include two anaesthetists who made different types of contribution: Cecil Gray transformed anaesthetic procedure by the introduction of the ‘Liverpool technique’ which enabled the use of only relatively small amounts of anaesthetic, and Peter Baskett was a pioneering figure in the development of modern paramedic (pre-hospital) services in the UK. The pathologist and clinical immunologist Jack Hobbs carried out the first bone marrow transplantation in the UK and developed the technique to cure a range of genetic and other diseases. The pharmacologist and protozoologist Len Goodwin made major advances in the pharmaceutical treatment of tropical diseases, and the bacteriologist Naomi Datta demonstrated the transfer of antibiotic resistance in bacteria.

From those many areas of modern life where medicine and society intersect we include the psychoanalyst Isabel Menzies Lyth, who worked on group dynamics among nurses and who demonstrated the role of social and occupational systems as defences against anxiety. The medical sociologist Janet Askham was a pioneer of sociological studies of fertility and sexual relations, and later of old age, dementia, and care of the elderly. One of the greatest afflictions of old age is loneliness and the former army officer, Richard Carr-Gomm, started the Abbeyfield Society and later the Carr-Gomm and Morpeth societies to provide companionship for the elderly as well as sheltered accommodation for them. Finally, we also include the medical journalist Antony Smith, who was for many years the medical correspondent for the Times and who steered the paper towards a more liberal approach on issues such as abortion, euthanasia, and organ transplantation. He was also a prolific author of popular medical guides.

Education, law, and religion

Our educationists illustrate very well the ideological and professional differences which have been at the heart of educational debate in Britain for a generation and more. Brian Cox was the author of important books on modern poetry but is better known for his role as a founder of the Critical Quarterly and co-editor with Tony Dyson of five Black Papers on education between 1969 and 1977 which attacked the lowering of educational standards in British schools. Cox became a notorious figure in educational circles for holding what were then heterodox opinions. Harold Rosen began as an English teacher but moved on to teacher training and to writing studies on the learning of language in particular, which reflected his faith in the potentiality of every learner and his respect for different social and immigrant cultures. Meanwhile Max Morris, a teacher, trade unionist, and one-time Communist, was both a forceful advocate of comprehensive education and yet also a traditionalist in the classroom who opposed progressive teaching methods. Dame Alison Munro gave up a high-flying civil service career to become a reforming and successful high mistress of St Paul’s Girls’ School between 1964 and 1974. In another part of the educational system Michael Marland was the founding headteacher of North Westminster Community School between 1980 and 1999, where he pioneered new approaches to the curriculum and staff development. His book, The Craft of the Classroom (1975), rapidly became known as ‘the teacher’s bible’. Many a teacher has reached for a Ladybird Book in relief, and we include in this update the initiator and publisher of this wonderful and long-lived series of children’s books, Douglas Keen. Keen helped teach a generation of children to read: he also sold Ladybird books about computers to the Ministry of Defence and about cars to the Thames Valley police force driving school.

Our coverage of the law—the legal profession, policing, and also criminality—is equally diverse. At the apex of the legal system we add the biographies of two Scottish justices, Walter Elliott, Lord Elliott, who, after distinguished war service, became the first president of the Scottish lands tribunal in 1971 and later chairman of the Scottish land court, and Donald Macfadyen, Lord Macfadyen who was counsel to the Orkney inquiry into supposed child abuse on the islands, and a judge at the Megrahi trial following the Lockerbie bombing. At the other end of the criminal justice system we have an article on Derek ‘Bertie’ Smalls, bank robber and mainland Britain’s first ‘super-grass’ who was pardoned in exchange for evidence which led to the conviction of 27 accomplices—the first and also the last time (because of the public outcry over the case) that a criminal was offered complete immunity in exchange for evidence. Perhaps surprisingly, Smalls lived to a good age and died of natural causes. In between we have the full panoply of the law. Sir Basil Kelly was a Northern Irish lawyer, Unionist member of the Stormont assembly, attorney general from 1968 to 1972 and judge from 1973 to 1995. Sir Francis Vallat was an international lawyer and a legal adviser to the Foreign Office in the 1960s who became director of international law studies at King’s College, London, and wrote standard works on international law and human rights. Several of our subjects were expert in new areas of the law. Sir Hugh Laddie was an expert in the new discipline of intellectual property law and a High Court judge noted for his efficiency (according to one observer, ‘if Laddie had been around in Dickens’ day, Jarndyce versus Jarndyce would have been over by lunchtime’). Margaret Puxon, a gynaecologist as well as a barrister, was a leading figure in another emerging legal discipline, medical law. And Edward Grayson was the founding father of sports law (and the author of the key textbook). Sadly, bankruptcy has always been with us, and Muir Hunter was an expert in the law of bankruptcy and insolvency whose cross-examination of John Poulson in 1972-3 led to the biggest British corruption trial of the twentieth century.

We also include several policemen, of whom the most memorable is Sir John Hermon, chief constable of the Royal Ulster Constabulary at the height of the Northern Ireland ‘troubles’, whose desire for reform of the service was thwarted by the political situation and who clashed fiercely with Ian Paisley and other hard line Unionists. Harry Cole was a bobby from Southwark, south London, and the author of several light-hearted books describing the work of the policeman on the beat. Less humorous by far was the indictment in 1964 of Harold ‘Tanky’ Challenor, a former SAS soldier turned policeman, for planting evidence. He was ruled unfit to plead owing to mental illness but the case highlighted an almost endemic culture of brutality and corruption in the Metropolitan Police of that era. Finally we also include Ray Wyre, who was a pioneering though controversial expert on sexual crime and on the use of group therapy to challenge the belief systems of offenders.

Among notable figures drawn from the religious life of Britain we include the Revd Leslie Hardman, who, as a Jewish army chaplain, was with the British forces that liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945. Later he became minister of Hendon Synagogue and a leading figure in the Holocaust Education Trust. David Kerr was a scholar of Christian-Muslim relations who sought to counter adverse views of Islam in the west. Mary Hall, otherwise known as Mother Rosario, was also involved in the promotion of inter-faith relations: a nun and educationist, she founded the Multi-Faith Centre in Birmingham. The Presbyterian and United Reformed minister Arthur Macarthur was a key figure in the negotiations which united the Presbyterian and Congregational churches and was involved in wider ecumenical initiatives. Among Anglicans we include George Noakes, the popular archbishop of Wales who nurtured the career of the current archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams; and also the liberal-minded John Yates, bishop of Gloucester, who supported the ordination of women priests and a more accepting attitude towards homosexual relationships.

Business and industry

Among the notable figures from the commercial world are two ‘company doctors’, so-called; one real, and one promoted by the media after a successful career in business. Sir John Harvey-Jones was the latter: he rose to be chairman of ICI in the 1980s, radically restructuring and repositioning the company. He was often in the limelight, particularly when disagreeing with the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, over the importance of manufacturing industry, and was probably Britain’s best-known industrialist. After retirement he enjoyed a second career on television dispensing advice as a company Troubleshooter. Sir Lewis Robertson was a real company doctor, famed as ‘the most methodical man in Scotland’, who returned many companies to profitability. He defended his high fees by saying, ‘Anything companies get for peanuts is fit for nothing but monkeys’.

We include three businessmen whose careers were bound up with Britain’s nationalized industries. Donald Stokes, Baron Stokes was the first chairman and managing director of British Leyland, the nationalized amalgamation of several car-making companies. His tenure from 1968 to 1975 coincided with recession and troubled industrial relations. Later, British Leyland was managed by Sir Austin Bide, who had been extraordinarily successful as chairman and chief executive of Glaxo (1973-85) but who was much less successful—inevitably—at BL between 1982 and 1986, where he saw his role as getting the company ‘to the point where someone might want to buy it’. Sir Denis Rooke was the engineer who oversaw the successful programme for the conversion of British homes to natural gas in the 1960s and rose to become chairman of the British Gas Corporation. He opposed its break-up and privatization in 1986 but presided over its flotation.

Another industrialist to become caught up in politics was John Cuckney, Baron Cuckney. A former MI5 officer, he had held a series of demanding posts in the public and private sectors at the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board, the Property Services Agency, and Crown Agents, and at Thomas Cook, Brooke Bond Tea, and the engineering firm John Brown. But he came to public attention as the chairman of Westland Helicopters at the time of the ‘Westland affair’ which divided the Conservative cabinet in 1986. Margaret Thatcher later referred in her memoirs to his ‘extraordinary talents’.

Noted industrialists include Sir David Orr, chairman of Unilever from 1974 to 1982, who is credited with introducing strategic thinking into the Anglo-Dutch company and who was later a tireless fundraiser as chairman of the Globe Theatre Trust. Sir Richard Morris was an engineer who had a wide-ranging business career in the private and public sectors, including as deputy chairman of the National Enterprise Board and Nirex. Sir Derek Alun-Jones enjoyed both success and failure at the electronics firm and defence supplier, Ferranti: as managing director after 1975 he returned the company to profitability, but his purchase of a compromised American firm led to his resignation in 1990 and Ferranti’s break-up. Sir Robert Telford held various senior positions at another electronics company, Marconi, which he helped to diversify.

Two contrasting lives are drawn from the emergent computer industries. David Caminer carried out the systems analysis and software design for LEO, the world’s first business computer, and later oversaw the design and installation of computers for the European Community. Sir Edwin Nixon was managing director of IBM(UK) between 1965 and 1986, during which time the company enjoyed massive expansion; he was later much involved in business education. Two other biographies are linked by a shared experience of Britain’s nuclear power industry. Tom Tuohy was a chemical engineer and nuclear industry executive who in 1957 bravely took the necessary steps to put out the fire at the Sellafield nuclear reactor, thus preventing a far worse accident. Tuohy went on to become the first managing director of British Nuclear Fuels but never received recognition for his role in 1957 because of the official policy to cover up the accident. The nuclear physicist Sir John Hill was also involved in the events of 1957, assigned to investigate the causes of the accident which he blamed on faulty instrumentation. He was later chairman of the UK Atomic Energy Authority from 1967 to 1981, at a time of growing public scepticism about the safety of nuclear power.

From the City of London, we include Alastair Ross Goobey, a pension fund manager and frequent broadcaster who was closely involved in the topical issues of better corporate governance, greater transparency, and an end to boardroom pay-offs and automatic bonuses. The banker, Sir Derek Higgs, chairman of S.G. Warburg, and later of Alliance and Leicester, was involved with similar issues, notably good practice in British boardrooms and the role of non-executive directors , the subject of his report in 2003. Sir John Templeton was an American-born investment adviser and head of the highly successful Templeton Growth Fund. A strong Anglophile from his days as a Rhodes scholar in Oxford, he took British citizenship, established the John Templeton Foundation, and gave handsomely to higher education among other causes.

Self-made entrepreneurs of rather different types also feature in our list. Michael Cole, for example, was a Cambridge metallurgist who founded Metals Research Ltd (which employed over 500 people by the early 1970s) and then bought Genevac, manufacturers of laboratory vacuum pumps. His later attempts to grow porcini mushrooms commercially were not as successful. Conversely, Lucy Appleby revived the near-extinct traditional methods of Cheshire cheese-making, created her own successful business thereby, and became a model and adviser to other artisan cheese and regional food manufacturers in Britain. Paul Raymond made a fortune from erotic shows, pornographic magazines, and property investments but died lonely and embittered. Sir Jack Lyons with his brother Bernard Lyons oversaw the rapid growth of the United Drapery Stores but was later convicted of offences connected with illegal share support in the Guinness affair of the 1980s and was stripped of his knighthood. Finally, we also include Eirlys Roberts, a champion of consumer rights as the editor of Which? magazine between 1958 and 1973 and ‘the most considerable figure thrown up by the British consumer movement’, and Sir Len Neal, a trade union official who moved into personnel relations and had a notable career in industrial relations with Esso and British Rail, and was a strong supporter of the legislation to curb trade union powers in the 1980s.

Politics, government, diplomacy, and the armed forces

The leading political life in this update is that of Francis Pym, Baron Pym, who was successively chief whip under Edward Heath’s leadership of the Conservative Party and then defence secretary, leader of the house, lord president of the council, and foreign secretary in Margaret Thatcher’s first administration. A natural centrist and a tory ‘wet’, he was sacked after the 1983 election for publicly expressing the hope that his party would win with only a small majority. Peter Rees, Baron Rees, who was notable for his Pickwickian appearance, was MP for Dover 1970-87, and chief secretary to the Treasury between 1983 and 1985. On the other side of the House Eric Varley, Baron Varley was MP for Chesterfield for twenty years (1964-84) and successively secretary of state for energy and then industry between 1974 and 1979. Varley moved from the left to the right of the Labour Party. George Thomson, Baron Thomson of Monifieth, undertook a similar odyssey, though in his case after twenty years as Labour MP for Dundee East (1952-72) and four years as a European Commissioner (1973-7) he eventually joined the Liberal Democrats, serving as their spokesman on Europe in the House of Lords in the 1990s. Other prominent Liberal Democrats included now are Ray Michie, Baroness Michie of Gallanach, the Liberal Democrat MP for Argyll from 1987 to 2001; Russell Johnston, Baron Russell-Johnston, at one time leader of the Scottish Liberal Party and MP for Inverness (1964-97), first as a Liberal and then as a Liberal Democrat; and Richard Holme, Baron Holme of Cheltenham, a successful businessman and then strategist for the Liberal Party who advised both David Steel and Paddy Ashdown and was chairman of the Hansard Society.

From the backbenches we also include two individualistic Labour MPs, Leo Abse and Gwyneth Dunwoody. Abse was notorious for his exotic dress and colourful rhetoric; he was also a noted supporter of liberal causes. Dunwoody was born into the Labour movement: her father had been the party’s national organizer and her mother was a life peer. But after junior ministerial office in the 1960s, their daughter emerged as a thorn in the side of the Labour leadership in the 1990s and 2000s and a prominent critic of Tony Blair. Sandy Bruce-Lockhart, Baron Bruce-Lockhart was Conservative leader of Kent County Council (1997-2005) and nationally prominent as a key figure in the Local Government Association. Brian Keenan was an IRA paramilitary and army council member who was once described as ‘the biggest single threat to the British state’ but was later a key supporter of Gerry Adams and the Northern Ireland peace process.

John Hunt, Baron Hunt of Tanworth, who was cabinet secretary from 1973 to 1979, had the distinction of having served four different prime ministers in that position. He made the cabinet office into a genuine department of state, led it with drive and energy, and navigated a way through the many difficult economic, political, and constitutional issues of the 1970s. A Roman Catholic, he later rescued The Tablet. Sir David Serpell was permanent secretary at the Ministry of Transport (1968-70) and then the Department of the Environment (1970-2). He was also responsible for the controversial Serpell Report on the finances of British Rail. Sir Peter Kemp was by nature blunt, entrepreneurial, and extrovert—all the things, in short, which senior civil servants are not supposed to be. His role after 1988 was to implement the ‘Next Steps’ reforms of the civil service, establishing agencies to which specific government functions would be outsourced, the greatest change in its structure since the nineteenth century. Perhaps it was inevitable that he made many enemies and was forced out in 1992.

Sir Curtis Keeble was the first British ambassador to East Germany and later ambassador to the Soviet Union at the time of the invasion of Afghanistan. Dame Maeve Fort was successively ambassador to Mozambique, Lebanon, and South Africa and had ‘a knack for getting on with awkward people’. Sir Dick Franks spent his career in intelligence, first in the SOE during the Second World War and then in MI6, which he led between 1978 and 1981. Jon Vickers was general secretary of the Civil Service Union from 1962 to 1977 and ensured that it made special efforts on behalf of lower-paid and part-time government workers. Maurice Stonefrost was the leading local government finance officer of his generation and in charge of the finances of the Greater London Council from 1973 until its abolition in 1985. Good at outwitting central government, he allowed Ken Livingstone, when mayor, to pursue radical policies.

This update of the Oxford DNB also includes two winners of the Victoria Cross: Eric Wilson, an army officer, was awarded the VC for his bravery in resisting the Italian invasion of British Somaliland, and Ian Fraser, a submariner, won his for a midget submarine attack on Japanese shipping in the closing stages of the Second World War. Pearl Witherington was a wartime SOE agent who organized the ‘Wrestler’ circuit in Sologne, whose 3000 members forced the surrender of 18,000 German soldiers in 1944. Diana Barnato Walker, socialite and granddaughter of Barney Barnato, was a wartime ATA pilot (or ‘Atagirl’) and later the first British woman to fly faster than the speed of sound. Sir John Barraclough was a flying boat pilot in the Second World War who rose to be vice-chief of the defence staff and air secretary, and later collaborated with General Sir John Hackett on the best-selling The Third World War (1978). Veterans of more recent conflicts include Jim Johnson, an SAS officer who organized mercenaries to fight rebels in Yemen and later founded Britain’s first private military company, and Sam Dunlop, commodore of the Royal Fleet Auxiliary and commander of the explosives ship, Fort Austin, during the Falklands War. In the latter capacity he was heard to say: ‘You don’t have to worry about going down in this ship, you’ll only ever go up’.

Sport

Our final category, sport, includes the footballer and Celtic legend, Tommy Burns, who played over 500 times for the club, scoring 82 goals, and who won 8 caps for Scotland. Revered by Celtic fans, like many footballers before him he was less successful as a team manager. Eric Ashton played 497 games of rugby league for Wigan and won 26 caps for Great Britain, scoring over 1900 points in all. Ashton was the first rugby league player to receive a royal honour, appointed MBE in 1966. We also include Pat Moss, who was a show jumper and rally driving champion like her brother, Stirling Moss, and the first woman to win an international rally open to men and women, in 1960. Finally, in Olympic year, we have the figure skater Cecilia Colledge who, aged 11 in 1932, became, and remains, the youngest ever competitor in the winter games. Colledge went on to win national, European, and world championships in figure skating before moving to Boston in the United States to train skaters.

Our next online update

Our next online update, which will be published on Thursday 24 May 2012, 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 includes a special focus on 600 years of Londoners and metropolitan history, plus historical Olympians and pioneer athletes prior to the London Games and paralympics held between July and September 2012.

Back to top of January 2012 preface

May 2012

New online contents, May 2012

Welcome to the twenty-third 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. To mark the Olympic Games in London this summer, our May 2012 update adds biographies of 108 individuals active between the twelfth and the late-twentieth century, with a special focus on British Olympians and sporting figures; composers and writers of anthems of the British Isles; and men and women who have shaped the history of London.

As ever, full details of the May 2012 update are available from the new online contents page, and a free selection of extracts and highlights is available here. The complete dictionary (58,202 biographies and 500 theme articles) is available, free, in nearly all public libraries in the UK. Libraries offer ‘remote access’ that enables you 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.

Olympic and sporting lives

As we near the start of London 2012, the May update includes 40 biographies of Britons connected with the Olympic Games. They include not only Olympians, but noteworthy figures in sports which have been recognized as Olympic events. The dictionary already includes entries on 38 title holders at Summer and Winter Olympics—from the weightlifter Launceston Elliot (Athens, 1896) to the ice skater John Curry (Innsbruck, 1976). There are also notable forerunners of the Olympic movement—such as Robert Dover, organizer of the seventeenth-century Cotswold Olimpick Games, and William Penny Brookes, founder of the Shropshire Olympic Games in the 1860s—as well as Sir Ludwig Guttmann, creator in 1948 of what has since become the Paralympics.

Research for the dictionary’s May 2012 update has re-discovered some landmark British Olympic lives. The Olympic appearances of Donald Osborne [Don] Finlay (1909-1970), a serving RAF officer, were divided by the Second World War. In 1932 (at Los Angeles) he won a bronze in the 110m hurdles, followed by silver in 1936 at Berlin. Here he captained the British team which gave the ‘eyes right’, rather than the Nazi salute, when parading past Hitler, and were met with silence from the crowd. Finlay flew a Spitfire during the Battle of Britain and, aged thirty-nine, participated in the 1948 London Games when he took the oath on behalf of the competitors. The first British woman to win an individual swimming medal was the Leicester clothes factory machinist Jennie Fletcher (1890-1968) who took the bronze in the 100m freestyle at Stockholm in 1912, the first Olympiad at which women’s aquatic events were included in the programme. John Edward [Jack] London (1905-1966), the son of a British Guianan doctor, and resident in the UK since infancy, became Britain’s first black Olympic medallist when he won silver in the 100m at Amsterdam (1928). London Foreign Office typist Eileen Hiscock (1909-1958), Bury mill worker Nellie Halstead (1910-1991), and Willesden shop assistant Violet Webb (1915-1999), whose daughter also became a British Olympic medallist, were members of the team of five women who set out in July 1932 from Waterloo for Los Angeles, where their bronze in the 4x100m was Britain’s first women’s athletics Olympic medal. Four years earlier, at Amsterdam, Britain’s flag-bearer had been the research chemist Malcolm Nokes (1897-1986) who had previously taken bronze in the hammer throwing at Paris (1924). Nokes was the last Briton to win a throwing medal at an Olympics until 1984, and was among a small group of pioneers who sought to raise the profile of throwing events within British athletics. The Metropolitan police sergeant Harry Mallin (1892-1969), middleweight boxing gold medallist at Antwerp (1920) and Paris (1924), was the first man successfully to defend an Olympic boxing title at any weight—an achievement that held until 1956. Another long-term British record holder was the schoolmaster Guy Montagu Butler (1899-1981), a 400m specialist whose haul of four track medals, at Antwerp (1920) and Paris (1924), was not superseded until Sebastian Coe’s success in the 1984 Games.

Rowing is represented by the Scottish-born William Nicoll Duthie Kinnear (1880-1974), a London department store salesman who won the Olympic sculling title at Stockholm in 1912. An unexpected and controversial gold was achieved by the British ice hockey team, captained by the Surrey businessman Carl Erhardt (1897-1988) at the winter Olympics in Germany in 1936. The City of London stockbroker Stanley Howard Shoveller (1881-1959) was a double gold-medallist as centre-forward of the winning men’s hockey teams in 1908 (London) and 1920 (Antwerp), as well as being the leading exponent of the men’s game at the height of its popularity as an amateur sport in Britain. London post office clerk William Reuben [Bill] Applegarth (1890-1958) was gold medallist in the British 4x100m relay team at Stockholm (1912), but his own sprint performances peaked in 1914, when the outbreak of war deprived him of the chance for individual Olympic titles; thereafter he turned professional and the opportunity for Olympic competition ended.

Whilst Olympic success has long been a high point for many sportsman and women, other non-medallists have also proved to be leaders in their field. Twenty-three times national ladies’ archery champion, Alice Blanche Legh (1856-1948), declined an invitation to compete at the London Olympic Games of 1908 in order to prepare her national title defence. The All-England women’s lawn tennis championship winner at Wimbledon in 1912, Ethel Larcombe (1879-1965), was a more remarkable badminton player, dominating the English championships in the early years of the twentieth century in an event which did not receive Olympic recognition until 1992. At the Lake Placid winter games (1932) the eleven-year-old Manchester figure skater Megan Taylor (1920-1993) was the top-ranked Briton but outside the medal places. Over the next eight years Taylor enjoyed an intense rivalry with her fellow English skater, Cecilia Colledge (whose biography was added to the dictionary in January 2012) which saw Taylor win two world titles in 1938 and 1939. Swansea shoe shop owner Arthur John Whitford (1908-1996)—the highest-scoring member of the British gymnastics team at Amsterdam (1928)—went on to be British gymnastics champion on ten occasions, and coached post-war British Olympic teams. Coaches are also represented by Walter Septimus Brickett (1865-1933), a London piano maker turned swimming instructor, who trained the British swimming teams in 1908 and 1912, and Geoffrey Harry George [Geoff] Dyson (1914-1981) who developed a serious interest in athletics while in the army, and became Britain’s first national athletics coach in 1947, fighting for the status of his profession at a time when amateur administrators did not always recognize the value of scientific approaches to training. Among the athletes whom Dyson coached was Oxford ballet teacher Maureen Gardner (1928-1974), silver medallist in the 80m hurdles at the 1948 London Games. In the final Gardner and her main rival were tied at exactly 11.2 seconds and first place was decided on a photograph; according to the Times, her achievement was the best second place in the history of athletics. Soon after the Games, Gardner and Dyson were married.

Forerunners of the Olympic movement in Britain included the Liverpool gymnasium proprietor John Hulley (1832-1875) and his collaborator the Liverpool merchant and philanthropist Charles Pierre Melly (1829-1888). In 1865 they founded the National Olympian Association which, although short-lived, established the principle of regular games, held in rotation in large towns, on an amateur basis. Cheltenham headmaster and clergyman Robert de Courcy Laffan (1853-1927) impressed the creator of the modern Olympic Games, Pierre de Coubertin, by his commitment to sport as a moral force, and went on to become a founder and first secretary of the British Olympic Association. Olympianism in Britain also had roots in rural games, such as those held at Grasmere, in the Lake District, where the Ulverston hotel-keeper Tom Ray (1862-1904) was among the Lakeland athletes who led the development of pole vaulting (or pole climbing as Ray practised it).

Other pioneers of Olympic sports include Horace Alfred Ford (1821/2-1880), the national men’s archery champion for ten consecutive years, who achieved a record score in 1857. Ford’s enduring achievement was to establish a systematic approach to the sport. This he disseminated through an influential book on its theory and practice though, following a religious conversion, he came to regret his book’s success in popularizing archery. Another sport popular on Victorian lawns (and an Olympic event in 1900) was croquet, whose leading proponent and rule-maker was the London games manufacturer Walter James Whitmore (1831-1872). Professional swimmer and showman Frederick Edward Beckwith (1821-1898) put on aquatic displays with his family (the ‘Beckwith frogs’), and kept swimming and its techniques in the public eye, but was of the generation who became marginalized when competitive swimming came under the control of an amateur governing body. His daughter Agnes Alice Beckwith (b.1861) performed until the early twentieth century, and can be seen as paving the way for the women who competed in Olympic swimming in Stockholm in 1912. After a period of employment in Japan, the engineer Edward William Barton Wright (1860-1951) imported to Britain a form of martial arts which he named Bartitsu, drawing upon jujitsu which he helped to popularize by public displays. The sport of cycle road racing in Britain was organized by the cycling journalist Frederick Thomas Bidlake (1867-1933), who got round objections to massed events by devising a successful format of time trial racing, which enjoyed a place of unique importance in British cycle sport. Beeston bicycle manufacturer Thomas Humber (1841-1910) was among the industrialists whose products were promoted by their use in racing.

The organization of women’s sport in Britain is represented by two of the leading figures in the All-England Women’s Hockey Association, who spearheaded the sport’s phenomenal growth in the first half of the twentieth century (though it was not until 1980 that the women’s game was admitted to Olympics). Edith Marie Thompson (1877-1961), a student of King’s College, London, was one of the association’s founding members, edited its journal, the Hockey Field, and between the wars combined promoting British women’s emigration to the colonies with the organization of international hockey tournaments. Another professional woman Hilda Light (1890-1960) was an administrator at the Booksellers’ Association and president of the AEWHA for fifteen years, as well as a prime mover in the holding of women’s hockey internationals at Wembley stadium. The British physical education teacher Constance Mary Katherine Applebee (1873-1981), who lived to the age of one hundred and eight, is remembered for her part in exporting women’s field hockey to North America. Women’s football, not admitted to the summer Olympics until 1996, is represented by Preston nurse Lillian [Lily] Parr (1905-1978), who joined the Dick, Kerr’s Ladies football team in the 1920/1 season, and was admired for her play as an outside-left in a series of well-attended matches held before December 1921, when the Football Association banned women’s matches at football league grounds.

Also featured are the early stars of British women’s athletics who competed under the auspices of the Women’s Amateur Athletic Association instituted ninety years ago (1922) and took part in the Women’s Olympiads (or Women’s World Games)—also founded in 1922 in response to the exclusion of women’s athletics from the Olympics. Londoner Mary Lines (1893-1978), a waitress who attended physical education classes at Regent Street Polytechnic, recorded a series of victories, as well as British and world records, in sprinting and long jump events in international tournaments during the early 1920s. Woolwich Polytechnic athlete Hilda Hatt (1903-1975) was British high jump champion but switched to hurdles, in which she became the British title holder from 1925 to 1929. Clerical officer Vera Maud Palmer (1901-1998) held British titles in the 220 and 440 yards, and set world records at 250 metres, before serving British women’s athletics as an administrator for over sixty years. Willesden sprinter Eileen Edwards (1903-1988), set world records at 200 metres in 1926 and 1927, and lifted the Women’s World Games title at 250 metres at Gothenburg in 1926. In the previous year the seventeen year-old Peckham schoolgirl Phyllis Green (1908-1999) became the first woman to clear five feet in the high jump, and also held the British women’s long jump title, but had only a short athletic career, later becoming a missionary. The British women’s discus title holder for five years—and captain of the British team at the 1926 Gothenburg women’s games—was Florence Ethel Birchenough (1894-1973) from Acton, West London. Her rival for the British title, Mary Weston (1905-1978), had a physical abnormality and was later found to have been wrongly identified as female at birth, the birth being registered as male in 1936. Silver medallist in the British relay team at the 1930 World Women’s Games at Prague, Ethel Scott (1907-1984), an East Londoner of Jamaican parentage, was the first black woman to represent Britain at athletics. Smethwick postwoman Gladys Lunn (1908-1988) took the gold in the 1000 metres at the Prague games, and followed this with gold in the 880 yards at the Empire Games held in London in 1934. However, as world 800 metre record holder, Lunn was denied the chance of Olympic gold at Los Angeles, since women’s middle distance events were excluded from the Olympic programme from 1932 until 1960. The women’s marathon was admitted to the Olympics in 1984, nearly sixty years after a South London solo runner, the enigmatic Violet Piercy (b.1889?), first undertook a timed run from Windsor to London as a prelude to a series of distance events in the 1930s.

Chess had its own Olympiad, the first official tournament taking place in London in 1927. The dictionary’s May 2012 update adds three lives from the history of British chess. The Pembrokeshire master mariner William Davies Evans (1790-1872) invented a three-colour system of shipping warning lights, which became compulsory for British steam vessels, but is best remembered for the Evans gambit, which became the most popular opening chess gambit of the nineteenth century. Bristolian Mary Rudge (1842-1919) learned chess in early childhood, and became the leading English woman player, winning the first Ladies’ International Chess Tournament, held in London in 1897. Hungarian Isidor Gunsberg (1854-1930) was brought by his father to London, where he became a member of the City of London Chess Club and competed in master competitions for twenty years before 1914.

Anthems: composers and lyricists

National anthems are, of course, a feature of Olympic and many other sporting events. With an eye to their imminent performance in London, this update traces the authors of some of the anthems which claimed recognition among the nations constituting the United Kingdom. Following the execution of the ‘Manchester Martyrs’, in 1867 the journalist and Irish nationalist Timothy Daniel Sullivan (1827-1914) composed ‘God Save Ireland’ which was widely sung at Irish gatherings in the late-nineteenth century. It was supplanted following the 1916 Easter Rising by the more militant ‘A Soldier’s Song’, written in 1907 by the Irish Republican Brotherhood member Peadar Kearney (1883-1942) and officially adopted as the anthem of the Irish Free State in 1926. Contemporary with Kearney’s anthem, the Manx folk revivalist William Henry Gill (1839-1923) composed ‘O Land of My Birth’; intended to stand side-by-side with ‘God Save the King’, it was officially recognized as the anthem of the Isle of Man in 2003. Sporting events have been the occasion for the performance of two Scottish anthems. ‘Scotland the Brave’, used as the anthem for Team Scotland at the Commonwealth Games between 1962 and 2006, was written in 1952 by the Glaswegian journalist Clifford Hanley (1922-1999) to a tune which was part of an older tradition of Scottish piping. ‘Flower of Scotland’, drafted in 1964 by Edinburgh folk musician Roy Williamson (1936-1990), and first recorded by his band The Corries in 1969, was first adopted by the Scottish rugby team at Murrayfield in 1990, and subsequently by other Scottish teams, including Team Scotland in the 2010 Commonwealth Games.

Ceremonial and pageantry are represented in several other new additions to the Oxford DNB. Robert George Windsor-Clive, earl of Plymouth (1857-1923), first commissioner of works in Arthur Balfour’s government, carried through in 1904 the realignment and laying out of the Mall as the processional approach to Buckingham Palace, and now a familiar part of state occasions. Between 1907 and 1932 the pageant master Frank Lascelles (1875-1934) organized spectacular mass performances to mark the Quebec Tercentenary (1908), the Union of South Africa (1910), the Festival of Empire and Pageant of London (1911), and at Calcutta (1912) on the occasion of the royal visit to India. Forty years after the Festival of Empire came the Festival of Britain (1951) at which the best-known and most innovative structure was the Dome of Discovery on the south bank of the Thames, designed by the architect Ralph Tubbs (1912-1996). The dome was the festival’s principal exhibition space and, at 365 feet in diameter and 95 feet in height, was then the world’s largest structure of its kind. Tubbs’s other London works include Baden Powell House and the Indian YMCA; despite its popularity, and a campaign for its preservation, the Dome of Discovery was dismantled after the festival. Similarly brief, but likewise innovative and influential, was an early attempt to regulate London’s traffic with the use of roadside semaphore signals devised by the railway engineer John Peake Knight (1828-1886). Knight’s bid to control traffic and allow pedestrians to cross busy roads proved short-lived: contemporaries knew him better for his organization of the railway system to the south of London, and especially the conveyance of large numbers of race-goers to the annual Derby Day at Epsom. Further along the North Downs, Box Hill—venue for cycling events at London 2012—was saved for the nation through the munificence of the City of London financier Leopold Salomons (1841-1915) who in 1913 paid the entire cost of acquiring the land as an open public space.

London lives, 13th to 20th century

As with many of the sporting figures described above, a number of our new ‘London lives’ recreate the life stories of people typically associated with well-known episodes or events from the capital’s past. One such is the St Pancras road-sweeper, Henry Croft (1861-1930) who was also the ‘Original King of the Pearlies’, having popularized pearly dress as a way of gaining attention at charitable events. In a lifetime of collecting Croft is said to have raised as much as £5000 and his funeral in January 1930 was described as ‘one of the largest that London has seen for many years’. The image of a policeman on a white horse, edging back the crowds from the Wembley pitch in April 1923, remains one of the best-known in English football history. Until recently, little was known of George Scorey (1882-1965), the officer whose actions were recorded that day at the FA Cup Final—the first held at the new Wembley stadium. Scorey joined the army in 1898, and served in the South Africa War and throughout the First World War. In 1919 he joined the mounted branch of the Metropolitan Police and was issued with horse ‘no. 62’, a 7-year old grey named ‘Billy’ with whom he made his famous Wembley appearance. From the outset Scorey emerged as the day’s key figure, distinguished by his actions and also by his grey mount who appeared white in newsreel and newspaper photographs. After 1923 Scorey kept a low profile, refusing invitations to appear in public. Not being a fan of the game, he declined complimentary tickets to subsequent Wembley finals.

Other new additions to the Oxford DNB are people once celebrated but now relatively little known. Jane Cakebread (1827/8-1898) was an inebriate and serial offender whose alcoholism made her a familiar late-Victorian criminal, as well as a subject of medical study. Her 277 appearances before a police court are thought to be a record, enlivened by her colourful abuse of modern policing and the poor manners of modern officers. Cakebread’s celebrity brought her to the attention of social reformers and psychologists. Her case was used to argue in favour of allowing courts to send alcoholics for treatment rather than to prison, resulting in the Inebriates Act of 1898. Cakebread died in December 1898 and was buried following a ceremony attended by just one mourner. Despite this, the Illustrated Police News described her as ‘one of the most famous figures in the metropolis’. For sixty years the Victorian ‘time-keeper’ Ruth Belville (1854-1943) carried a chronometer (set weekly at Greenwich) to London businesses to enable them to keep the correct time. At the height of her trade, Belville supplied 200 London clock and instrument makers with the correct time, though her success faltered with the introduction, from the 1920s, of electronic time signals and the Speaking Clock. Other first-time biographies include that of Agnes Cowper (b.c. 1559, d. after 1619), a Southwark capmaker, whose testimony to parish official provides a rare and remarkably detailed account of one woman’s descent from trade to domestic service to poverty in early modern London. More fortunate was Cowper’s contemporary, the Wandsworth property speculator and benefactor, Henry ‘Dog’ Smith (1549 1628), who gave £1000 apiece to several Surrey towns, but refused alms to those who had mocked his beggarly appearance and canine companion, giving rise to his nickname. His name lives on with the Henry Smith Charity, now based in Leadenhall Street, London. A slightly later seventeenth-century figure is Sir Thomas Bludworth (b.in or before 1623, d. 1686) who is now best known for his ill-judged response when told of the ‘Great Fire’ on 2 September 1666. Then London’s lord mayor, Bludworth’s initial comment—that the fire was so insignificant that ‘a woman might piss it out’—has been handed down through the generations. Bludworth soon realized the extent of the disaster and was overcome by the impending destruction, as Pepys recorded after encountering the lord mayor later that day. But there was more to Bludworth, as revealed in the Oxford DNB’s detailed account of his successful career as a City merchant. Likewise, though mocked in subsequent histories, Sir Thomas’s business interests clearly did not suffer as a result of his conduct in September 1666. By contrast, one man who probably does deserve his poor historical reputation is Richard Mabot (c.1487-1539), master of St Thomas’s Hospital, which under his watch became synonymous with ‘bawdy’ practices and people of ‘evyll and noughty conversacion’. Mabot led by example, ignoring the hospital’s educational role, neglecting its responsibilities to the poor, and appropriating hospital property, until his removal from office by Thomas Cromwell in the late 1530s.

At the other end of the spectrum was William Elsyng (d. 1349), a City mercer who established a hospital in Cripplegate for the blind and destitute, providing care rather than treatment. Known as St Mary’s within Cripplegate or the Elsynghospital, this was a large and innovative project for an ordinary citizen and took its place alongside St Bartholomew's in ministering to the needy. Following Elsyng’s death his inmates were regularly remembered by London citizens in their wills; today the remains of the hospital’s chapel can be seen on London Wall, near to the Museum of London. A rather different approach to perceived social decline was taken by the eighteenth-century magistrate Sir John Gonson (1676/7-1765) who was an energetic member of the Society for the Reformation of Manners and a zealous prosecutor of bawdy-house keepers and suppliers of gin. Sir John’s reputation led to his depiction in Hogarth’s morality series, A Harlot’s Progress, where he is shown about to arrest the fictional prostitute Moll Hackabout.

We gain further insights into the medieval and early modern City in the lives of John Causton (d.1353)—a mercer who represented London five times in parliament—and the royal fishmonger turned lord mayor Sir William Hampton (d.1482/3), here included with his niece, the vowess and benefactor Alice Hampton (d.1516) who achieved a rare degree of autonomy for a woman in late-medieval England. Lives of several parts include Hugh Losse (d.1555), a one-time surveyor for Henry VIII who acquired a number of prominent London rents in the wake of the dissolution of the monasteries, and the Aldgate engineer, projector, and alchemist, Gavin Smith (b.c.1550, d. in or after 1604), whose numerous metropolitan schemes included an offer to James I to provide water to the City of London. Finally there is Adam Pinkhurst (fl.1385-1410) who worked variously as a City clerk, collector for the exchequer, and scrivener, but is now known as the scribe of the two most important manuscripts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

Metropolitan activists and campaigners added in May 2012 include the biologists George Scott Williamson (1883-1953) and Innes Hope Pearse (1889-1978), the so-called ‘Peckham Pioneers’ who established the Peckham Health Centre in the 1920s. Key to their work was a concept of public health through personal responsibility, with a focus on well-being (rather than treatment) via the facilities at their modernist health centre. In the 1940s the Colonial Office civil servant Ivor Cummings (1913-1992) gained a reputation as someone who would help any black person in trouble. In 1948 he was a central to the arrangements for receiving Jamaican settlers who arrived on the Empire Windrush, while during the war he investigated instances of a ‘colour bar’ among London trades and in the provision of air-raid protection. There are echoes of Cummings’s work in that of Olive Morris (1952-1979) who, in 1970s Brixton, became a prominent critic of racial discrimination in the provision of housing and employment. A member of the Black Panther movement, Morris later campaigned to scrap the ‘sus’ laws which allowed the police to stop people on the suspicion that they intended to commit a crime. The death of Morris’s contemporary, the teacher and anti-fascist protester Blair Peach (1946-1979), caused widespread concern and led to an internal Metropolitan Police investigation. The police’s subsequent refusal to disclose their findings—partially released in 2010—has since kept Peach’s name and case in the public eye.

Londoners who left their mark on the capital’s cultural life take several forms. Artists and writers for whom London was a principal theme include the painter William Logsdail (1859-1944) who specialized in large canvasses of city ceremonials, processions, and landmarks such as St Paul’s and Ludgate Hill. The writers Geoffrey Maiden [pseud. James Curtis] (1907-1977) and Gerald Kersh (1911-1968) evoked a less salubrious city in their popular interwar novels. Maiden’s The Gilt Kid and They Drive by Night (the latter successfully adapted for film) recreated a metropolitan underworld of brutality and rough justice. Kersh’s most successful London novels, Night and the City (1938) and Fowler’s End (1957)—set in Soho and dominated by unscrupulous and greedy businessmen—have, like Curtis’s novels, recently gained a new generation of readers. Somewhere between Logsdail’s grand ceremonials and the low life of Curtis and Kersh, sits 18 Folgate Street, Spitalfields, the ‘living museum’ created by Dennis Severs (1949-1999). Over twenty years, the Californian-born Severs designed a house-cum-museum that purported to be the residence of several generations of a French Huguenot family; here Severs also lived, with few modern amenities, and gave atmospheric tours of the family’s world. Others who left their mark on the capital’s cultural life include the arts promoters Anya (1903-1993) and Patricia Angadi (1914-2001) who—with the help of Yehudi Menuhin, Benjamin Britten, and others—established the Asian Musical Circle and cast themselves as cultural ambassadors of Anglo-Indian relations in post-war Britain.

Popular entertainers in the May 2012 update include the American-born music-hall performer Ella Shields (1879-1952) who found fame as ‘Burlington Bertie from Bow’ in 1915. The role of Bertie had been created by Shields’s husband for a male comic who declined the part; Shields, who had first performed in male dress in 1910, took on the role and achieved a great success as a cross-dressing social climber who apes West End manners. Also American-born were Shields’s contemporaries, the pianist Turner Layton (1894-1978) and singer Clarence Johnstone (1885-1953), who played to diverse audiences, from the West End Café de Paris to the Hackney Empire, during the 1920s and 1930s. A decade on Phyllis Dixey (1914-1964) courted controversy with her ‘Peek-a-Boo’ revues at London’s Whitehall Theatre, where Dixey and her troupe developed the striptease from artistic tableau to fan dance routine. Another wartime entertainer was the actor and song writer, Hubert Gregg (1914-2004), best-known for his number, ‘Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner’, written in 1944. The song, which was subsequently taken up by Bud Flanagan, remains a popular evocation of metropolitan life of which Gregg later commented: ‘It took me 20 minutes to write before supper one night. It’s only got sixteen bars but people seem to like it.’ In the year that Gregg penned his hit song, many Londoners were exposed to a new threat from Nazi Germany, the V1 and V2 flying bombs. In a matter of weeks, these attacks caused a more intense rate of destruction of London’s housing stock than the seven month Blitz of 1940-41. In response Malcolm Trustram Eve (1894-1976), then chair of the War Damage Commission, was appointed to head a new ‘London repair executive’ to undertake renovations. By September 1945 he had achieved ‘tolerable’ repairs to 70% of the 719,300 properties (homes for 3 million Londoners) needing attention. At an earlier stage of the war, Euan Wallace (1892-1941) served as the commissioner for London’s civil defence region—responsible for the inspection and co-ordination of the capital’s air-raid defences across an area covering 720 square miles. One further life shaped by war was that of Edward Young (1913-2003), a successful submarine commander in the Far East, who recounted his wartime experiences in One of Our Submarines (1952) which became the 1000th title to be published by Penguin Books. Young’s association with Penguin dated to the company’s formation in 1935 when, as a young designer, he was asked by Allen Lane to sketch the penguins at London Zoo. It was Young’s jaunty birds that graced the early orange, green, red, and blue Penguins and Pelicans, whose colour coding he also devised.

Our next online update

Our next online update will be published on Thursday 20 September 2012 and further extends the dictionary’s coverage of people in all periods up to the late-twentieth century. September’s update includes a special focus on the church in twentieth-century Britain, as well as lives of noted black and Asian Britons.

Back to top of May 2012 preface

September 2012 preface

New online contents, September 2012

Welcome to the twenty–fourth 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 September 2012 update adds biographies of 124 individuals active between the thirteenth and the early twenty-first century, with a special focus on individuals who shaped religious practice and the churches in modern Britain.

 

September’s release also continues two long-term research projects (begun in 2010) to extend the dictionary’s coverage of black and Asian figures who shaped national life, and of teachers, translators, and promoters of modern languages. Following the conclusion, in 2011, of another of our projects—to provide biographies of every English bishop from the Conquest to the Reformation (see May 2011)—we turn now to the abbots, abbesses, priors, prioresses, monks and canons who made up the late-medieval religious. September’s update begins this new project which we’ll continue in future releases. In addition to these sets of biographies, we’ve also the usual mix of life stories—including Sir William Scawen, whose personal fortune helped to create the Bank of England (in 1694), the pioneer of geriatric hospital care, Oscar Olbrich, and Monica Jones, friend, correspondent, and mentor of the poet Philip Larkin.

 

As ever, full details of the September 2012 update are available from the new online contents page, and a free selection of extracts and highlights is available here. The complete dictionary (58,326 biographies and over 500 theme articles) is available, free, in nearly all public libraries in the UK. Libraries offer ‘remote access’ that enables you 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.

The churches in the twentieth century

The September 2012 update includes a selection of lives which reveal the ways in which the churches—and the established church in particular—addressed the challenges of the twentieth century. For many of those included in this selection, the First World War was a formative influence. The Anglican bishop of Birmingham Henry Russell Wakefield (1854-1933) visited the Western front for a fortnight in 1915 and wrote in The Times of his experiences. He found the morale of the troops to be high, and celebrated the ‘Christian patriotism’ which he found there, and welcomed wartime sacrifice as an antidote to the materialism of the pre-war world. An Oxford don and future bishop, Edward Arthur Burroughs (1882-1934), who though declared unfit for military service made several visits to the forces, was moved by the loss of friends and former pupils during the war, and came to national prominence with his calls for moral renewal. (Frank) Russell Barry (1890-1976), a regimental chaplain ordained in the year the war broke out, witnessed the slaughter on the Somme, and came away convinced of the inadequacy of the traditional ideas of God and Christianity. In peacetime, he addressed contemporary moral problems, taking a progressive view on issues such as birth control within marriage. Appointed a bishop by Winston Churchill in 1941, Barry is described as exemplifying ‘the liberal tendency that dominated the upper echelons of the Church of England for much of the twentieth century’.

The wartime emergency prompted an Anglican clergyman’s widow Mabel Barltrop (1866-1934) to campaign for the opening of the box of prophecies, sealed—over a century earlier—by the millenarian Joanna Southcott, whose works had been reprinted in the early twentieth century by Alice Seymour (1857-1947). The community established by Barltrop in Bedford in 1919 to promote the cause numbered several female relations of clergymen, disillusioned by the very limited role which the church allowed them. In 1919, a clergyman’s daughter, Constance Adelaide Smith (1878-1938), began a campaign to promote mothering Sunday as a celebration of motherhood, in response to the secular mother’s day initiated in North America. Within twenty years mothering Sunday was celebrated in churches throughout the British empire. Gertrude May King (1867-1954), the sister of a colonial bishop, accompanied her brother throughout his ecclesiastical career, which took her to Madagascar. Returning to Britain in 1919, she became secretary to the Mothers’ Union which she worked to develop as a global network of women, initiating an intercessory calendar that focused on women’s issues in the weekly celebration of Anglican communion.

A former medical missionary in India, Helen Beatrice de Rastricke Hanson (1874-1926), linked women’s missionary work with the movement for women’s suffrage. Another suffragist, the Wesleyan Methodist Agnes Elizabeth Slack (1858-1946), campaigned for fifty years—as secretary of the World’s Women’s Christian Temperance Union—for control of the drink trade, and was encouraged by the successes of international prohibition reformers in the 1920s. The lives of three daughters of the Salvation Army’s founders, Evangeline Cory Booth (1865-1950), world leader of the Salvation Army, Emma Moss Booth-Tucker (1860-1903), commander of the Salvation Army in the United States, and Lucy Milward Booth-Hellberg (1868-1953), commander in Denmark, Norway, and South America, exemplify the position that women held in the army’s hierarchy and the internationalism of its scope. Zoë Barbara Fairfield (1878-1936), who for nearly three decades helped to run the inter-denominational Student Christian Movement, ensured that gender equality became a cornerstone of the movement, and extended its mission to include international affairs. In his Christmas radio broadcast in 1939, shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War, George VI quoted lines from a book of poems privately published in 1912 by Minnie Louise Haskins (1875-1957) who had worked in Madras with the Methodist Missionary Society’s zenana mission. To a country facing the uncertainties of war, the lines in the king’s speech struck a chord, and their author found unexpected fame. During those war years the spiritual reflections of a Roman Catholic laywoman, (Frances) Caryll Houselander (1901-1954), became best-sellers.

Ecumenism was the aim of many of those whose biographies are included in this update. William John Birkbeck (1859-1916), an Anglo-Catholic layman, died shortly after returning from one of his visits to Russia, where he worked to promote the reunion of Church of England and the Russian Orthodox church. A more unconventional figure, with ‘hazy’ ideas of church order, Arnold Harris Mathew (1852-1919), was ordained a Roman Catholic priest, then attempted to enter the Anglican ministry before making contact with the Old Catholic church, and forming his own hierarchy, styling himself archbishop, with a view to restoring the Church of England with the western church. George Francis Graham Brown (1891-1942), who had been wounded in the trenches during the First World War, took part in meetings between Anglicans and Old Catholics in Germany in 1931, and as Anglican bishop in Jerusalem from 1932 not only attempted to overcome divisions between Christians but also sought to reconcile Jewish and Muslim communities. A canon of Liverpool, Frederick William Dwelly (1881-1957), who had a flair for liturgy in devising special services for the city’s newly-consecrated (1924) cathedral, found himself at the centre of a national controversy in 1933, when he allowed a Unitarian minister Lawrence Redfern (1888-1967) to preach there. A conscientious objector in First World War, (John) Eric Fenn (1899-1995), trained for Presbyterian ministry and took part in the conferences in the late 1930s that led in 1948 to the establishment of the World Council of Churches, though was best known in Britain for his wartime BBC radio broadcasts Lift Up Your Hearts.

Local pastoral work is a theme of several new biographies. A Victorian precedent is represented by Archibald Geikie Brown (1844-1922), Baptist pastor of Stepney, who combined urban mission work at the East End tabernacle with philanthropy and social investigation in this deprived area of London. Also in East London, William Henry Lax (1868-1937), Methodist minister at the Poplar and Bow mission, preached in the open-air outside the docks, and was assiduous in house-to-house visiting; his work made the Poplar Mission famous worldwide and he even featured in a film. Another inner-city cleric, Peter Green (1871-1961), vicar of Salford for forty years from 1911, became renowned as ‘the greatest parish priest in the Church of England’. Daily Communion was central to Green’s devotional life, as it was for another priest in a northern parish, Ernest William Southcott (1915-1976), who from 1949 in his parish of Halton, Leeds, celebrated communion in parishioners’ homes as a means of linking church and people. John Cyril [Jack] Putterill (1892-1980), vicar of Thaxted from 1942 to 1973, maintained his parish’s position as a focal point of English Christian socialism, and remained uncompromising in politics. A Church of Scotland minister Geoffrey Mackintosh [Geoff] Shaw (1927-1978) was a leading light in the Gorbals Group formed in 1957 to carry out the church’s social mission by living among the community in one of the most deprived areas of Glasgow. During the 1960s he moved into Labour Party politics, became convener of Strathclyde regional council, and at the time of his death was reckoned a front runner for the leadership of a Scottish devolved government.

Among those who promoted revivalism was Alexander Alfred Boddy (1854-1930), the energetic incumbent of All Saints’, Monkwearmouth, Sunderland who, inspired by the Welsh revival of 1904, led Pentecostal (or charismatic) conventions at Sunderland in the years before First World War. Arthur Douglas Brown (1874-1940), Baptist minister Balham, south London, and son of Archibald Geikie Brown, led a revival at Lowestoft in 1921, though he was concerned less with conversion than renewal among existing church members. A different approach was taken by the full-time evangelist John [Jock] Troup (1896-1954), ‘a rough Gospel-preacher’ who led missions to fishing communities on the north-east coast of Scotland in the same period. Later in the twentieth century David Christopher Knight Watson (1933-1984), who underwent a personal experience of spiritual renewal in the early 1960s, developed forms of worship in his York parish which made it a symbol of charismatic practice in the Church of England in the late 1970s, and succeeding in doing so without alienating senior figures in the church.

The restored Roman Catholic hierarchy in Britain is represented by Edward Ilsley (1838-1926), appointed to the see of Birmingham 1888, and its first archbishop in 1911. A successor, Francis Joseph Grimshaw (1901-1965), became the fifth archbishop of Birmingham in 1954 during a period of remarkable numerical growth in English Roman Catholicism, with 45 new churches and 75 new schools being built in the diocese during his time. Towards the end of the nineteenth century the Roman Catholic priest William Francis Barry (1849-1930), best known for his novel The New Antigone (1887), investigated the themes of poverty and revolutionary nationalism in relation to Christianity in his fiction, and in 1917 wrote in support of the allied war effort. Anatole Andreas Aloys von Hügel (1854-1928) organized the successful campaign in the 1890s to lift the Roman Catholic hierarchy’s prohibition on Roman Catholic undergraduates studying at Cambridge University.

Three Glamorgan miners’ sons represent the variety of religious trajectories in this period. George Jeffreys (1889-1962) experienced ‘new birth’ during the Welsh revival of 1904, and went on to found the Elim Pentecostal Alliance, which enjoyed extraordinary growth in the fifteen years after the end of the First World War. David Richard Davies (1889-1958) trained for the Congregational ministry, and briefly became a Unitarian before returning to Congregationalism. Davies served as a minister in the 1920s but was drawn to Marxism and left the church, only to undergo a religious experience which brought him back into the church, and eventually into the Anglican ministry. (William Thomas) Pennar Davies (1911-1996), who underwent a spiritual crisis in late 1930s in the context of the ‘long tragedy of the people of Wales’, explored spirituality in his Welsh language poetry and short stories, and became a committed member of Plaid Cymru.

Others were preoccupied with developments in theology. Daniel Henry Charles Bartlett (1871-1957), the incumbent of a Liverpool parish, strove to keep the evangelical wing of the Anglican church to its ‘old paths’ and led the creation in 1922 of a new society, the Bible Churchmen’s Missionary Society. (William Henry) Griffith Thomas (1861-1924), principal of Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, moved to North America in 1910 where he became a staunch upholder of biblical fundamentalism. David Martin McIntyre (1859-1938), a Free Church of Scotland minister, became principal of the Bible Training Institute in Glasgow—a pioneering institution for lay theological training—and sought the preservation of orthodoxy in a series of popular devotional works published between the wars. The Anglican evangelical, (Frederic Sumpter) Guy Warman (1872-1953), a future bishop of Manchester, wanted evangelicals to engage more positively with modern theological scholarship in the early twentieth century. The Cambridge scholar Alexander Roper [Alec] Vidler (1899-1991), author of A Plain Man’s Guide to Christianity (1936) was a leading Christian apologist at the forefront of new trends in Anglican theology, who in the early 1960s drew large audiences of Cambridge undergraduates to his open lectures on ‘Objections to Christian belief’. The professor of divinity at Glasgow University from 1956, Ronald Gregor Smith (1913-1968) explored the meaning of faith in a secular society, and mediated the work of leading continental religious thinkers to a specialized British readership.

Several figures in the selection contributed to the churches’ changing approach to the ethics of sex, marriage, and family life during the twentieth century. The joyless and austere household of a survivor of the Victorian episcopate, John Sheepshanks (1834-1912), in other respects a progressive figure as bishop of Norwich, was recalled by his daughters. As suffragan bishop of Croydon, Edward Sydney Woods (1877-1953), confronted the potential moral hazard of cinema by instigating in the early 1930s the ‘Croydon experiment’ of allowing cinema opening on Sundays, by promoting healthy stories, and by eliminating films that made ‘a special feature of crime, cruelty, and loose morality’. Service as an army chaplain in the First World War led the Presbyterian minister Arthur Herbert Gray (1868-1956) to advocate a renewed theology of sex within marriage, linked to a broader incarnational theology centred around the conviction that human love is a reflection of divine love. The practical outcome was the creation in 1942 of the Marriage Guidance Council, chaired by Gray. Its secretary was a Methodist minister David Robert Mace (1907-1990) who with his wife and collaborator Vera Chapman (later Mace) (1902-2008) went on to promote the movement in North America. A friend of Mace, Derrick Sherwin Bailey (1910-1984), a university chaplain at Edinburgh before working for the Church of England Moral Welfare Council, advocated in the early 1950s the decriminalization of homosexuality, on the basis of a distinction between ‘sin’ and ‘crime’, and influenced the Wolfenden committee’s report in 1957. Jack Putterill’s successor as vicar of Thaxted, Essex, Peter Charles Edward Elers (1930-1986) promoted tolerance of homosexuality and was a founder in 1976 of the Gay Christian Movement. In opposition to such trends was the Anglican evangelical (Olaf) Raymond Johnston (1927-1985) a Sheffield schoolteacher and later a lecturer in education at Newcastle University, who took a leading part in the anti-permissiveness campaigns in the early 1970s, and became the first full-time director of the National Festival of Light.

Since the Victorian period, spiritualism had gained many adherents. Emma Hardinge Britten (1823-1899), who promoted the movement on both sides of the Atlantic, gave it structure. A Yorkshire miner Alfred Kitson (1855-1934) developed spiritualist lyceums as an alternative to church Sunday schools. The medium Gladys Isabel Osborne Leonard (1882-1968) enjoyed credibility after examination by the Society for Psychical Research, and in particular by the physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, who sat with her to communicate with his son killed at the second battle of Ypres. After the war, the claims of George Vale Owen (1869-1931), vicar of Orford, Cheshire, to have received spirit messages were hailed by Arthur Conan Doyle. In the period after the Second World War Harry Edwards (1893-1976) gave demonstrations of ‘psychic healing’ to large audiences, and dealt with thousands of letters from those seeking his ‘absent healing’ by correspondence.

The late-medieval religious

We continue the theme of church history with the start of a new research project which, over the next couple of years, will add biographies of about 30 men and women who shaped England’s religious houses in the two centuries prior to the Reformation. Our first selection comprises six biographies which reflect some of pressing topics of the period, which will recur in the biographies to be included later in the project. The dominant theme for heads of religious institutions in the early sixteenth century was, of course, their gradually worsening relationship with the monarch, Henry VIII. In the life of Clement Lichfield (d.1546), abbot of Evesham, we see the pressure of the crown on monasteries as Henry’s reign progressed, especially after the king’s assumption of the headship of the English church in 1534. Within two years, Lichfield faced demands to surrender the abbey’s property, prior to his being forced to resign by Thomas Cromwell’s assistant, so ending an abbacy characterized by initiatives in church building and education. As prominent figures in their communities, the religious often endured difficult relations with other competitors for local authority. The Augustinian, Thomas Vivian (d.1533), prior of Bodmin, was notable for his poor standing with the town’s inhabitants who twice petitioned Henry VIII against the restrictions (religious and secular) placed on them by the prior and his canons. Such disputes were common in towns controlled by monasteries, and much of what Vivian was charged with doing was common practice. Others chose to withdraw from political contests, notwithstanding the potential power of their office. John Shirburn (1335/6-1408), abbot of Selby, steered clear of the brutal politics of Richard II’s reign, choosing to be represented in parliament by proctors. For forty years Shirburn’s focus remained Selby abbey to which he brought stability, and where he initiated a programme of building, and maintained good relations with the abbey’s local creditors. Shirburn’s life, however, was far from ascetic; as abbot he maintained hunting dogs and enjoyed foods such as swan, deer, and heron—often the gifts of Yorkshire landowners eager to remain on good terms.

Two Kent lives also highlight the importance, and implications, of relations (good and bad) between religious heads and the episcopacy. As prior of Christ Church, Canterbury, Thomas Ringmer (d.1311?) enjoyed the support of two archbishops of Canterbury—the Dominican Robert Kilwardby, and Franciscan John Pecham—but this led to resentments among Ringmer’s own Benedictine monks. At the lowest point Ringmer authorized the excommunication of thirteen of his own monks, a measure that prompted litigation in Rome in 1283. Within two years, papal and royal pressure led to Ringmer’s resignation and to a peripatetic future which saw him living, in 1289, as a hermit in Windsor Forest. The priorate of Ringmer’s successor, Robert Hathbrand (d.1370), proved less acrimonious as he resolved traditional disputes over power and responsibilities between his monks and the archbishop, eight of whom were elected while he held office.

Our first set of religious also includes an abbess, with women’s role in pre-Reformation religious houses set to be another important theme in forthcoming updates. Katherine de la Pole (1410/11-1473), abbess of Barking, was a particularly impressive individual who was for forty years head of the Benedictine community at Barking, then one of the most important nunneries in England. Her accomplishments demonstrate well the independence and power of an abbess’s position. Under Katherine’s sound management, the nunnery achieved financial stability, was able to reclaim farming lands previously devastated by flooding, and gained a reputation for scholarship and education, including the schooling of Edmund, first earl of Richmond, and Jasper, earl of Pembroke, the sons of the dowager queen Catherine’s marriage to Owen Tudor.

Black and Asian lives

Our latest contribution to an ongoing research project—to extend the Oxford DNB’s coverage of notable black and Asian subjects who shaped national life—begins in the eighteenth century, and inevitably with the subject of slavery. It was the plight of the Barbadian slave Jonathan Strong (c.1747-1773) which prompted the future abolitionist Granville Sharp to become active in the cause for emancipation. Strong suffered severely at the hands of several English masters who claimed ‘ownership’ of him following a sale in London. In 1768 Sharp successfully challenged the claim, which led to the ruling that the selling of people in England was unlawful. Stone’s case also encouraged Sharp to study the law for himself, leading to his conclusion that slavery had no basis in English law and to his one-man campaign to have this established. In 1772 Sharp’s argument was formally recognized by Lord Mansfield in the celebrated James Somerset case. William Sessarakoo’s experience of mid-eighteenth-century London was more congenial, though it too had begun in a state of slavery—this time after his father (a prominent Gold Coast landowner) had been deceived by an English trader who sold his son into captivity. Shocked at this treatment, the Royal African Company secured Sessarakoo’s release and the so-called ‘prince of Annamaboe’ was welcomed into elite London society during a two-year residence, recounted in The Royal African, or, the Memoirs of the Young Prince of Annamoboe. A century later the US abolitionist Sarah Remond (1826-1894) toured north-west England as an anti-slavery lecturer. Her English campaign took on greater urgency given the hardships suffered by black Americans during the civil war, and she later reprimanded the English for their indifference to the harsh repression of black rebellions in Jamaica.

Critical views of Britain are a feature of several other lives now added to the dictionary. The political activist, Peter McFarren Blackman (1909-1993), emigrated from Barbados in 1937 and soon became a prominent member of the British Communist Party and the League of Coloured Peoples. In books and journalism Blackman criticized colonial policy and everyday attitudes, citing refusals to be served in cafés, pubs, and hotels as the common lot of black men in thirties Britain. Keen to enlist in the RAF following the outbreak of the Second World War, the Jamaican-born (Louis) Fernando Henriques (1916-1976) was informed that people of non-European descent were not officer material. Henriques remained in Britain, studied at Oxford, and became a prominent social anthropologist specializing in Jamaica. Another who battled to enlist in the RAF was the Nigerian-born (Emanuel) Peter John Adeniyi Thomas (1914-1945) who came to prominence in documentary films as the first commissioned West African pilot following the ending of the colour bar on non-white airmen.

Other visitors advanced a more positive image of Britain or sought to foster closer ties with their own country. The Islamic scholar Abdullah Yusuf Ali (1872-1953), born in Gujarat, came to Britain in 1891 where he sought social advancement. Prizing his membership of the British empire, Ali’s scholarship was concerned with changing negative western perceptions of Islam and arguing against pan-Islamism in favour of loyalty to empire. These were interests shared by the Lahore-born scholar and missionary Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din (1870-1932) who—concerned by what he considered mounting pressures on Islam and Muslims globally—came to Britain in 1912 to pursue his ‘jihad by persuasion’. A prolific public lecturer and author, Kamal-ud-Din was also instrumental in establishing the Woking Muslim Mission as Britain’s main centre for the propagation of Islam, and in advocating less the differences between Christianity and Islam than the commonalities within the Abrahamic tradition.

Connections between British and Indian cultures were also a preoccupation of the poet, Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1824-1873), whose great work Meghnad-Badh Kavya (1861), modelled on Paradise Lost, was considered the first modern Bengali poem, and Dutt the first Bengali writer to combine the Oriental with the Occidental. In 1885 Krishnabhabini Das (1864-1919) published Englande Bangamahila (‘A Bengali Lady in England’)—an account of British manners based on her seven-year residence in London, much of it spent reading and researching in the British Library. Following her return to India in 1890, Das continued to wear European clothes and to travel independently on public transport. Several decades on came the British travelogues of Atiya Fyzee (1877-1967) and her sisters, Zehra (1866-1940) and Nazli (1874-1968), all three prominent social and dress reformers in south Bombay. Meanwhile in 1864 Satyendranath Tagore (1842-1923), born into the eminent Tagore family of Calcutta, became the first Indian to join the ranks of the covenanted Indian Civil Service after two years training for the post in England. Tagore’s achievement was widely commemorated across different faiths in Calcutta, including a celebratory poem by Michael Madhusudan Dutt.

The impact of immigration on British life is evident in other new biographies. Though he died in personal poverty, the Islamic scholar Abdullah Yusuf Ali left, in 1953, a sizeable bequest to London University for the benefit of Indian students. The provision of education was also a concern of the Sanskrit scholar and nationalist, Shyamji Krishnavarma (1857-1930), who in 1905 established a hostel in north London for Indian students—known as Bharat Bhavan or India House—which quickly became a centre for young nationalist campaigners and a target of British police surveillance. Notable medical professionals include (Harbans) Lall Gulati (1895/6-1967) who left Lahore for Britain soon after witnessing the Amritsar massacre in 1919. A qualified physician, he subsequently became a general practitioner in Battersea, London, working from his home surgery from the 1930s until his death. Gulati also achieved prominence as a local politician, serving as a Conservative councillor from 1934 and later as a Labour member of the London county council. Medicine and politics were also the life’s work of Jainti Dass Saggar (1898-1945), like Gulati a medical graduate from Lahore, who in 1919 moved permanently to Dundee, where he established his practice in the following decade. Then perhaps the only Asian resident in Dundee, in 1936 he became Scotland’s first Asian councillor representing the Labour Party.

A final set of individuals left their mark on British cultural life, while also reflecting British attitudes to black performers and entertainers. The extraordinary Martini Maccomo (1835/6-1871) is thought to have been born in Angola and may have come to Liverpool as a sailor. In Britain he made his name as ‘the African lion tamer’ who from the late 1850s toured nationally with the Grand National Mammoth Menagerie. Maccomo’s signature event was to appear in a cage with twenty lions and four tigers, chased and whipped until furious. It was a gathering that often led to attacks and injuries, which it became evident was a principal reason for his popularity as a performer. Maccomo finally succumbed to rheumatic fever in Sunderland, but his legacy was a second generation of black entertainers working with animals in British circus. Another performer who paved the way for others was the American-born singer Amy Height (c.1866-1913) who first appeared on the London stage as Topsy (Man Friday’s Squaw) in a pantomime version of Robinson Crusoe in 1886. Over the next two decades Height took similarly exotic roles in pantomimes, as well as performing as a ‘theatrical singer’ and as a member of the African-American Bohee Brothers, who claimed to be ‘banjoists to the Prince and Princess of Wales’. Height’s success was unusual for a black woman in Edwardian London and her popularity helped open doors for others, including her fellow American Belle Davis. Music was also a feature of the Soho clubs established and run by the Sierra-Leonean-born Ernest Patrick Marke (1902-1995) who capitalized on the demand from American GIs for West Indian cooking and entertainment. But Marke was also committed to the welfare of London’s black population and his Coloured Colonial Social Club became the home of the Coloured Workers’ Associations and a base for visitors such as Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta. Away from London, the residents of Halifax, West Yorkshire, were treated to unfamiliar sight of a Lincoln Continental station wagon, sporting the name of its owner, the New Orleans blues pianist William Thomas Dupree (1909-1992), who lived in the town between the 1960s and 1980s. Dupree became one of the most prolific recording and performing blues artists of the post-war era, his ‘rollicking’ style of playing influencing, among others, Fats Domino, Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones. In Liverpool, Dupree’s close contemporary, Harold Phillips (1929-2000) left his mark on two impressionable would-be musicians, John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Originally from Trinidad, Phillips was one of the talented calypsonians who came to Britain on the SS Windrush and with fellow players—such as Lord Kitchener and Lord Beginner—popularized West Indian music in post-war Britain. Known as Lord Woodbine, Phillips’s Liverpool club performances were followed by members of what were then the ‘Silver Beetles’, while it was Phillips who organized and oversaw the Beatles’ formative tour to Hamburg in 1960.

Modern linguists and Europeanists

The Oxford DNB’s coverage of modern linguists and promoters of European cultures continues in this update with a further 14 biographies. They are accompanied by an overview essay, The go-betweens: modern linguists in Britain, by Professor Peter France, one of our advisers for this research project, which describes nineteenth and twentieth-century developments in the study and translation of modern languages by British promoters of continental European cultures. The new lives added in September 2012 reflect some of these developments, for example in the emergence of modern languages within the British university sector. Academic linguists include the Hispanists Alexander Augustine Parker (1908-1989), a specialist in ‘golden age’ drama, and the economic historian Marjorie Eileen Henrietta Grice-Hutchinson (1909-2003), an expert on the Spanish rural economy. With his acclaimed studies of humanism, John Humphrey Whitfield (1906-1995), professor of Italian literature at Birmingham from 1946 to 1974, became the dominant figure in Italian literary criticism in the inter-war period. A notable theme of Whitfield’s work was the influence of Italian writers on British and European cultural traditions. In 1963 Brian Westlake Downs (1893-1984) was appointed the first professor of Scandinavian studies at Cambridge; already master of Christ’s College, he later became the university’s vice-chancellor and established his reputation with his study of the Norwegian dramatist, Henrik Ibsen. Like Downs with Ibsen, the Oxford-based German scholar James Boyd (1891-1970) is most closely with a single author—this time Goethe—on whom he published throughout his academic life. Boyd also collaborated in the immediate post-war years with the publisher Basil Blackwell to produce new editions of forty classic works of German literature—so redressing the relative lack of titles then available for general readers.

James Boyd’s interest in the general appeal of German literature in translation highlights another development by which classic texts came to be widely disseminated through new forms of literary publishing. Two individuals from September’s update—the Italianist George Anthony Bull (1929-2001) and the translator John Michael Cohen (1903-1989)—were closely involved with Penguin Books whose affordable paperback editions brought the staples of European literature to a new readership. Bull’s contributions include Penguin Classic editions of Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier and Machiavelli’s The Prince. Cohen produced a masterful new translation of Cervantes’s Don Quixote for Penguin, and later served as the publisher’s unofficial adviser on European literature while also introducing British readers to New World writers such as Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez. A generation earlier, the Ukrainian-born Samuel Solomonovich Koteliansky (1880-1955) had been responsible for the first English translations of Chekhov, as well as for English language editions of works by Dostoevsky, Gorky, and Ivan Bunin. Resident in England from 1911 until his death, Koteliansky became a close friend of Katherine Mansfield, D.H Lawrence, and Virginia and Leonard Woolf with whom he worked, for the Hogarth Press, on several translations of Russian classics.

Koteliansky’s life is a reminder of the different ways in which the men and women included in this new selection came to literary studies. Some, like the academics John Whitefield and Brian Downs, followed traditional university-based routes. Koteliansky, by contrast, was sent to Britain as a young man in order to escape the persecution of Ukraine’s Jewish population. He was prevented from returning by war, revolution, and civil war, and so made his life and living as a Russian-speaker in London. Antisemitism also forced Arnold Julius Pomerans (1920-2005) and his family to leave his native Germany prior to his arrival in Britain in 1948; here—over the next fifty years—he developed a career as ‘one of Britain’s finest translators’, with a particular specialism in works of psychoanalysis, history, physics, and chemistry.

The journalist and translator Terence Kevin Kilmartin (1922-1991) owed much to his wartime association with David Astor, future proprietor of the Observer. Kilmartin joined the paper to bolster its reputation for cultural commentary. His contribution saw the arrival of critics such as Angus Wilson, Al Alvarez, and Clive James, and was followed by his translation of what is recognized as the modern standard English edition of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. The Finnish scholar David Barrett (1914-1998) gained his introduction to the language and to Finnish culture as an employee of the British Museum and, during wartime, at the Foreign Office. Stuart Ahluwalia Stronge Gilbert (1883-1969) became a translator on account of being in the right place at the right time. Resident in Paris from 1927, Gilbert spotted some errors in a new translation of Joyce’s Ulysses displayed in the window of the bookshop Shakespeare and Co. The outcome was a meeting with Joyce which developed into a close friendship and led to a new translation of Ulysses into French, a French edition of Joyce’s correspondence, and English editions of ‘new’ writers, including Camus, Cocteau, and Satre. A final individual in this selection, the author and translator, Vyvyan Beresford Holland (1886-1967), had more personal reasons for his choice of career. As the younger son of Oscar Wilde, Holland did much to secure his father’s posthumous personal and literary rehabilitation, not least with his edition of Wilde’s Letters (1962), as well as establishing himself as a translator of note blessed with (as he himself wrote of the Proust scholar Scott Moncrieff) ‘the courage to be literal and … the skill not to be too ridiculous.’

Other lives: of letters, business and medicine

Two of the new entries reflect the late-Victorian concern to establish an ethical basis for citizenship in a democratic society. This was the concern of the philosopher John MacCunn (1846-1929), and also of the Fabian Society founders (act. 1884-1900), whose interests are surveyed in a reference group entry. Ethical concerns preoccupied the early generation, who published the series of Fabian Tracts. Several of the theologians, translators, and literary scholars already referred to in this introduction were hugely prolific authors—the output of the Islamist Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din, for example, ran to more than 100 stand-alone monographs. But others, notably (Margaret) Monica Beale Jones (1922-2001), were not. During a near forty-year career as an English lecturer at Leicester University, Jones published nothing, an achievement in which she took great pride considering it more of a virtue not to publish in an age when everyone appeared to be doing so. Jones’s inclusion in the September 2012 update derives, therefore, not from her literary career (though she was a much-admired teacher and a passionate champion of the Victorian classics) but for her influence on, and friendship with the poet Philip Larkin. What is clear from their letters (published in 2010) is Jones’s role as a critic and commentator on Larkin’s work before publication: as Jones’s ODNB biographer (and former student) John Sutherland puts it: Jones was Larkin’s ‘mentor’—his dedication to her of The Less Deceived an act of recognition as well as affection.

One of the novelists whom Jones championed was William Makepeace Thackeray whose twentieth-century standing owes much to Geoffrey Tillotson (1905-1969), for twenty-five years professor of English at Birkbeck College, London, where another of our new additions, Tony John Chandler (1928-2008), climatologist and author of The Climate of London (1965), was later served as master. Chandler’s research revealed how the atmospheric environment of the city functioned, and led him to pioneer the use of geographical knowledge to shape environmental planning. On the ground, Sir Hubert Bennett (1909-2000)—as head of the London county council’s architect’s division, from 1956 to 1971—was influential in shaping the look of the modern capital. Under his watch came some controversial schemes, including the brutalist South Bank arts complex, the Thamesmead estate, and the business complex at Centrepoint which rose over central London in the mid-1960s.

These were also the years when the industrialist John Everleigh Bolton (1920-2003) presided over the British Institute of Management. A long-standing critic of the quality of British management education (his initiatives subsequently gave rise to the UK’s first business schools), Bolton is best known for his government-commissioned report on the role of small businesses (1971) whose recommendations were quickly implemented by Edward Heath’s ministry. Nearly three hundred years earlier business life was an interest of the City merchant and politician, Sir William Scawen (1646/7-1722), who was a principal advocate, and financier, of the new Bank of England, created in 1694. A member of the bank’s inaugural board of directors, Scawen became its second governor three years later. The fortunes of another of London’s great institutions, Great Ormond Street Hospital, were shaped in the 1980s and 90s by the public servant Sir Anthony Sanders Tippet (1928-2006) who became the hospital’s chief executive, overseeing the successful Wishing Well Campaign to raise funds to extend research and clinical services. Tippet followed this with responsibility, under the New Labour government, for the funding and performance of 1200 grant-maintained schools—all of which followed his retirement, in 1984, as fourth sea lord in the Royal Navy. An alternative interpretation of life at sea comes from the folk singer Cyril Francis Tawney (1930-2005) who exchanged his routine career as an RN seaman for life as a professional folk singer, as well as a researcher, publisher, and performer of ‘lower-deck’ naval songs.

September’s update also includes a small set of geriatricians whose work, from the 1950s, pioneered the development of this now important branch of medicine in Britain. The central figure was the Prague-born Oscar Olbrich (1901-1957) who came to Edinburgh to escape the Nazis and there studied medicine, moving post-war to the Royal Infirmary, Sunderland. Here he took charge of a 600-bed geriatric unit still run along the lines of a poor law institution. Olbrich’s reforms dramatically shortened periods of treatment and modernized clinical care of the elderly via outpatient initiatives such as ‘meals on wheels’. Many of the leading geriatricians of the next generation were trained by Olbrich and continued his reforms, among them Eluned Woodford-Williams (1913-1984), who worked as his deputy at Sunderland and later developed research into the psychiatry of old age. William Davison (1925-1993) was another trainee of Olbrich’s Sunderland system (and a registrar to Woodford-Williams), and later became consultant geriatrician in Cambridge where his bid to treat the elderly in their own homes and as outpatients was initially criticized by some as ‘sadistic’. After training under Olbrich and Woodford-Williams, Robin [Bobby] Irvine (1920-2002) reshaped the provision of care in Sussex, becoming adviser on geriatric medicine to the Department of Health in the 1980s and president of the British Geriatrics Society. In Ipswich John Norman Agate (1919-1998) proved a determined advocate for the dignity and rights of elderly hospital patients, often resorting to threats against hospital managers to ensure basic facilities such as adequate heating on geriatric wards.

In marked contrast to lives dedicated to the care of the elderly is that of Fanny Godwin (1794-1816), daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, who was adopted (after her mother’s death) by the novelist and philosopher William Godwin. Fanny’s short, and unhappy, life was spent at the heart of one of literary society’s best-known and most scandalous families (two of her step-sisters eloped with Shelley and Byron respectively). But the pressures of caring for her adopted father bore heavily on Fanny whose suicide, aged twenty, was covered up from other family members and the public. The last person in this introduction takes us back to where we began, with the modern church. However, Noel Percy Mander (1912-2005) was not a clergyman or theologian but one of Britain’s leading builders and restorers of church and cathedral organs. He started his career repairing instruments damaged by enemy bombing during the Second World War; it reached its pinnacle with the rebuilding of the organ of St Paul’s cathedral—an enormously difficult task which took seven years and was completed in time for the queen’s jubilee service (her silver) in 1977.

Our next online update

Our next online update will be published on Thursday 3 January 2013 and will add biographies of 219 men and women who died in the year 2009.

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