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2013 updates: introductions

January 2013

New online contents, January 2013

Welcome to the twenty-fifth update to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography which, as every January, extends the dictionary’s coverage of modern Britons who shaped national life and who died in the twenty-first century. In January 2013 we add (in 214 new articles) biographies of 225 men and women who died in 2009. Of these, 46 are women. The earliest by date of birth (1896), Henry Allingham, was an airman in the First World War and for a month before his death the oldest living man in the world. The youngest of those who died in 2009 now included in the dictionary is the celebrity Jade Goody, born in 1981. Overall, approximately two-thirds of this selection were born before 1930, the vast majority in the 1910s and 1920s, and the average longevity of the group is over 80 years of age, testament to one of the most notable demographic developments of the twentieth century, the increasing life-span of the majority of Britons. In accordance with the aim of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography to include biographies drawn from all areas of cultural, intellectual, social, economic and political life, in this release some of the most notable entrants are from the overlapping worlds of broadcasting, journalism, cinema, and entertainment.

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 (58,552 biographies and over 500 theme articles) is available, free, in nearly all public libraries in the UK, and college and university libraries worldwide. Most libraries (including UK public libraries) 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.

Literature and languages

People connected to literature and languages who died in 2009 include the novelist and short story writer, J.G. Ballard (1930-2009), famous for his dystopian world view developed in such books as The Atrocity Exhibition (1969), Crash (1973), and his semi-autobiographical novel, Empire of the Sun (1984). Will Self, who has written Ballard’s biography for the ODNB, describes him as ‘probably (England’s] most original and important post-war writer’. He is joined by a writer of a different stamp, Sir John Mortimer (1923-2009), the barrister, playwright, champion of liberal causes, and author of some fifty ‘Rumpole of the Bailey’ stories. Keith Waterhouse (1929-2009), the Leeds-born novelist, playwright and screenwriter is most famous for Billy Liar (1959) and for two screenplays of that same era, Whistle Down the Wind (1961) and A Kind of Loving (1962). Later he became a much admired newspaper columnist. U. A. (Ursula) Fanthorpe (1929-2009) was one of the best-loved and wittiest poets of her generation who wrote with compassion of ‘the strangeness of other people’ and who was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2003. Mick Imlah (1956-2009) was also a poet, noted for his perfectionism and hence little published, as well as a teacher and critic. He became poetry editor of the publisher Chatto and Windus and then of the Times Literary Supplement. James Kirkup (1918-2009), by contrast, was prolific, publishing more than 30 volumes of poetry, as well as translations from a dozen languages and numerous reviews and essays. Open about his own bisexuality, his poem ‘The love that dares not speak its name’ led to the Gay News blasphemy case in 1977 in which John Mortimer was defending counsel. Naomi Lewis (1911-2009) wrote ‘magical’ poetry and criticism of children’s literature, broadcast frequently, and filled her flat in central London with stray cats and injured birds. Dic Jones (1934-2009) was a Welsh-language poet and farmer, his poetry stretching from the routines of rural life to commentary on current affairs. He is joined by two Scottish poets and much more. Maurice Lindsay (1918-2009) was also a journalist, editor, and writer on subjects ranging from guide books to musicology, and a key figure in Scottish cultural life. Tom McGrath (1940-2009) began work on the 1960s counter-cultural paper IT before returning to Glasgow and becoming a key-figure in the city’s avant-garde as a musician, playwright, and arts administrator—as well as poet.

The children’s author and illustrator John Ryan (1921-2009) was most famous for his comic creation Captain Pugwash, whose swashbuckling adventures were adapted for television from the 1960s. Pugwash, explained Ryan, had ‘two qualities which I believe are present in all of us to some degree: Cowardice and Greed’. Susan Einzig (1922-2009), a refugee from Nazism, was another children’s book illustrator, notable for her work in Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden (1958) and E. Nesbit’s The Bastables (1966). Elizabeth Berridge (1919-2009) was a novelist and book reviewer who wrote about the tensions and dark secrets hiding behind seemingly respectable family façades. Literary scholars added now to the Oxford DNB include David Nokes (1948-2009), the biographer of Swift, Gay, Austen and Samuel Johnson, who also adapted Clarissa and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall for television; Sally Ledger (1961-2009), a leading writer on Victorian literature; and the French specialist Elizabeth Fallaize (1950-2009) who was noted for her work on Simone de Beauvoir and other modern French women writers. Carmen Blacker (1924-2009) was a leading scholar of Japanese culture. Translators are represented by the inclusion in this update of Barbara Wright (1915-2009), the pre-eminent translator of French modernist literature, and Peter Foote (1924-2009), whose translations of Icelandic sagas were highly regarded not only in the English-speaking world but in Iceland itself. Vivian Ridler (1913-2009), who was printer to Oxford University Press from 1958 to 1978, and printer of collectable books at Perpetua Press, is now also added to the dictionary.

Broadcasting and journalism

The complete spectrum of styles of broadcasting and journalism is represented in the January 2013 update. It contains the short and sad life of Jade Goody (1981-2009), the contestant on Big Brother, the so-called ‘reality television’ show, whose comments and behaviour made her a celebrity. She was reviled as well as admired, built up by the media so that she could then be knocked down by them (as she herself understood). She died with dignity, caring for the long-term future of her children and encouraging other women to present themselves for cancer tests. For a future historian interested in the popular culture of early twenty-first century Britain her biography will be instructive. The fickleness of fame is also illustrated by the life of an earlier television celebrity, Simon Dee (1935-2009), whose early evening chat show, Dee Time, was a fixture in the 1960s. Dee overreached himself, however, and was soon unemployable and forgotten. Dee and Goody may be contrasted with Sir Ludovic Kennedy (1919-2009), a broadcaster who became a public figure for very different reasons. An inveterate campaigner against the death penalty and miscarriages of justice, Sir Ludovic presented a range of investigative current affairs programmes from the 1950s to the 1980s. He is joined by the BBC’s Brian Barron (1940-2009), who covered conflicts around the world from Aden and Vietnam to the Falklands and Iraq; Anne Scott-James (1913-2009), editor of Harper’s Bazaar who also wrote for the Sunday Express and Daily Mail; the ‘unreconstructed generalist’ Geoffrey Moorhouse (1931-2009) who wrote acclaimed non-fiction on expeditions in Africa and Asia, Tudor history, religion, and sport; and Sir John Maddox (1925-2009), the leading scientific journalist of his generation who transformed the fortunes of the journal Nature and engaged combatively with environmental doomsayers and the claims of alternative medicine. Bert Hardy (1928-2009) was a newspaper executive who fell out with Rupert Murdoch but not before persuading him to build a new printing works at Wapping in the 1980s, a key event in the history of the British press.

The artist Tony Hart (1925-2009), who was a fixture on children’s television from the 1960s to the 1990s in programmes like Vision On and Hartbeat, is now added to the dictionary. So too the flamboyant TV chef Keith Floyd (1943-2009), whose personal life was more complicated than any of his recipes and who died, fittingly, after a jolly good lunch. Norman Painting (1924-2009), whose biography is written by the radio critic Gillian Reynolds, gave up a career as a tutor of Anglo-Saxon in Oxford to work in radio and became, for nearly sixty years, the voice of Phil Archer—the dependable central character in The Archers radio series. Painting also wrote nearly 1200 Archers episodes and two histories of the series. Screenwriter Troy Kennedy Martin (1932-2009) was a key figure in the new realist television of the 1960s. He created Z Cars, wrote the screenplay for the classic crime comedy The Italian Job (1969)—‘You’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off’—and won six BAFTA awards in 1985 for his drama on nuclear terrorism, Edge of Darkness.

Stage and screen lives

Three ‘action men’ lead our coverage of cinema, theatre, and entertainment. Richard Todd (1919-2009), who appeared in many British films of the 1950s and 1960s, including The Dam Busters (1955) and The Longest Day (1962), was the real thing, having parachuted into France on D-Day in 1944. Patrick McGoohan (1928-2009) was first Danger Man and then The Prisoner in the eponymous television shows of the 1960s. The rest of his career was an anti-climax and he later complained that he was ‘a prisoner of The Prisoner’. Edward Woodward (1930-2009) worked across a range of genres but was most famous for his television roles in Callan (1967-72) and The Equalizer (1985-9), and in the cult film The Wicker Man (1973). Actresses who died in 2009 and who now enter the dictionary include some well-known and popular figures. Wendy Richard (1943-2009) began in Carry On films and then had long runs on television in Are You Being Served? (1973-85) and EastEnders (1985-2006). During Kathleen Byron’s (1921-2009) sixty-year career she was Sister Ruth in Black Narcissus (1947) and Mrs Ryan in Saving Private Ryan (1998). Moyra Fraser (1923-2009) enjoyed an even longer career, starting as a ballerina in the 1930s and moving through revue to television, making her last appearance in As Time Goes By in 2005. Jill Balcon (1925-2009), wife of Cecil Day-Lewis and mother of Daniel Day-Lewis, was sometimes overshadowed in a highly talented family, but was a notable actress in her own right with a fine voice ‘like a solo on the cor anglais’. Natasha Richardson (1963-2009) had similarly distinguished relatives in the Redgrave family but carved out her own career on Broadway and in film. Betsy Blair (1923-2009), wife of Gene Kelly and then Karel Reisz, won a BAFTA for Marty (1955) and acclaim for later roles on stage and in film. Meanwhile the comedienne and impressionist Joan Turner (1922-2009) achieved national success and her own television series in the 1950s and 1960s, but alcoholism and a gambling addiction ended her career, and in 2001 she was found in a homeless shelter in Los Angeles.

Film director Ken Annakin (1914-2009) was responsible for a series of cinematic hits including The Longest Day (1962), Battle of the Bulge (1965), Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965), and The New Adventures of Pippi Longstocking (1988). Peter Rogers (1914-2009) produced the Carry On films and apparently said, ‘I’ll do anything for my actors, except pay them’. Cinematographer Jack Cardiff (1914-2009) was the recipient of two Oscars, for best cinematography for Black Narcissus (1947) and an honorary award (2001) for a lifetime’s achievement. Robin Wood (1931-2009) was an expert in the history and criticism of film who tried to put media studies on a firm scholarly footing.

The January 2013 update includes two figures from the world of ballet: the dancer and ballet mistress Georgina Parkinson (1938-2009) and the French-born dancer and choreographer André Prokovsky (1939-2009). A muse to Kenneth MacMillan, Parkinson appeared in many ballets by Frederick Ashton and then moved to New York as ballet mistress of American Ballet Theater; Prokovsky meanwhile was a key figure in the London Festival Ballet before forming the New London Ballet. The German-born theatre director Peter Zadek (1926-2009) divided critics with intellectualized and avant-garde productions for the Royal Court and Arts theatres in the 1940s and 1950s before returning to Germany, where he was noted for his productions of Shakespeare. Canadian-born singer and actor Ted Hockridge (1919-2009) was a huge star in West End versions of American musicals in 1950s and as a ballad singer with hits frequently in the top twenty. For glamour and bravado, no one could out-do Danny La Rue (1927-2009), undoubtedly the most famous female impersonator of his generation who insisted nevertheless that ‘I don’t want people to forget that I’m a bloke in a frock’.

In this update we also include figures from a wide range of musical genres—classical, contemporary, jazz, folk, and pop. Two composers head our list. Tony Arnell (1917-2009), viewed as one of the leading young composers in 1940s and 50s, reached a large audience through his film scores, and later experimentations with synthesizers. Nicholas Maw (1935-2009) was initially most influenced by the modernist work of Schoenberg and others, but later developed a personal style that was more influenced by late Romanticism and lyricism. The conductor Sir Ted Downes (1924-2009) worked with numerous orchestras over a long career, and was particularly noted for his championing of modern English music, the Russian operatic repertoire, and Verdi. He is most widely recalled, perhaps, for his decision to end his life alongside his terminally ill wife (despite not being terminally ill himself) in a Swiss clinic. The New Zealand-born mezzo-soprano Dame Heather Begg (1932-2009) made her name at Covent Garden and Sadler’s Wells with an astonishingly wide repertoire. The Australian-born mezzo-soprano Margreta Elkins (1930-2009) was a close friend of Joan Sutherland, with whom she frequently appeared. She sang in several Britten premieres, but returned to Australia in the 1970s. Meanwhile, the Greek singer Arda Mandikian (1924-2009) caused a sensation with her recitals in the UK of ancient Delphic hymns and modern Greek folk songs, but also won acclaim in a wide variety of more conventional operatic roles. The Welsh contralto and mezzo-soprano Helen Watts (1927-2009) ranged very widely, achieving critical acclaim for her recordings of Bach, Wagner, Vaughan Williams, and Elgar. Pamela Weston (1921-2009), the leading clarinettist of her generation, was not only a fine performer but the author of numerous books on clarinet technique and history. She too ended her life in Swiss clinic.

The jazz musician and composer Steve Race (1921-2009) wrote several popular tunes but was best known as the deviser and presenter of the radio panel game, My Music (1967-94), and as the jazz critic for several newspapers. The jazz trumpeter Ian Carr (1933-2009) broke new boundaries with his jazz/rock fusion band, Nucleus, and wrote acclaimed studies of jazz history. Stanley Robertson (1940-2009), singer, musician, and storyteller, was a key figure in transmitting and preserving the Scottish Traveller heritage. The folk musician Tim Hart (1948-2009) was a multi-instrumentalist best known for his role in Steeleye Span, the most successful ‘folk rock’ group of the 1970s. The guitarist and singer-songwriter John Martyn (1948-2009) was one of the most critically acclaimed rock musicians of his generation but was known as much for his temperamental behaviour, drinking, and drug abuse as for his influential music. The record producer Ron Richards (1929-2009) worked with George Martin on early Beatles recordings. He also produced songs for the quintessential bands of the mid-1960s, among them Gerry and the Pacemakers and The Hollies. We also include two composers and musical arrangers of popular music. Angela Morley (1924-2009)—formerly Wally Stott—ranged widely, from light music, big bands, and orchestral arrangements for popular singers such as Dusty Springfield, to numerous film and television scores. Tony Osborne (1922-2009) began as a trumpeter with Cyril Stapleton’s band, later arranged music for Gracie Fields and Eartha Kitt, and won Novello awards for his own compositions including ‘The Windows of Paris’ (1959).

Art, design, and architecture

Among the artists now added to the dictionary is Craigie Aitchison (1926-2009), noted for a distinctive style, part Lowry and part Matisse. Aitchison summed up his subject matter in this way: ‘I do mostly black people, dogs, religious pictures and still lifes’. Fellow colourists include John Craxton (1922-2009), a friend and contemporary of Lucian Freud, who later moved to Crete and was noted for his colourful and vigorous paintings, but who rejected the label ‘neo-romantic’. Margaret Mellis (1914-2009) was known for her brightly-coloured abstract paintings, and later for her brightly-coloured driftwood reliefs, and she counted Damien Hirst among her later admirers. Frederick Gore (1913-2009) was head of painting at St Martin’s College for 28 years. His own paintings were again strikingly colourful and warm. The artist and sculptor Barry Flanagan (1941-2009), once described as ‘the most directly poetic sculptor of his generation’, was famous in 1960s for his use of commonplace items, and later for a series of stylised hares. The German-born sculptor Ruth Duckworth (1919-2009) was known for minimalist stoneware, asymmetrical vessels, and use of different textures. The Sheffield-based silversmith and industrial designer David Mellor (1930-2009) was a leading designer of cutlery who also designed bus shelters, letter boxes, and traffic lights.

Among those responsible for a revival of interest in craftsmanship we include the furniture designer and maker Alan Peters (1933-2009), who produced elegant wooden furniture and wrote classic reference works on woodworking. Henry Rothschild (1913-2009), the German-born gallery owner was another key figure in the arts and crafts revival in Britain. And the arts and crafts scholar Barbara Morris (1918-2009) was a leading authority on William Morris (no relation) and on Victorian and Edwardian ceramics, embroidery, and glass and made several appearances on Antiques Roadshow. The art historian and gallery director Vivien Knight (1953-2009) revitalized the Guildhall Art Gallery and wrote influential studies of Victorian painters. In contrast, the art historian Charles Harrison (1942-2009), who was associated with Studio International and the Art & Language collective, championed modernism and the avant-garde. The Scottish artist and journalist Cordelia Oliver (1923-2009) was a key supporter of the curator Richard Demarco, and of Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre, Glasgow’s Citizens’ Theatre, and Scottish Opera; she also wrote perceptive books on fellow Scottish artists. Monica Pidgeon (1913-2009) was a highly influential architectural journalist who served as editor of Architectural Design from 1946 to 1976. We also include three architects in this update: the modernist husband and wife team Jim Cadbury-Brown (1913-2009) and Elizabeth Cadbury-Brown (1922-2002), noted for the main concourse at the Festival of Britain and for housing projects and school and university buildings such as at Birmingham and Essex; and the strikingly innovative Czech architect Jan Kaplicky (1937-2009), who designed the media centre for Lords’ cricket ground (likened by many to a flying saucer), oversaw the remodelling of Selfridges’ department store, Birmingham (likened to a Paco Rabanne dress), but was more widely influential in his profession for his unrealized designs. Of more than merely local interest, Michael Groser (1918-2009) was responsible for many of the modern Oxford gargoyles that adorn buildings across the university.

Scholarship

The worlds of scholarship and education are headed this year by several notable philosophers and political theorists. The philosopher David Pears (1921-2009) was a key figure in Oxford philosophy, an expert on Wittgenstein, and on the philosophy of mind. Stephen Toulmin (1922-2009) was also much influenced by Wittgenstein (whose lectures he attended) and wrote several very important studies on the philosophy of science and nature of argumentation. The social and political theorist Brian Barry (1936-2009) was best known for Political Argument (1965) but also wrote widely on theories of justice and liberal egalitarianism. Conversely, the Canadian-born Marxist philosopher Jerry Cohen (1941-2009) was best known for Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (1978) and later for If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? (2008). The Polish-born philosopher and dissident Leszek Kolakowksi (1927-2009) is remembered for his three-volume Main Currents of Marxism (1978), one of most devastating critiques of the Marxist legacy, which he wrote after coming to Britain from Poland in the 1970s. Another notable European in British academic life was the German-born sociologist, political theorist, politician, European Commissioner, director of the LSE, and warden of St Antony’s College, Oxford, Ralf Dahrendorf, Baron Dahrendorf (1929-2009). One of Europe’s leading intellectual figures, he wrote widely on how to reconcile freedom and equality.

They are joined by the sociologist Peter Townsend (1928-2009), whose studies of poverty led to widespread acceptance of ‘relative poverty’ and ‘exclusion’ as key indicators. He later conducted work on health inequalities and was a key figure in the Child Poverty Action Group and Disability Alliance. The economic and regional geographer Gerald Manners (1932-2009) produced a stream of books on natural resources and regional planning, and was much sought after as an adviser and conductor of inquiries for local and central government. The historical geographer Michael Williams (1935-2009) responded to increasing environmental concerns with a series of books on historical and contemporary landscape changes, and especially deforestation. Frank Barlow (1911-2009) was a leading medieval historian who, in particular, showed that it was possible to write credible medieval biographies. Another historian, George Holmes (1927-2009), wrote widely on the late-medieval economy and the Renaissance in Italy. Valerie Flint (1936-2009) worked on medieval intellectual history, including ‘the rise of magic’, but counted New York as her favourite city and had a passion for kitsch, Dinky cars, and Elvis Presley. John Burrow (1935-2009), an intellectual historian, was best known for works on nineteenth-century evolutionary theories, and on historiography. Norman Gash (1912-2009) also worked on the nineteenth century, his interests shifting from economic and social to political history, and in particular to the careers of the tory prime ministers Lord Liverpool and Sir Robert Peel. The Marxist historian Victor Kiernan (1913-2009) ranged more widely, from Wordsworth to the history of tobacco, but was best known for his work on European imperialism; his biography is written for the Oxford DNB by Eric Hobsbawm, who died last year. Kiernan’s fellow Marxist John Saville (1916-2009) worked primarily on British labour history, including the monumental Dictionary of Labour Biography which he founded and edited. In contrast, the economic historian Max Hartwell (1921-2009) was most famous for his clashes with Marxist historians over living standards during the Industrial Revolution, which he maintained had had a beneficent impact on the life experiences of the British working classes. The husband-and-wife team, Rupert Hall (1920-2009) and Marie Boas Hall (1919-2009), were among the leading historians of early modern science of their generation. The classicist Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones (1922-2009) combined works of pure scholarship with a more public role as frequent book reviewer and defender of classical education.

John Dunning (1927-2009) was a pioneer in business studies, especially the phenomena of globalization, the growth of multinationals, and the factors affecting foreign investment. We also include two contrasting educationists: Tyrrell Burgess (1931-2009), a scholar of educational practice and a firm advocate of comprehensive schools, polytechnics, and independent learning, and Peter Mason (1914-2009), a headmaster of Manchester Grammar School who ‘saved’ the school by leading it from direct grant status to independence (but whose public school attitudes sometimes infuriated students and staff).

Lives in science: mathematics, physics, and engineering

The list of mathematicians and scientists now added to the dictionary is headed by the statistician Jack Good (1916-2009), who worked at Bletchley Park during the Second World War and then at GCHQ, later forging a career as an academic mathematician. His work on probability was at first largely ignored but re-discovered by a later generation. The physicist Albert Crewe (1927-2009), working in the United States from 1956, invented the modern scanning transmission electron microscope, and captured the first image of a single atom. The experimental physicist John Holt (1918-2009) was a key figure in post-war British nuclear physics, who helped design synchrotrons, and carried out fundamental research on the structure of protons. The computer scientist John Buxton (1933-2009) helped develop the CSL and CPL programming languages, and founded the Warwick University department of computer science. Anthony G. Evans (1942-2009) was a materials scientist whose work on ceramics (in the United States from 1971) had a profound impact on the aerospace and electronics industries. The work of the metallurgist Jack Harris (1932-2009) on magnesium alloys for the Central Electricity Generating Board resulted in a near-doubling of the energy extracted from nuclear fuel. He later served as an adviser on corrosion to St Paul’s Cathedral and other historic buildings. The geologist and petrologist Alexander Deer (1910-2009) was best known for his investigations of the geology of Skaergaard, and for his monumental textbook Rock-Forming Minerals, while the palaeontologist Barrie Rickards (1938-2009) was a renowned expert on the palaeobiology of graptolites and their use in dating geological strata; he was, however, more widely known as the author of more than thirty books about angling.

Among engineers added to the dictionary in this update, we include Sir Edward Fennessy (1912-2009), who worked on radar during the Second World War (with Arthur C. Clarke among others) and went on to become a leading figure in the telecommunications industry, including as head of the telecoms side of the Post Office between 1969 and 1977. The expertise of the civil engineer Sir Alan Muir Wood (1921-2009) on geotechnical engineering was put to good use in preventing or stabilizing landslips, and in tunnelling, including in 1964-5 a detailed feasibility study for the Channel Tunnel which recommended a design subsequently largely followed in 1988-94. Peter Fraenkel (1915-2009) was another civil engineer whose firm worked on motorway schemes and marine and coastal engineering worldwide, including the Tolo Highway in Hong Kong and the Rama IX Bridge in Bangkok (then the longest cable-stayed bridge in the world). Olek Zienkiewicz (1921-2009) was the most important figure in the development of the now widely used finite element method for solving engineering problems. The naval architect Louis Rydill (1922-2009) contributed significantly to innovative submarine and aircraft carrier designs, and established the course in naval architecture at University College, London.

Lives in science: conservation and ecology

Ecology and conservation are notably prominent themes in this update, as we include a number of biographies of individuals whose careers were spent in an area of growing significance for scientific and public cultures. The plant population ecologist John Harper (1925-2009) revolutionized the study of plant ecology by abandoning purely descriptive methods in favour of studying interactions between demography and natural selection, reasserting a ‘Darwinian approach’ thereby. The plant biochemist Christopher Lamb (1950-2009) produced innovatory work on plant defences, and later led the John Innes Centre through a period of scientific and technical transformation. Jack Dainty (1919-2009) helped establish the new specialism of plant biophysics, and published seminal papers on ion and water transport in plants.

David Snow (1924-2009) was probably the leading academic ornithologist of his generation, who published studies of various individual species, starting with the humble blackbird (which he studied in Oxford’s Botanic Garden), and also of larger bird populations. As head of the bird room at the Natural History Museum, Snow took demotion to concentrate on research. He is joined by Eric Simms (1921-2009), probably the best-known British ornithologist for his work as a sound recordist, presenter (for almost 40 years) of The Countryside radio series, and author of numerous books including The Public Life of the Street Pigeon (1979). Aubrey Buxton, Baron Buxton of Alsa (1918-2009), was a notable broadcaster as chief executive of Anglia Television, and also a keen ornithologist. He created the hugely successful Survival series, and was a founder of the World Wildlife Fund. Sir Martin Doughty (1949-2009), at one time Labour leader of Derbyshire County Council, was a leading environmentalist who served as chairman of English Nature, and from 2006, as founder chairman of Natural England. Teddy Goldsmith (1928-2009), brother of James, was a leading and radical, but often controversial, figure in the emerging environmentalist movement, the founder of The Ecologist magazine and co-author of the widely-read Blueprint for Survival (1972). Helen Brotherton (1914-2009) was a key figure in West Country conservation who played a crucial role in saving Brownsea Island from development. Meanwhile the merchant banker Edmund (Eddy) de Rothschild (1916-2009) was perhaps best known for the restoration of Exbury House and gardens, famed for its rhododendron and azalea collections and opened to the public in 1955. Two ecologically-aware farmers are also included in this update. Sir John Quicke (1922-2009) was an innovative, entrepreneurial, and cerebral farmer (a devotee of Jung and of transcendental meditation), the founder of Quicke’s cheesemaking business and of welfare-friendly pig-farming, and a key voice in the farming industry through the Country Landowners’ Association. He is joined by Dinah Williams (1911-2009), a pioneer of organic farming. Hers was the first certified organic farm in UK and enabled her daughter to launch the highly successful Rachel’s Dairy range of products.

Medicine and medical science

One of the most notable medical statesmen of the twentieth century heads our list of biographies connected to medicine. Sir George Godber (1908-2009) was chief medical officer from 1960 to 1973 and—as a firm supporter of the principle of a national health service free at the point of delivery—a key figure in medical politics for many decades. The public health campaigner Sir John Crofton (1912-2009) played a central role in defeating tuberculosis and was then a leading anti-smoking campaigner. The South African-born psychiatrist and public health campaigner Michael Russell (1932-2009) conducted pioneering research on nicotine dependence, establishing smoking as primarily nicotine-seeking behaviour, hence explaining why nicotine replacement therapies (patches and pills) were more effective than lower-yield cigarettes. The German-born psychiatrist Sula Wolff (1924-2009) conducted studies into childhood psychopathologies which provided influential classifications and underpinned more effective treatments. The physician and epidemiologist Jerry Morris (1910-2009) focused on social and health inequalities. His epidemiological work established a clear connection between exercise and health and he himself lived to 99 as proof of his theories. John Wild (1914-2009) was a pioneer in the development of ultrasound, particularly for the diagnosis of cancer. The research of the cardiologist Philip Poole-Wilson (1943-2009) transformed understandings of heart disease from an end-stage condition to a complex syndrome underlying other conditions. Yvonne Carter (1959-2009) was a leading academic general practitioner who wrote award-winning textbooks and led the new Warwick University medical school. Sheila Collins (1921-2009) was head of the school of nursing at the London Hospital, chair of the Royal College of Nurses’ education committee, and a notable figure in the development and professionalization of post-war nursing education.

We have included two geneticists: Geoffrey Beale (1913-2009) moved from the study of plant genetics to protozoan genetics, and elucidated the basis of drug resistance in malaria parasites, enabling the development of new methods of treatment, and Alick Bearn (1923-2009) studied the modes of inheritance and mechanisms of genetic diseases such as Wilson’s disease, leading to successful diagnoses and treatments. Research by the biochemist Sam Perry (1918-2009) on the protein chemistry of muscle led to several breakthroughs, including a major diagnostic tool for the detection of myocardial infarction. The mycologist Mary English (1919-2009) transferred her knowledge of fungal diseases in plants to medical mycology, and was instrumental in setting up a highly-regarded diagnostic service and in analysing fungal infections from athlete’s foot to MRSA. Paediatrician David Morley (1923-2009) devoted his career to the improvement of maternal and child health in developing countries, including by developing a series of practical and educational aids, better training for health professionals, and multi-disciplinary primary health care clinics. Barrie Russell Jones (1921-2009) was a New Zealand-born ophthalmologist who carried out ground-breaking research on trachoma, was the first professor of clinical ophthalmology at the University of London, and founded the International Centre for Eye Health to lead research into, and treatment of, preventable blindness in developing countries. The haematologist Humphrey Kay (1923-2009) was a leader in the pathology and treatment of childhood leukaemia, radically increasing survival rates. The geriatrician John Pathy (1923-2009) transformed the care of geriatric patients in Cardiff and edited key textbooks on geriatric care. Taken together, these ‘medical lives’ show both the extent and the range of medical research and treatment in recent decades, and the roles played by many different types of practitioners, researchers, and public advocates in the eradication of disease and the improvement of health.

Business and industry

Our coverage of business includes two important figures from the recent history of British aviation. Alan Bristow (1923-2009), businessman and inventor, was the founder of Bristow Helicopters (taking advantage of the development of North Sea oil, which depended on helicopter transport). He played a small part in the Westland saga in 1986 which divided the Thatcher cabinet and led to the resignation of Michael Heseltine: it was the withdrawal of his offer to buy the company which triggered the crisis. After war service as a pilot, Allen Greenwood (1917-2009) became a key figure at successively Vickers, the British Aircraft Corporation (as assistant managing director) and then at British Aerospace (as deputy chairman). He was opposed to nationalization of the industry, and was closely involved in collaborative projects with European partners. The flamboyant Sir Ernest Harrison (1926-2009), known for his parties as well as for his business acumen, was the driving force behind the emergence of Racal as a key player in defence electronics, and of its subsidiary Vodafone in mobile telecommunications. It was estimated that £1000 invested when he floated Racal in 1961 would have been worth £14 million by his retirement in 2000. Tom Hudson (1915-2009) was a talented computer industry executive who, after working for IBM and Plessey, became director and then chairman of ICL in its pre-1979 period of profitable expansion. James Murphy (1913-2009) was the Irish founder of J. Murphy & Sons, the ubiquitous and highly profitable construction company, which was generating revenues of £500 million a year by 2009. Notable entrepreneurs who made their mark serving consumers include: Jimmy Hoseason (1927-2009), who built a family firm into the leading holiday company for boating holidays and one of UK’s leading holiday-let companies; Sir Bernard Ashley (1926-2009), the temperamental driving force behind the Laura Ashley business; and Leonard Steinberg, Baron Steinberg (1936-2009), who amassed a fortune from betting shops in Northern Ireland, but left for the mainland in 1977 after being targeted by the IRA. The annual revenues of his company, Stanley Leisure, exceeded £1 billion by 2003 and he left a personal fortune of almost £90 million.

Coverage of trade unionism and industrial relations is headed by Sir Richard O’Brien (1920-2009), who began his career as a personnel manager. He subsequently became an advocate of the reform of industrial relations, was chairman of the Manpower Services Commission in the 1970s and later chairman of the Church of England committee that produced the Faith in the City report (1985), much lambasted by the then Conservative government. He is joined by a number of trade union leaders whose lives recall a period of trade union militancy and power in the 1960s and 1970s. Jack Jones (1913-2009) was one of the great trade union barons of the era, and general secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union between 1969 and 1978. He was named in a poll in 1977 as the most powerful man in Britain (ahead of the prime minister James Callaghan). Jones threw his weight behind the so-called ‘social contract’ between the unions and the Labour governments in 1974, but was losing control of his own union by the time he retired. Ken Gill (1927-2009) was the leader of the Manufacturing, Science and Finance Union who clashed with both Conservative and Labour governments (notably in opposition to the ‘social contract’) and was president of the TUC during the 1984-5 miners’ strike. He was a lifelong supporter of the Soviet Union and was expelled from the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1985 when he opposed its shift to Euro-communism. Lawrence Daly (1924-2009) was the skilful general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers between 1968 and 1984; he led the miners in successful strikes in 1972 and 1974, but lost influence thereafter and was unable to prevent the suicidal strike of 1984-5. Eric Hammond (1929-2009) was the combative general secretary of the Electronic, Telecommunications, and Plumbing Union, 1984-92. Though popular with his own members, his traditional right-wing Labourism led to his vilification by other trade union leaders, especially for his role in the 1986-7 Wapping dispute in the newspaper printing industry.

Law and theology: practitioners and scholars

The January 2013 update includes legal scholars as well as practitioners. The committed pro-European Gordon Slynn, Baron Slynn of Hadley (1930-2009) was an advocate-general in the European Court of Justice (1981-8) and then a full member of the court (1988-92), before becoming a law lord. He gave several judgements notable for their liberality, but was much criticized for his opposition to the extradition of General Pinochet. James Clyde, Baron Clyde of Briglands (1932-2009) was the third judicial Lord Clyde (both his father and grandfather were lords justice-general of Scotland before him). An expert on valuation, trusts, administrative law, and tax law, he chaired the 1992 Orkney inquiry into child abuse, was made a law lord in 1996, and, after taking early retirement, was the first justice oversight commissioner in Northern Ireland. Another Scottish judge, Kemp Davidson, Lord Davidson (1929-2009), was a respected judge of the Court of Session and a reforming chairman of the Scottish Law Commission. Sir Henry Hodge (1944-2009) was a reforming solicitor who played an important part in the revivification of judicial review and opened one of the country’s first legal aid practices. He became chair of the National Council for Civil Liberties, a judge of the Queen’s Bench Division, and chair of the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal. The jurist Sir Derek Bowett (1927-2009) combined a glittering career in international law with work as an adviser and arbitrator in international conflicts, and the legal scholar Sir David Williams (1930-2009) was an expert on law relating to government secrecy, national security, police, and public order. He was also a reforming vice-chancellor of the University of Cambridge and the first chancellor of Swansea University.

A similar mix of scholars and practitioners is evident in our coverage of notable religious figures. Indeed Cardinal Cahal Daly (1917-2009) was both a leading figure in scholastic philosophy, and as bishop of Ardagh and Clonmacnois and then archbishop of Armagh, a severe critic of IRA violence. He promoted social reform and was much exercised by the early child abuse scandals involving the Catholic Church in Ireland. Roy Magee (1930-2009) was a presbyterian minister in Northern Ireland who initially supported Loyalist paramilitaries but later condemned sectarianism and played a crucial mediating role in the preparatory negotiations leading to the Good Friday agreement of 1998. The nun and theologian Dame Maria Boulding (1929-2009) was the author of widely-read works of Benedictine spirituality, and an acclaimed translator of St Augustine’s Confessions. Bishop Eric Kemp (1915-2009) was author of scholarly works on canon law and a key supporter of Anglican-Methodist reconciliation and of the reform of church governance. He was criticized for the lack of a robust response to evidence of child abuse when he served as the bishop of Chichester. The Church of Scotland minister Maxwell Craig (1931-2009) was a leader in the Scottish ecumenical movement, supported the miners’ strike, and expressed his nation’s grief at the time of the Dunblane massacre in 1996. The New Zealand-born Graham Stanton (1940-2009) was one of the UK’s leading New Testament scholars, combining critical methods with social-scientific perspectives. Pilgrim Praise, the first collection of the Dutch-born hymn-writer and United Reformed minister Fred Kaan (1929-2009), was credited with starting the ‘hymn explosion’ of the late 1960s. His radical theology led to condemnation in the House of Commons by Enoch Powell. Finally, and rather differently, Harold Blackham (1903-2009) played a central role in the creation of the modern humanist movement, renaming the Ethical Union as the British Humanist Association.

Sporting lives

From religion to sport. Our leading sporting life is that of Sir Bobby Robson (1933-2009), a successful footballer at West Bromwich Albion and Fulham who won twenty England caps. He enjoyed great success as manager of Ipswich Town in the late 1970s (including winning the FA Cup and UEFA Cup) and this led to his appointment as England manager between 1982 and 1990. Although often criticized, he took England to the semi-finals of the World Cup in 1990 where they lost on penalties to Germany. The athlete Godfrey Rampling (1909-2009) won gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics in the 4x400m. We also include two very notable figures from the world of equestrianism: Douglas Bunn (1928-2009) was both a successful businessman and a keen amateur equestrian; voted Horseman of the Year in 1962, he created the All England Jumping Course at Hickstead. Meanwhile several of Hickstead’s fences and courses were designed by Pamela Carruthers (1916-2009), who also designed courses for the 1976 and 1988 Olympics, and for competitions throughout the world.

Cricket offers two lives more notable for umpiring and commentating than playing. David Shepherd (1940-2009) was a successful cricketer for Gloucestershire but is better known as an umpire, becoming one of the best-loved figures in the sport and standing in 92 tests and 172 one-day internationals. Bill Frindall (1939-2009) was a cricket scorer and statistician who achieved fame as ‘Bearders’ on Test Match Special on BBC Radio and popularized the linear scoring system. He also developed a lucrative sideline in selling his detailed scoresheets. Bernard Ganley (1927-2009) was a rugby league player for Oldham and Great Britain who was the first player in either code of rugby to kick more than two hundred goals in a season. From rugby union we include two Welsh internationals. Haydn Tanner (1917-2009), captain of Wales from 1947 to 1949, was rated one of Wales’s best ever scrum halves. Bleddyn Williams (1923-2009), who combined strength with unusual agility, also captained Wales (1953-5) but shone brightest as a player for Cardiff, scoring 185 tries in 283 matches for them. Boxer Chris Finnegan (1944-2009) won a gold medal at the Mexico Olympics in 1968 and won British, Commonwealth, and European titles, but in 1972 failed to win the world title. He is joined in the ring by boxing manager Terry Lawless (1934-2009), the most successful and best-known manager in British boxing, who played a crucial role in the early careers of Frank Bruno, Lloyd Honeghan, and Joe Calzaghe.

Politics and government

From pugilism we move to politics, though the first ‘politician’ we note, Sir Clement Freud (1924-2009), was neither very pugilistic nor very political. He was Liberal MP for Ely (1973-87) after a varied career as a restaurateur, journalist, and broadcaster. One of the most colourful parliamentarians of his generation, he was known for his mordant wit, hangdog looks, and inveterate womanizing. Bertie Hazell (1907-2009), the Labour MP for North Norfolk (1964-70) and president of the National Union of Agricultural and Allied Workers (1966-78), was a socialist of the old school and a representative and leading voice of rural labourism, a dying cause. Peter Blaker, Baron Blaker (1922-2009) was elected a Conservative MP in 1964 after a promising diplomatic career. Though only a junior minister under Heath and Thatcher, he was influential in Conservative foreign policy circles and notably hostile to the Soviet Union. Francis Noel-Baker (1920-2009), the son of Philip Noel-Baker, was the ‘baby’ of the House of Commons when elected a Labour MP in 1945, but was probably overshadowed by father. He was at odds with his party over his support for Archbishop Makarios in Cyprus and the colonels in Greece (where he had inherited a large estate). Wayland Young, second Baron Kennet (1923-2009), the son of Hilton Young, was perhaps also overshadowed by his father, though he enjoyed distinguished careers as a journalist and author, as well as becoming a front-bench spokesman for Labour and then the Social Democratic Party. He later returned to Labour, but opposed Tony Blair’s foreign policy and enjoyed no preferment. John Gregson, Baron Gregson (1924-2009), a successful industrialist, was made a life peer in 1975, and became a front-bench Labour spokesman on science and industry, and an acute critic of the effects of the Thatcher government on manufacturing.

January’s update also includes a number of politicians whose careers were largely focused on the European parliament. Diana Elles, Baroness Elles (1921-2009) was a moderate Conservative, a keen pro-European, known as Heath’s ‘right-hand woman on Europe’. She served as both an appointed and a directly elected MEP, and from 1982 to 1987 was vice-president of the European Parliament. She was defeated in 1987 by Christopher Prout, Baron Kingsland (1942-2009) for the leadership of the European Democratic Group. Prout was an MEP between 1979 and 1994 and was notably more comfortable under the leadership of John Major than Margaret Thatcher. In parallel with this he enjoyed a distinguished legal career: he was later shadow lord chancellor and spokesman on legal affairs, and an opponent of Labour’s plans to create a partly elected House of Lords. Sir Neil MacCormick (1941-2009), an eminent legal scholar, was an MEP for the Scottish National Party; he was a key figure in providing the intellectual underpinnings of Scottish nationalism, and provided advice on the ability of a future independent Scotland to join the EU.

The disability rights campaigner Nicola Chapman, Baroness Chapman (1961-2009), was a ‘people’s peer’, appointed in 2004; the first congenitally disabled person to sit in the Lords, she used her position to campaign vigorously against discrimination on grounds of disability. Desmond Plummer, Baron Plummer of St Marylebone (1914-2009), Conservative leader of the Greater London Council (1967-73), was a technocrat who pioneered the sale of council houses and a man not afraid to clash with the national leadership of his party. We also include Colin Jordan (1923-2009), one of the post-war leaders of the British far right, a central figure in the British National Party and British Movement who was marginalized after he was found guilty of shoplifting women’s knickers from Tesco. He was described by his (fascist) ex-wife as a ‘middle-class nobody’.

Among civil servants, diplomats, and leaders of civil society we include Ron Dearing, Baron Dearing (1930-2009), who was chairman of the Post Office, and then of Camelot, the company which ran the original National Lottery, and who became ‘the Conservative government’s educational pooh-bah’. His influential 1997 report on higher education, supported by both Labour and Conservative parties, led to the introduction of university tuition fees. Sir Michael Quinlan (1930-2009) was a civil servant at the Ministry of Defence who was a key figure in developing moral arguments for nuclear deterrence, and was regarded by fellow civil servants as among the best of his generation. Sir Nicholas Henderson (1919-2009) was a flamboyant diplomat who was ambassador to West Germany (1972-5), France (1975-9), and the USA (1979-82), and who put the case for Britain during the Falklands War. Sir Oliver Wright (1921-2009) was an equally colourful diplomat who followed Henderson as ambassador to West Germany (1975-81) and the USA (1982-6), and who described himself as an ‘anti-Maastricht Europhile’. On the other hand, Richard Mayne (1926-2009) was a genuinely committed Europhile who worked for Jean Monnet before Britain joined the EEC and later was the EEC’s representative in the UK. Philip Moore, Baron Moore of Wolvercote (1921-2009), was the private secretary to the queen. Noted for sound judgement, he is credited with nudging the royal family towards modernization.

Several public economists of different views died in 2009 and are now added to the dictionary. The Nobel prize-winning econometrician Sir Clive Granger (1934-2009) conducted work on the analysis of economic data which revolutionized economic forecasting. The Keynesian economist Sir Bryan Hopkin (1914-2009) was a key figure in economic planning from the 1940s to 1970s. Later an outspoken critic of Thatcherism, he also opposed European monetary integration, predicting in 1996 its demise when confronted with recession. The economist and economic historian Sir Kenneth Berrill (1920-2009) moved from academia to policy-making. He was a respected chief economic adviser to the Treasury and then head of the Central Policy Review Staff in the 1970s. Later he had a less happy experience as the first chair of the Securities and Investments Board. Sir Alan Walters (1926-2009) was a keen neo-liberal, and a controversial adviser to Margaret Thatcher whose influence was a factor in the resignation of her chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson. Eddie George, Baron George (1938-2009) had a long career in the Bank of England and was governor from 1993 to 2003, overseeing the Bank’s independence from government after 1997. He led an expansionary monetary policy in the early 2000s, though his reputation suffered in the wake of the economic crisis of 2008 onwards.

We also include two lives from the voluntary sector. Robin Guthrie (1937-2009) was a radical-minded social worker who reformed the Joseph Rowntree Memorial Trust and, as chief charity commissioner 1988-92, pushed for changes in the Charities Act of 1993. Later he became director of social and economic affairs at the Council of Europe. Winifred Tumim, Lady Tumim (1936-2009) was a reforming chair of the Royal National Institute for the Deaf and the National Council of Voluntary Organisations who criticized the poor management of charities, and helped shape the Charities Act 2006.

The armed services

The final group of biographies added in this update are from the armed forces. They include the army officer Sir Jack Harman (1920-2009), who saw active service in North Africa, Normandy, and Italy in the Second World War and held a series of key posts culminating in deputy supreme allied commander Europe. Sir David Willison (1919-2009) was a career officer in the Royal Engineers and later worked in military intelligence. From 1975-8 he was the civilian director-general of intelligence, ‘the ablest defence intelligence professional of his generation’. The Royal Marines officer Sir Martin Garrod (1935-2009) saw service against EOKA in Cyprus and in Malaysia during the ‘confrontation’ with Indonesia. He also served in Northern Ireland, and after official retirement was head of the EU mission in Mostar. They are joined by two RAF officers, Sir John Gingell (1925-2009) and Sir Neil Wheeler (1917-2009), both of whom saw service in the Second World War (Gingell with the Fleet Air Arm, Wheeler with Coastal Command). Both then had distinguished careers in the higher reaches of the RAF and the Ministry of Defence, Gingell subsequently becoming Black Rod at the Palace of Westminster. David Smiley (1916-2009) is a link with the tangled history of Britain’s post-war involvement in the Gulf. He took part in SOE missions in Albania and Siam during the Second World War. He later combined regular soldiering with secondments to the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6. In 1958-9, as commander of the armed forces to the sultan of Muscat and Oman, he achieved a victory over rebel forces. Later still he was an adviser to the royalist forces in Yemen.

Pride of place among those who have served in Britain’s armed forces, and the most poignant of the lives that we add now, are the biographies of the soldier Harry Patch (1898-2009), the airman Henry Allingham (1896-2009), and the sailor Bill Stone (1900-2009). They were the last survivors of the ‘men who marched away’ to war, the last link with the most traumatic events of the twentieth century in Britain, with Harry Patch the last surviving veteran. As Peter Parker explains in his article, as survivors they became celebrities at the end of their lives. Patch, a West Country plumber who lived an unremarkable life for 80 years, never lost an opportunity to condemn wars and those who caused them. Patch’s own remembrance day was not 11 November but 22 September, the day in 1917 when he lost his pals in an explosion which haunted him for the rest of his life. His funeral reflected his belief that all combatants were victims. His coffin was borne by serving men of his old regiment, flanked by soldiers from Belgium, France, and Germany, all unarmed on Patch’s orders. Our article explores this trio’s experience of the Great War and their lives afterwards. It also analyses the cultural phenomenon of remembrance which made them such honoured figures in their last years—an appropriate theme for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which serves as an accessible record of those who have shaped national history, whether in the trenches in Flanders or the studios of reality television.

Our next online update

Our next online update, which will be published on Thursday 23 May 2013, 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 men and women who have shaped the history of British motoring and motoring culture.

Back to top of January 2013 preface

May 2013

Highlights from the May 2013 update

Welcome to the twenty–sixth online update of the Oxford DNB, in which, as every May and September, we extend the dictionary’s coverage of men and women ‘from the earliest times’ to the twenty-first century. The May 2013 update adds biographies of 112 individuals active between the eleventh and the early twenty-first century, with a special focus on 70 individuals who shaped the history of British motoring—as drivers, manufacturers, engineers, safety campaigners, and creators of organizations such as the Automobile Association (AA) and the Royal Automobile Club (RAC).

May’s release also includes several smaller sets of biographies on promoters of outdoor living and pursuits and on mid twentieth-century women activists and campaigners. We also continue our new research project (begun in September 2012) to extend the dictionary’s coverage of the abbots, abbesses, priors, prioresses, monks, and canons who made up the late-medieval religious prior to the Reformation. In addition to these sets of biographies, we offer the usual mix of life stories—including Edwin Budding, inventor of the lawnmower; Robert and Frances Andrews, sitters for Thomas Gainsborough’s famous double portrait; and Leslie Green, the architect responsible for London Underground’s well-known red-tiled stations.

Full details of the May 2013 update are available from the new online contents page, and a free selection of extracts and highlights is available here. The complete dictionary (58,664 biographies and 504 theme articles) is available free via 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.

Motoring in Britain

The motoring lives included in the May 2013 update cover noteworthy manufacturers, designers, drivers and racers, lobbyists for roads and motoring, safety campaigners, and those who contributed to the culture of motoring in twentieth-century Britain.

Among the earliest motorists now added to the Dictionary is George Johnston (1855-1945), a Scottish locomotive engineer who in November 1895 drove a petrol-engine dog-cart across Glasgow. Johnston’s business acumen did not match his mechanical ingenuity and his manufacturing efforts were financial failures. His original partners in the Mo-Car syndicate formed to build petrol dog-carts—the Scottish engineers Thomas Blackwood Murray (1871-1929) and Norman Osborne Fulton (1872-1935)—established their own company, the Albion Motor Car Company, and at purpose-built works at Scotstoun successfully concentrated on lorry production. Also in 1895 the Liverpool chemist Edward Shrapnell Shrapnell-Smith (1875-1952) became involved in the Self-Propelled Traffic Association, founded to promote motor transport, and went on to organize trials of motor lorries to demonstrate their ability to transport heavy loads from Liverpool’s docks. Many early motor vehicle manufacturers had backgrounds in cycle manufacture, notably John Marston (1836-1918), a Wolverhampton bicycle maker who early in the twentieth century focused on motor vehicle production and established the Sunbeam marque. At the same time Dan Albone (1860-1906), a Biggleswade bicycle manufacturer, pioneered petrol-engined tractors in Britain. Experiments with steam-powered river launches and motorized bicycles led Wilbur Gunn (1860-1920) to develop four-wheeled motor vehicles; an American engineer and tenor singer who had settled at Staines beside the River Thames, Gunn went on to found the Lagonda company. The unsatisfactory brakes on horse-drawn carriages led the Derbyshire inventor Herbert Frood (1864-1931) to experiment with new materials. His cotton-lined brakes were widely used on horse omnibuses, but motorized road transport opened up a large new market for his Ferodo brand friction products, launched in 1920. A member of the brewing family and an early racing driver Kenelm Edward Lee Guinness (1888-1937) developed effective spark plugs, and founded the highly successful KLG brand. In 1915 another well-connected early racer, Lionel Walter Birch Martin (1878-1945), built and registered the ‘Aston-Martin’ car from his car dealership in Kensington, London.

As early as 1902 private motoring had become the subject of a literary genre, pioneered by an American-born novelist Alice Muriel Williamson (1867/8-1933) and her husband Charles Norris Williamson (1857-1920) who researched and wrote a series of popular novels, organized around the incidents of a motor tour. Among the early private motorists was John Francis Stanley Russell, second Earl Russell (1865-1932), brother of the philosopher Bertrand Russell, and holder of the registration plate A1 when vehicle licensing became compulsory in 1903. Russell championed the interests of motorists in the House of Lords and was active in the early motoring organizations. Though not himself a driver, Sir (Ernest George) Stenson Cooke (1874-1942), secretary of the Automobile Association (AA) from 1905, turned this recently established organization into a mass membership institution, in response to the boom in private motoring in the interwar years. His counterpart at the rival Royal Automobile Club, Sir Julian Walter Orde (1861-1929), as well as presiding over the move to an opulent club house in Pall Mall, initiated the RAC’s popular ‘get you home scheme’ for stranded motorists. Active in both organizations, the civil servant William Rees Jeffreys (1871-1954) was an early promoter of a road network in Britain appropriate to the motor age. In response to a request from the Automobile Club, the governor of the Isle of Man, George Henry Fitzroy Somerset, third Baron Raglan (1857-1921), initiated legislation in 1904 to open the island’s roads to motor racing and speed trials, making possible the famous Tourist Trophy (TT) races. A founder member of the Automobile Club, the Royal Artillery officer and mechanical engineer Sir (Henry) Capel Lofft Holden (1856-1937) was responsible for technical aspects of the banked design of Britain’s first purpose-built motor racing track which opened at Brooklands, Surrey, in 1907.

Brooklands was the venue for many early motoring and aviation feats. A London motor dealer Percy Edgar Lambert (1881-1913), who raced at Brooklands as a works driver, became in February 1913 the first driver to cover more than 100 miles in 60 minutes, but was killed at Brooklands later that year while attempting to regain his record. The Australian aviator and mechanic Harry George Hawker (1889-1921) learned to fly at the Brooklands aerodrome in 1912 and after his heroic attempt at a transatlantic flight seven years later, raced cars at Brooklands from 1920. It was at Brooklands in 1921 that Louis Vorow Zborowski (1895-1924)—son of a wealthy New York real estate owner, and an American citizen but born and resident in Britain—made a winning debut in his aero-engined car, the original Chitty-Bang-Bang which was seen on the track by a young Ian Fleming. Another such ‘monster’ car, using wartime surplus aero engines, was driven at Brooklands by the works driver Ernest Arthur Douglas Eldridge (1897-1935) who used a public road in France to set a land speed record of 146 mph in 1924. Another Brooklands works driver Kaye Ernest Don (1891-1981) became the first driver there to lap at 130 mph, but failed in land speed record attempts at Daytona Beach in 1930; four years later he was imprisoned on the Isle of Man having been convicted of manslaughter arising from a fatality during practice. Two other regular Brooklands drivers, Albert William [Bert] Denly (1900-1989), who made his name as a motorcycle works rider, and Christopher Stainbank Staniland (1905-1942), an RAF officer and motor racer who became a test pilot, co-drove in the twenty-four hour record drive by George Eyston at Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah, in 1935. Vehicles for several land-speed record attempts in the 1930s by Malcolm Campbell and John Cobb were designed by Reid Antony Railton (1895-1977), chief engineer of a firm based at Brooklands making high-speed cars.

Successes in the twenty-four hour endurance races at Le Mans secured the fame of the Bentley Boys—a group of motoring enthusiasts and playboys off the track, who raced their Bentley cars to a series of victories in the late 1920s. Most were Bentley customers who liked to race their new acquisitions. Many had colourful lives: (Joel) Wolf Barnato (1895-1948), son of a diamond merchant, who held court at his Surrey mansion; Joseph Dudley Benjafield (1887-1957), a respected Harley Street bacteriologist who raced for fun; Sir Henry Ralph Stanley [Tim] Birkin, third baronet (1896-1933) was a former First World War pilot who looked for excitement in peacetime but whose risk-taking led to his death following an accident at the Tripoli grand prix; Frank Charles Clement (1886-1970), a mechanical engineer and professional driver who gave up racing when he married; Sydney Charles Houghton [Sammy] Davis (1887-1981), sports editor of Autocar, who also raced and wrote memoirs of the Bentley era; John Francis Duff (1895-1958), a car dealer turned racer, the son of Canadian missionaries, distinctive in his roll-neck sweaters and plus-fours; George Edward Duller (1891-1962), a racehorse jockey, trainer, and aircraft mechanic who turned to cars; the Dunfee brothers—(Beresford) Clive Dunfee, (1904-1932), who was killed at Brooklands, and Jack Lawson Dunfee (1901-1975), who gave up racing after his brother’s death—both of whom were married to film actresses; (Reginald) Clive Gallop (1892-1960) a former air force engineer who designed Bentley cars and raced in the team; (George Pearson) Glen Kidston (1899- 1931), a one-time naval officer, whose life was a series of dramatic episodes, including an escape from a sinking submarine, a motor boat accident, and a passenger plane crash near Croydon aerodrome; and Bernard Rubin (1896-1936), son of an Australian pearl merchant, who also combined motor racing with aviation, flying from Britain to Australia and back in 1934. The excitement of international racing in these years was captured by two artists who made motoring their subject matter, (Thomas) Frederick Gordon Crosby (1885-1943) of Autocar and Charles William Grineau [Bryan de Grineau] (1883-1957) of Motor.

Many women were prominent competitors in motorsport in the period before the Second World War, and their lives matched the Bentley Boys for glamour and risk-taking. A secretary employed by the Napier motoring company, Dorothy Elizabeth Levitt (1882-1922) was spotted as the ideal person to promote its cars. Having been sent on an apprenticeship, Levitt became a skilful driver and raced between 1903 and 1908, before writing a pioneering manual on motoring for women. Violette Cordery (1900?-1983) took up motor racing in 1920 through her brother-in-law Sir (Albert) Noel Campbell Macklin (1886-1946), the Cobham manufacturer of Invicta cars. With her sister Evelyn, Violette set endurance records at Brooklands in the 1920s, twice holding the RAC’s Dewar Trophy, and also drove round the world. Cordery married a fellow racing driver John Stuart Hindmarsh (1907-1938) who died test flying a Hurricane fighter aircraft from Brooklands. The daughter of a British army general, Gwenda Mary Stewart (1894-1990) drove ambulances in the Balkans in the First World War and, like Cordery, began racing in 1920; she set a series of records at Brooklands and at the Montlhéry autodrome, Paris, and was elected to honorary membership of the British Racing Drivers’ Club. Stewart’s Brooklands rival—with whom she duelled in highly-publicized lap speed records in 1935—was the Canadian Kay Petre (1903-1994), who was introduced to the Brooklands set by her husband, the air force officer Henry Aloysius Petre (1884-1962). Petre achieved the women’s lap record at Brooklands in 1934 and drove in the Riley works team at Le Mans and in the South African grand prix. Kay Petre’s partner at Le Mans was Elsie Mary [Bill] Wisdom (1904-1972), who took up driving at sixteen and found herself entered for her first race at Brooklands by her racer husband Thomas Henry [Tommy] Wisdom (1907-1972). Wisdom soon broke the ladies’ speed record, before driving for a series of works teams, and competing in mixed events. The Irish-born Helen Francis [Fay] Taylour (1904-1983) settled in England and became a works team motorcycle rider, made a living from prize money, and later turned to speedway racing. After the Auto-Cycle Union banned women from speedway she moved to motor racing, before her active involvement in the fascist movement led to wartime internment.

The Second World War interrupted several motor racing careers. In 1938-9 (Alfred Thomas) Goldie Gardner (1890-1958) set ‘light car’ speed records in MG cars on German autobahns, before returning in the late 1940s to a series of records and two unsuccessful record attempts at Utah in 1951 and 1952. Reginald [Reg] Parnell (1911-1964), a Derbyshire driver, began racing at Donington Park. In a twenty-year racing career from 1935, Parnell was the leading British driver in the immediate post-war period when the sport was dominated by Italian teams, though he subsequently enjoyed international success as manager of the Aston Martin team. (Thomas) Raymond Mays (1899-1980), based at Bourne in Lincolnshire, was the leading light in the ERA (English Racing Automobiles) team which enjoyed success in the late 1930s, and after the war was a founder of BRM (British Racing Motors) which aimed to build an all-British grand prix car. Mays served as BRM’s race manager during the firm’s chequered history, though a Formula 1 victory was finally achieved in 1959. The New Zealander Bruce Leslie McLaren (1937-1970) came to Britain in 1958 and established himself as a Formula 1 driver, securing twenty-seven podium placings in 100 F1 races; from 1963 he achieved his ambition of building cars and running his own team, McLaren. The Hawick-born Robert Steven Hislop (1962-2003) grew up in a motorcycling family and started racing in earnest in 1983. Hislop went on to achieve eleven wins on the Isle of Man, his victory in the senior TT in 1992—by just 4.4 seconds over the 226 mile course—being the most notable.

Alongside speed, road safety is a theme of many of the lives now added to the Oxford DNB. Sir Herbert Edwin Blain (1870-1942) managed municipal tramways in Liverpool and London before the First World War. Concerned at the number of accidents involving pedestrians and cyclists, he founded the ‘Safety First’ movement which later became the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA). John George Butcher, first Baron Danesfort (1853-1935), vice-president of the Pedestrians’ Association, supported parliamentary bills to impose a maximum speed limit of 5 mph for commercial vehicles in built up areas; he also campaigned for compensation from motorists for injured pedestrians, horse riders, and cyclists, without the need to prove negligence. Conversely Francis Richard Henry Penn Curzon Howe, fifth Earl Howe (1884-1964)—president of the British Racing Drivers’ Club and a victorious driver at Le Mans in 1931—accumulated a series of speeding convictions, and spoke in parliament against the speed limit, blaming the recklessness of pedestrians for many accidents. An assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, with responsibility for traffic, Sir Herbert Alker Tripp (1883-1954) proposed planning-based solutions to road safety, advocating the segregation of cars and pedestrians by sending the latter underground into underpasses, or over ground onto bridges. Such ideas, which influenced post-war town planning, were opposed by the pedestrian movement, including the solicitor and MP Sir (Rodney) Graham Page (1911-1981), chairman of the Pedestrians’ Association, whose principal legacy was his series of private members’ bills to curb drink driving, which led to legislation in 1967 introducing breathalyser tests.

Mass motoring was extended through the ingenuity of engineers seeking to build small, low-cost vehicles. The bicycle engineer Tom Laurence Williams (1891-1964) was a strong believer in the potential of three-wheelers, and designed a chain-driven van in his garden shed in Tamworth. This became the starting point for his Reliant firm, which catered for the passenger market in the post-war years of fuel rationing, and enjoyed a flourishing market up to the 1970s. In Longridge, Lancashire, Lawrence Bond (1907-1974) designed a prototype ultra-lightweight microcar which went into production from 1949 as the Bond Minicar. Mass production techniques were imported from the United States to British motoring plants at Cowley, Oxford, and Longbridge, Birmingham, in the 1930s by the engineer, Leonard Percy Lord, Baron Lambury (1896-1967). Lord’s principal legacy, as chairman of the British Motor Corporation in the 1950s, was to press ahead with a fuel-efficient small car, launched in 1959 as the Mini, though BMC failed in the short term to benefit financially from its innovative technology. Initially more successful, though aimed at a smaller market, was the E-type Jaguar sports car, which made its debut at the Geneva Motor Show in 1961. Regularly acclaimed as the most beautiful car in the world, the E-type was designed by Malcolm Gilbert Sayer (1916-1970) who had worked as an aeronautical engineer before joining Jaguar.

The more functional world of road haulage is represented by George William Quick Smith (1905-1986), an accountant who worked for the Road Haulage Association and was an early supporter of a Channel Tunnel. An army officer, responsible for road and rail movements in several theatres of the Second World War, George Neville [Charles] Russell (1899-1971) was appointed chairman of the Road Transport Executive in 1948 following nationalization of the road haulage industry, and went on to establish and run the state-owned British Road Services, created out of the firms taken into public ownership, comprising 80,000 staff and 40,000 vehicles. An automobile engineer Donald McIntyre Sinclair (1901-1971) spent most of his career in the bus industry, principally at the Birmingham-based Midland Red firm, the largest outside London. His many innovations included Britain’s first express motorway coach service which he launched between Birmingham and London in 1959 following the opening of the new M1 motorway. Five years earlier London Transport launched the celebrated Routemaster double-decker bus, designed from scratch, with a lightweight aluminium body, by its chief engineer Albert Arthur Molteno [Bill] Durrant (1898-1984) and regarded as ‘the most successful motor bus ever designed’. Finally, a lifetime’s experience behind the wheel of London taxi cabs was recorded in the books written by Maurice Levinson (1910-1984). Having arrived in the East End of London in 1918 as a refugee, Levinson found taxi-driving an escape from unemployment in the depression of the 1930s, and was never out of work in peacetime again.

Women activists and campaigners

The May 2013 update includes the lives of four women who, for brief periods, were prominent in British public life in the mid-twentieth century. Elsie Florence Eva [Elsy] Borders (1905-1971) and her husband James Walter [Jim] Borders (1901-1967) were among the house buyers on a newly-built estate on the southern outskirts of London, whose homes were found to have major faults as a result of cost-cutting in their construction. The Borders led a mortgage strike which resulted in legal proceedings up to the House of Lords in 1941, in which Elsy conducted her own case. After the Second World War Dorothy Crisp (1906-1987), a political writer during the 1930s, became chairman of the British Housewives’ League which campaigned against food rationing and austerity. In January 1955 Margaret Kennedy Knight (1903-1983), a humanist and lecturer at Aberdeen University, was at the centre of a public controversy when she gave three radio talks for the BBC, discussing morals without religion, and challenging the Christian monopoly of broadcasting on moral issues. In 1968 the Hull fish processor Lillian [Lil] Bilocca (1929-1988) became a household name when she led a ‘headscarf army’ of trawlermen’s wives. Bilocca and her followers demanded improved safety regulations after the loss of three Hull trawlers, and of fifty-eight lives, in less than a month.

Promoters of outdoor life

Two earlier campaigners now added to the Oxford DNB are remembered as champions of public access to common land. Cobbler’s Walk in Bushy Park, Surrey, commemorates the actions of the cordwainer Timothy Bennett (d. 1756) who successfully campaigned against the closing of a public walk in the park, following the creation of a royal drive to Hampton Court Palace. Bennett’s campaign has many similarities to that of the Richmond brewer John Lewis (1713-1792) who resisted attempts by George II’s daughter, Princess Amelia, to close Richmond Park to all but her friends. In 1756 Lewis brought a successful legal challenge and public access was restored. Subsequently both men have been celebrated as champions of English liberties in the face of authority, and as forebears of the ‘right-to-roam’ movement. The benefits of walking and rambling were championed from the 1880s by Edmund Seyfang Taylor (1853-1908) who explored and mapped a series of public pathways across south-east England. Under the pseudonym ‘Walker Miles’ Taylor’s discoveries were written up in more than 40 guidebooks, in which he encouraged Londoners to use their leisure time to explore the surrounding countryside. In Lancashire Taylor’s contemporary, Thomas Arthur Leonard (1864-1948), established a programme for factory workers to take holidays in the Lake District rather than at nearby seaside resorts. In the 1890s Leonard became secretary of the Co-operative Holiday Association. By 1913 the association had grown to cater for 20,000 guests annually, at which date Leonard left to establish the still extant Holiday Fellowship. As the founding general secretary of the Council for the Protection of Rural England, Sir Herbert John Griffin (1889-1969) was responsible for co-ordinating the growing number of rural organizations—including the National Trust and the Ramblers’ Association—as a common voice to champion conservation. Two further additions to the Dictionary are remembered as pioneers of British rock climbing. Walter Parry Haskett Smith (1859-1946) led the way in promoting climbing in Britain, in contrast to the then established fashion for Alpine expeditions. In the 1890s Smith published the first guidebooks to the British climbing landscape, while his fellow mountaineer James Merriman Thomson (1863-1912) popularized Snowdonia as a climbing venue through first-time ascents and publications.

Our selection of ‘outdoor lives’ is completed by a famous landowner, and his wife, and by a man whose invention made possible what has since become a British obsession. Thomas Gainsborough’s double portrait of ‘Mr and Mrs Andrews’ (c.1750), in the National Gallery, London, is one of the best-known works by a British artist. The work depicts Robert Andrews (1725-1806) and his wife Frances Andrews (1732-1780) under an oak surveying their lands on the Sussex/Essex border. The Oxford DNB’s biography of Mr and Mrs Andrews explains their association with Gainsborough and how the painting—as much a work of landscape as portraiture—celebrates the couple’s marriage and the restoration of their respective estates after a complex legal case. Landowners on a smaller scale owe much to the Gloucestershire inventor, Edwin Beard Budding (1796-1846), now best known for his ‘mowing machine’ which he patented in 1830. Budding’s machine used a system of rotating helical blades, derived from techniques used to remove the nap from cloth. His design, which incorporated a tray to catch grass clippings, went into production in the early 1830s and became the model for ‘push’ lawnmowers used by generations of gardeners.

The late-medieval religious

In September 2012 we published the first biographies of a new research project, to extend the Dictionary’s coverage of abbots, abbesses, priors, prioresses, monks, and canons active in late-medieval England. In May 2013 we add biographies of a further 14 individuals which highlight some key themes in the history of the medieval religious. Common to many of these lives was the importance of relations with bishops and—on some occasions—the monarch. Many religious would experience the detrimental effects of Henrician rule in the 1530s. However, the abbess of Wilton, Isabel Jordayne (d. in or before 1534), was more immediately affected by royal interests in 1528 as Henry’s queen, Anne Boleyn, sought to have her replaced by Anne’s sister-in-law. Jordayne survived as abbess but her authority was greatly weakened, and she failed in her attempts to reform the abbey despite the assistance of Cardinal Wolsey. By contrast, an earlier figure such as Aethelwig (d. 1077/8), abbot of Evesham, enjoyed a more harmonious and fruitful relationship first with Harold II and then with William the Conqueror—the Norman monarch being keen to use the English clergy, and men like Aethelwig, to stabilize the west Midlands following invasion. Secure in this relationship Aethelwig also prospered as abbot, overseeing a house that grew considerably in wealth and numbers. The prior of Norwich, William Worstede (d. 1436), was another whose good relations with his monarch, Henry VI, led to his appointment as an ambassador to the Council of Basle; Worstede was also in step with his bishop, William Alnwick, in the prosecution of heresy trials held at Norwich between 1429 and 1431. As bishop of Lincoln (from 1437), Alnwick had less harmonious relations with John Deeping (d.1439), abbot of Peterborough. Alnwick’s visit to the abbey exposed a series of long-standing derelictions, including drinking, which made clear Deeping’s loss of control and led to his resignation as abbot in 1438.

Coping with wayward elements was a difficulty also faced, with varying degrees of success, by several other new additions to the Oxford DNB. Thomas Colyns (d. 1539), prior of Tywardreath, near St Austell, Cornwall, led a small Benedictine house whose monks were said to consort with women, with the prior himself often the worse for drink. Attempts were made by Wolsey to remove Colyns and the priory was dissolved in 1537. One of Colyns’s failings was to allow internal discipline to deteriorate while nurturing relations between the priory and the outside world, a claim also levelled against the abbot of Glastonbury, John Chinnok (d. 1420), who cultivated the cult of Joseph of Arimathea as the abbey's founder while leaving unpunished misdemeanours among his brethren. At Godstow, near Oxford, the abbess Elizabeth Felmersham (d.1446) was more successful in confronting miscreants, some of whom were encouraged by regular visits by corrupting students from the university; however, it is likely that the strain of bringing the abbey in line ruined Felmersham’s health and hastened her death.

Difficult circumstances, often financial, were on occasions overcome—as in the example of Christabel Cowper (d.1562?), prioress of Marrick, near Richmond, Yorkshire, whose diligent management ensured that the house was described, in 1536, as free from ‘manifest sin’ and ‘abominable living’. John Evesham (d.1370), prior of Worcester, was another commended for his diligence and handling of the priory’s affairs at a time of reduced circumstances. Evesham’s biography again highlights the importance of good relations between a religious head and the episcopacy. Evesham had been appointed prior by the bishop of Worcester, Worstan Bransford, with whom he enjoyed a harmonious relationship; however, the situation worsened markedly from 1352 when Bransford’s successor sought to challenge privileges bestowed on the Evesham by Pope Clement VI. Few suffered as severely as Bonus (fl. 1327-1333), abbot of Tavistock, whose chief adversary, John Grandison, bishop of Exeter, was also the sole source of information about the abbot’s life and work. Bonus repeatedly appealed to Canterbury against the bishop; however, the latter—keen to install his own favourite—finally secured Bonus’s removal in 1333, having accused the abbot of reducing his monks to destitution. Such was Grandison’s antipathy that, as Bonus’s ODNB biographer concludes, his account of the abbot tells us more about the bishop than about his beleaguered subject. Distinctive sources also provide an insight into life at St Mary’s abbey, Winchester, of which Elizabeth Shelley (d. 1547) was head from 1527. Shelley took in girls for education—among them the daughter of Viscount Lisle, the illegitimate son of Edward IV—and her surviving letters to Lady Lisle reveal her efforts to secure sufficient funds to adequately clothe the child. Two final lives—those of the Benedictine monk Richard Clyve (d. 1326) and the Premonstratensian canon Thomas Wyngenhale (d. 1406?)—remind us of the scholarly aspect of religious life. Forty years a monk at Christ Church, Canterbury, Clyve was valued principally for his legal and administrative skills. Wyngenhale, who appears to have been the only theologian and canonist of note among the English Premonstratensians in the later middle ages, affirmed in works of history, canon law, and theology a Catholic doctrine of ‘pastoral theology’ to confront the new Lollard heresy.

Other lives: in books & in London

Early modern figures added in the May update include the religious conspirator Henry Arthington (fl.1569-1609), the third member of a group who, in 1591, publicly proclaimed their leader William Hacket to be the ‘king of Europe’ and Christ come to judge the world. Imprisoned in London Arthington wrote an account of the incident in which he claimed to have been the ‘possessed’ by Hacket. Unlike his co-conspirators, Arthington was spared execution and was freed after his testimony had been published by the government as part of a co-ordinated propaganda campaign against presbyterianism. Arthington’s contemporary, the London bookseller George Bishop (d. 1610/11), became a prominent member of the Stationers’ Company, established a monopoly on the printing of English bibles, and was instrumental in publishing titles such as John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Between 1592 and 1598, the Suffolk draper Thomas Fella (d. 1639) compiled a pocket-book miscellany comprising poems, botanical drawings, biblical scenes, and a calligraphic alphabet. Fella’s text, which offers a remarkable insight into the life and reading habits of a late sixteenth-century tradesman (including Foxe’s Book of Martyrs), is now in the Folger Institute, Washington DC, and was first published in facsimile in 2012.

Seventeenth and early eighteenth-century literary figures added in this update include the political pamphleteer, Charles Hornby (bap. 1670, d. 1739), known for a long-running series critical of the ‘anarchy’ integral to whig politics and supportive of the political writings of Jonathan Swift. In the late 1710s the Arabic scholar and translator Solomon Negri (bap. 1665, d. 1727) was appointed by the SPCK to supervise and correct an Arabic New Testament and psalter for dissemination among Oriental Christians. Born in Damascus, Negri had studied and worked in Rome and Paris before settling in England in 1717 where he also translated ancient Arabic texts and catalogued the oriental collections of the earls of Oxford. A more sensational publication traces the life of the Dublin-born Dorothea Maunsell (b.1749x51) who secretly married the celebrated Italian castrasto, Ferdinando Tenducci in 1766. What is known of Maunsell’s life derives from her True and Genuine Narrative of Mr and Mrs Tenducci (1768) which describes the couple’s elopement and the dramatic consequences of their marriage which was spent in Britain and Italy. Maunsell again came to public attention in the mid-1770s when she sought, successfully, to have her marriage annulled on the grounds of Tenducci’s impotency. Sir Thomas Gascoigne (1745-1810) was, like Maunsell, another one-time Italian resident, who first visited the peninsula on the grand tour and later with the travel writer Henry Swinburne with whom he toured France, Spain, and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. On his Yorkshire estate Gascoigne was a noted agricultural improver and developed Boston Spa as a ‘village resort of some renown’. The vast wealth of the Jamaican planter Simon Taylor (1739-1813) was derived from the slave trade. Resident in Jamaica from the 1760s, his letters provide some of the best evidence on eighteenth-century plantation management, planter politics, and Jamaican slave society. An active opponent of abolition, Taylor made occasional visits to England to petition against the ‘madman Wilberforce’ who, in his words, threatened to ‘spread fire and destruction among us’.

May’s update also adds the life of the writer, rogue, and literary prototype Gerald Hamilton (1890-1970) who is now best known for his association with Christopher Isherwood in the 1930s, recreated in fiction as the sinisterly comic Mr Norris in Isherwood’s Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935). Hamilton’s was a hugely colourful (and much elaborated) life spent travelling in continental Europe and the Middle East, consorting with foreign royalty, variously championing Irish independence, communism, and fascism—as well as periods in prison for sexual and political offences. Hamilton spent his final years on the King’s Road, Chelsea, and London is a shared theme for a final trio of architects who left their mark on the capital. As superintending architect of London County Council from 1899, William Edward Riley (1852-1937) oversaw what was then the largest municipal building programme in the country—comprising public housing, courts, a series of Arts and Crafts-style fire stations, and the laying out of Aldwych and Kingsway. John Henry Forshaw (1895-1973) also headed the LCC’s architects’ department in the 1940s, in which capacity he collaborated (with Patrick Abercrombie) in planning the post-war city and initiated a programme of high-density housing estates based on Swedish models. Forshaw had previously made his name as architect to the Miners’ Welfare Commission where, in the 1930s, he supervised a national welfare programme of redevelopment which put in place facilities for more than 250,000 miners, including 240 pithead baths. Finally, in the 150th anniversary year of the London Underground, we add the biography of Leslie William Green (1875-1908) who designed the well-known ‘red tile’ Tube stations at Covent Garden, Russell Square, Chalk Farm, and over 40 other locations across the capital. Green’s designs were influenced by his time in Paris and used elaborate ox-blood terracotta tiles as exterior decoration, with green tiling and elegant platform signage for the interiors. Green’s stations were designed and built in just four years and his heavy workload likely led to his early death at just thirty-three.

New portraits for existing entries

Of the biographies added to the Oxford DNB in May 2013, 32 are accompanied by a portrait likeness of an individual or (in the case of the Bentley Boys) of members of a historical group. The May update also adds 24 ‘retrospective’ portraits of subjects already included in the Dictionary. Among those individuals now illustrated are the cellist Jacqueline Du Pré, the tight-rope walker Charles Blondin, Arthur Percival, British commanding officer at the fall of Singapore (1942), and Christopher Merrett, the seventeenth-century natural philosopher who may have pioneered the production of sparkling wines. Other early likenesses include the burial monument of Sir Nicholas Rainton (1569-1649), mayor of London, and a colour illustration of the Tudor court fool, Will Somer (d.1559)—depicted alongside Henry VIII—from a psalter prepared in 1540. A full list of new portraits added in the May 2013 update is available here.

Dictionary updates have now added more than 150 ‘retrospective’ likenesses to biographies published in 2004. These—in addition to the 880 likenesses for new subjects added in updates since 2005—brings to 11,095 the number of biographies now accompanied by a likeness. All portraits are researched in association with curators at the National Portrait Gallery, London, to provide an authentic likeness of the individual.

Our next online update

Our next online update will be published on Thursday 26 September 2013 and will add biographies of 124 men and women, with a special focus on black and Asian lives and on historical figures from Birmingham and the West Midlands.

Back to top of May 2013 preface

September 2013 preface

New online contents, September 2013

Welcome to the twenty-seventh 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 2013 update adds biographies of 116 individuals active between the thirteenth and the early twenty-first century, with a special focus on those who shaped the history of the city of Birmingham and the adjoining industrial Black Country.

September’s release also continues three long-term research projects to extend the dictionary’s coverage of black and Asian figures in Britain; the British Empire and Commonwealth; and the abbots, abbesses, priors, prioresses, monks and canons who made up the late-medieval religious. In addition to these sets of biographies, we offer a selection of other lives ranging from the thirteenth to the late-twentieth century.

As ever, full details of the September 2013 update are available from the new online contents page, and a free selection of extracts and highlights is available here. The complete dictionary (58,780 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 you 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.

Birmingham and Black Country lives

Lives connected with Birmingham and the adjoining Black Country form the principal theme of the September 2013 update to the Oxford DNB. Boundary extension in 1911 made Birmingham the second city in England, in terms of area and population. This update charts some of those who left their mark on the city and surrounding region; it coincides with the opening (also in September 2013) of the new Library of Birmingham, now the largest public library in Europe.

A continuous territorial link with the city is traceable through the Calthorpe family (per. 1717-1910), associated with the Edgbaston estate to the west of the city, purchased in 1717 and surviving into the twenty-first century. The original purchase was made by Sir Richard Gough (1655-1728) who had made a fortune in Far East trade, and retired to Edgbaston Hall as a rural retreat near to, but secluded from, the city and its industries. His son, Sir Henry Gough, first baronet (1709-1774), a merchant and member of parliament, married into the East Anglian Calthorpe family. In the next generation Sir Henry Gough, second baronet and first Baron Calthorpe (1749-1798), also an MP, adopted the Calthorpe name on inheriting that family’s estates and settled in Suffolk. From 1786, building leases began to be granted on the Edgbaston estate for substantial detached residential villas. The first baron’s younger son, George Gough-Calthorpe, third Baron Calthorpe (1787-1851), was responsible for the laying out and expansion of the suburban estate. The estate’s golden years came during the ownership of Frederick Gough-Calthorpe, fourth Baron Calthorpe (1790-1868), who lived for a while at Perry Hall, Staffordshire. His support for charitable and educational institutions in Birmingham culminated in the donation of Calthorpe Park to the town in 1857, while his estate became home to the leading families who propagated Birmingham’s ‘civic gospel’. The estate was inherited by Frederick Henry William Gough-Calthorpe, fifth Baron Calthorpe (1826-1893), who was more detached from Birmingham and incurred anti-aristocratic sentiment from its inhabitants. These were vented when his son and successor, Augustus Cholmondeley Gough-Calthorpe, sixth Baron Calthorpe (1829-1910), was a tory candidate for one of Birmingham’s parliamentary seats in 1880, and came bottom of the poll. He went on, though, to support the new University of Birmingham and gave land to local churches and charities.

Among the early residents of the Edgbaston suburb was the jeweller and political reformer James Luckcock (1761-1835). Although a leader of the movement in Birmingham for parliamentary reform in the post-Waterloo years, Luckcock regarded his work in organizing Sunday schools as his more important contribution to civic life. His fellow reformer George Edmonds (1788-1868) was among those imprisoned for his leading part in the unlawful election of a ‘legislative attorney’ to represent the town in 1819, when Birmingham had no separate representation in parliament, and went on to organize the Birmingham Political Union. Such developments alarmed one of the town’s leading physicians, John Darwall (1796-1833), an opponent of political change, but an innovator in his own field. He undertook a path-breaking study of the health of Birmingham’s workers, treated poor patients free of charge, and kept careful notes of all his cases. The reputation of the surveyor John Pigott Smith (1798-1861) was secured by his authoritative map of Birmingham (1828) following which he oversaw the resurfacing and drainage of the town’s roads and streets, which were regarded as a model of their type—though his ambitious schemes for improving the town’s drainage ran into opposition from an early generation of economy-minded councillors.

The gun trade was among the most distinctive of Birmingham’s industries. As well as being a successful gun maker, the Quaker Samuel Galton (1753-1832) was a leading figure in Birmingham scientific and civic affairs at the end of the eighteenth century. His family’s gun-making firm, dating to 1702, prospered from government contracts and supplied slave traders in West Africa, for which he was disowned by the Friends in Birmingham in 1796. Birmingham’s interlocking business families are illustrated by John Dent Goodman (1816-1900) who went on to lead the Birmingham gun trade at the time of the Crimean War, when it was threatened by competition from Enfield and also faced the challenge of machine-made guns. Goodman oversaw the foundation of the Birmingham Small Arms Company (BSA) which soon became the largest privately-owned rifle maker in Europe. William Greener (1806-1869) was the founder of another Birmingham gun-making dynasty. He settled in Aston in 1844 to be near local suppliers of components, and was noted for his wide-ranging inventiveness, and won large military orders, though mainly for muzzle-loaders. His son William Wellington Greener (1834-1921) won numerous medals, principally for sporting breech-loaders, of which he became the largest manufacturer in Birmingham.

In a town known for its brass industries, Robert Walter Winfield (1799-1869) set up a foundry that became the most successful in Birmingham. Having taken out patents on metallic bedsteads, Winfield established a dominance in that trade, with large exports to the British empire. Richard Prosser (1804-1854), who established a business in the Birmingham brass-founding trade, took up the cause of patent reform, to secure the rights of inventors. His son, Richard Bissell Prosser (1838-1918), born in Aston, made a career in the new Patent Office in London, where he carried out his father’s project to publish and index patents from 1617, and himself published a record of Birmingham inventors and inventions, showing the town’s pre-eminence. Birmingham-born engineer George Edward Belliss (1838-1909) acquired a business in the town making steam engines, and developed a light, high-speed engine for propeller-driven ships, and soon became a leading manufacturer of marine engines. He formed a partnership with a naval engineer Alfred Morcom (1848-1905), and—in addition to supplying the Admiralty—diversified into the expanding new market for electricity generators. The machine-tool manufacturer James Archdale (1839-1925) began on the shop-floor and set up in business in Birmingham in 1868 with just three employees. By 1910 he employed 600, the armaments industry being a major customer for his firm’s precision tools.

Fine art metal working is represented by Francis Alfred Skidmore (1817-1896), a Birmingham-born silversmith who established a business in Coventry making chalices. He applied his expertise in medieval metal work to a range of nationally-prestigious projects, including cathedral restorations (notably a choir screen at Hereford) and public buildings (including St Pancras Station and the Albert Memorial). Among those who worked to raise the standing of one of Birmingham’s long-established industries was the jeweller Jacob Jacobs (1839-1896), whose family—originally from Poland—had set up in business in Birmingham’s jewellery quarter. During the trade depression of the mid-1880s he helped to found a trade association to regulate the industry, while also establishing a technical school to create a well-trained workforce. His collaborator in these innovations was Charles Green (1844-1906), who learned the jeweller’s craft and joined his family’s firm.

Two family-owned businesses in the twentieth century catered for the demands of the mass consumer market. Alfred Joseph Johnson (1873-1936) was a toy manufacturer who seized the opportunity presented by the ban on foreign toy imports during the First World War to create one of Britain’s leading toy-making firms, Chad Valley. A Swiss pastry chef, who had settled in Birmingham, Christian Kunzle (1879-1954), built up a highly successful business making high-quality cakes and chocolates under the Kunzle name, profits from which he channelled into philanthropy in his adopted city. In the previous century Louisa Anne Ryland (1814-1889), the Edgbaston-born heiress to a fortune made in the Birmingham wire-drawing industry, devoted her energies and much of her wealth to the town which had brought prosperity to her family.

The newspaper proprietor Sir John Jaffray, first baronet (1818-1901), who had arrived in Birmingham in 1844—and who became a partner in the Birmingham Journal, the Birmingham Post and the Birmingham Evening Mail—was also a significant benefactor of the town’s hospitals and art gallery. A notable figure in Birmingham’s Liberal politics, John Thackray Bunce (1828-1899) was editor of the Birmingham Daily Post for thirty-six years, was involved in planning the new central library (1866) and also the school of art, which opened in 1885—the first municipally-run art school in the country. John Skirrow Wright (1822-1880), a button manufacturer, was chairman of the Liberal party organization which famously secured all three seats for the constituency at the general election of 1868. His sudden death, while attending a committee meeting in the newly-built Council House, was followed by the unveiling of a statue in front of the municipal buildings. Samuel Timmins (1826-1902), a hardware manufacturer responsible for compiling a remarkable survey of the region’s metal-working industries, was among the circle of active citizens who promoted Birmingham’s civic gospel. The ideas underpinning such civic activism were recorded and published as a result of the shorthand reporting of Marie Bethell Beauclerc (1845-1897), who taught shorthand at the Midland Institute to large attendances and introduced typewriting to the city’s commercial practice, as well as pioneering a new career for professional women. A new generation of municipal improvers was represented by William White (1820-1900), who set up in business in Birmingham as a bookseller and printer, was a dedicated teacher at a Quaker Sunday School, promoted temperance, and as a town councillor organized slum clearance. His work in improving Birmingham’s housing was continued by George Baker (1825-1910) who persuaded the council to build the city’s first municipal housing.

Three Birmingham architects whose lives are included in the update helped to shape the city’s built environment. The new Council House, completed in 1879 in a modified Italo-French Renaissance style, was the work of Henry Richard Yeoville Thomason (1826-1901). Julius Alfred Chatwin (1830-1907) established an architectural practice there and designed schools and commercial buildings during the mid-Victorian years, before turning to church architecture. William Henry Bidlake (1861-1938) became an influential teacher of architecture, and drew national and international attention for his respect for the vernacular craft tradition in his domestic and church commissions.

Sir Whitworth Wallis (1855-1927), the first keeper of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, which opened in 1885, sought to make the gallery ‘something more than a picture exhibition’. His legacy included fine collections of metalwork, ceramics, and examples of relief ornament, valuable as examples to the city’s craft trades, as well as building up the museum’s holdings of Pre-Raphaelite art. An early student at the Birmingham Municipal School of Art, Florence Camm (1874-1960) went on to join her family’s stained glass studio in Smethwick, working on ecclesiastical and domestic stained glass, for which she was a prize-winner at the Turin International Exhibition in 1911. Another student at the city’s art school, William James Bloye (1890-1975), was noted for his public sculpture in the city, of which over fifty examples are recorded. In the 1930s the brothers (Henry) Robert Melville (1905-1986) and John William Melville (1902-1986) were leading members of the Birmingham group of surrealist painters.

Birmingham’s traditions of internationalism and anti-slavery attracted many outsiders. The Baptist missionary James Mursell Phillippo (1798-1879), who established Sunday schools and Bibles classes among the enslaved in Jamaica, from 1824, maintained a lifelong connection with the Baptist community in Birmingham. The American peace campaigner and consul in Birmingham, Elihu Burritt (1810-1879), found its political culture and faith in moral progress congenial. A Baptist pastor Peter Thomas Stanford (1860-1909), who had been born into slavery in the United States, spent five years as a minister in Birmingham. Stanford’s reputation for justice, equality, and enterprise made the city a place where a passionate advocate for racial justice could expect a warm reception. Humanitarian relief for refugees was the lifelong concern of Francesca Mary Wilson (1888-1981), who took up a teaching post in Edgbaston where she opened her home first to émigrés from revolutionary Russia then to those fleeing Nazi Germany and civil war Spain.

Child welfare is another theme running through the lives now added to the Oxford DNB. Sabrina Sidney (1756/7-1843), a London foundling who was taken to Shrewsbury, was the subject of an extraordinary experiment in child development at the hands of Thomas Day, a member of the Lunar Society of Birmingham, and heavily influenced by the writings of Rousseau. Birmingham’s destitute street children were the object of the philanthropic work of Sir John Throgmorton Middlemore, first baronet (1844-1924), who was convinced that children’s opportunities would be improved if they were removed to adopted homes in Canada, and so began a programme of organized emigration, whose results were later seen as controversial. Julia Lloyd (1867-1955), born into a Black Country family of Quaker ironmasters, became interested in the Froebelian kindergarten movement and worked to make kindergartens available to the poor in Birmingham. The Quaker educationist Margaret Ann Backhouse (1887-1977) encountered on a visit to North America the Camp Fire Girls (CFG) movement, established by progressive educators in Canada and introduced the CFG movement to Britain, at Bournville. In 1947, alongside an American colleague, Backhouse accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the British and American Friends. Dame Geraldine Southall Cadbury (1865-1941) had married into the Cadbury family, and devoted her life to social reform, developing a specialist interest in the treatment of young offenders, on which she was recognized as a national authority. Her husband Barrow Cadbury (1862-1958) shared her interest in penal reform.

Three of the daughters of Joseph Chamberlain perpetuated that family’s tradition of public service. The eldest Beatrice Mary Chamberlain (1862-1918) broke away from a domestic role to manage elementary schools in London, but remained connected with the West Midlands’ heart of the Unionist party, and fought for separate women’s organizations within it. Her half-sisters (Florence) Ida Chamberlain (1870-1943) and (Caroline) Hilda Chamberlain (1872-1967), involved in public administration to address food shortages during the Great War, became active after the war in the Women’s Institute movement and in local government. Through their correspondence with their brothers Austen and Neville Chamberlain, the sisters created and preserved a record of interwar British politics and diplomacy. Catherine Courtauld Osler (1854-1924) followed a family involvement with the women’s suffrage movement, advocated women’s involvement in local government, and took an especial interest in infant welfare. A landowner’s daughter from Berkswell, Solihull, Lettice Annie Floyd (1865-1934) became a member of the militant Women’s Social and Political Union and was twice imprisoned.

A member of Birmingham’s Quaker Sturge dynasty, Mary Darby [Maida] Sturge (1865-1925) was among the first four women students at Mason College, Birmingham. She later took up general practice in the city, where she promoted the position of women in the profession. In the early twentieth century an Edgbaston schoolteacher (Martha) Beatrice Webb (1863-1951) gave up her teaching post to enrol as one of the first women medical students at the newly-founded University of Birmingham. Her surviving letter books preserve in unusual detail a record of this experience. The Birmingham medical practitioner, John Francis Hall-Edwards (1858-1926) undertook early experiments in the use of X-ray photographs for surgical purposes at enormous personal cost, as the effects of radiation led to the amputation of his left hand and four fingers from his right hand. After his death, Hall-Edwards was among those commemorated in Hamburg, Germany, on the Radiation Martyrs’ Memorial. A leading figure in the Birmingham University Medical School, Sir Arthur Peregrine Thomson (1890-1977) had himself studied medicine there and established a substantial private practice in Edgbaston, gaining a reputation for his diagnostic flair. After medical training in Bombay and London, Dhani Ram Prem (1904-1979) settled in Birmingham as a general practitioner on the eve of the Second World War; in 1945 he was elected the city’s first Asian councillor, and in the 1960s took a leading part in combating racial discrimination.

One of Birmingham’s first Labour councillors was Eldred Hallas (1870-1926), who supported Britain’s participation in the First World War, and was accounted the city’s first Labour MP. Charles James Simmons (1893-1975), twice wounded during the First World War, was twice imprisoned for campaigning for a negotiated peace and against army field punishments. He continued as a peace campaigner between the wars and served for two periods as MP for Birmingham and West Midlands constituencies. Returning to Birmingham after being wounded and gassed on the Western front, Percy Lionel Edward Shurmer (1888-1959) became well-known as a pugnacious street orator, was elected to the city council, and became an MP for Sparkbrook, formerly a Conservative and Unionist seat, in 1945 when Labour gained a majority of the city’s seats. Among those who lost their seats in 1945 was the Conservative and Unionist Geoffrey William Lloyd, Baron Geoffrey-Lloyd (1902-1984), who reconstructed the party’s organization in the city, and went on to hold ministerial office in the 1950s, notably at the education ministry, where he introduced ambitious school building plans.

In 1938 Birmingham marked the centenary of its charter of incorporation with a historical pageant, the most ambitious of those organized by the pageant master Gwen Lally (1882-1963). For the Birmingham pageant she mobilized a cast of 8000 citizen actors in a historical chronology, from the age of dinosaurs to modern manufacturing. Two subjects offer differing perspectives on Birmingham’s more recent past. In her recollections, written late in life and published at the end of the twentieth century, Kate Dayus (1903-2003), described her poverty-stricken upbringing in back-to-back housing in Hockley, on the edge of the Jewellery Quarter, but also how she successfully set up in business on her own account as an enameller. Henry Charles Gunter (1920-2007), born in Jamaica, joined friends in Birmingham in 1948, where he became the first black member of his union branch and the first black delegate to the Birmingham Trades Council. He was active in campaigning in the early 1950s against the colour bar and racial discrimination in the workplace.

Several lives included in the update were connected with the Black Country, the industrial region to the north and west of Birmingham. The entrepreneur John Shaw (1782-1859), was apprenticed in Birmingham and learned the craft of the travelling salesman before setting up in business as a ‘factor’ in Wolverhampton. Such men played a crucial role in industrialization, in Shaw’s case distributing the hardware products of Birmingham and the Black Country to wholesalers and retailers both around Britain and also India. His grandson Sir (Theodore Frederick) Charles Edward Shaw, first baronet (1859-1942), a town councillor and MP, diversified the business into machine tools in the twentieth century. John Shaw’s widow Elizabeth Shaw (1788-1869) had provided essential support to the family firm, overseeing the warehouse and dealing with the accounts, both during his lifetime and after. Following her husband’s early death Eliza Tinsley (1813-1882) took over the running of what became a major nail and chain-making business, with a new factory at Tipton. Trading in her own name, Tinsley supplied orders to large customers, such as the Admiralty, and as far as Australasia.

Thomas Parker (1843-1915), brought up in the iron trade in Coalbrookdale, Shropshire, became a partner in a firm in Wolverhampton that manufactured electrical accumulators, and was responsible for electrification schemes around the country, including the Liverpool overhead railway. His interest in fuel-economy and smoke abatement led to his invention of Coalite smokeless fuel. Sir Alfred George Beech Owen (1908-1975) took over his family’s steel and component business at Darlaston after his father’s early death, and organized it on Christian principles with extensive welfare and recreational facilities. Succeeding generations of the Williamson family (per. c. 1855-c. 1934) ran a metal-working business originating in Wolverhampton, but established permanently outside the Black Country, at Worcester. William Blizard Williamson (1810/11-1878) founded the Worcester business, making tinplate domestic goods, and his two sons William Blizard Williamson (1839/40-1895) and George Henry Williamson (1845-1918) learned the trade at the tinsmiths’ bench, and went on to develop innovations such as lever lid tins for paint, custard powder, and treacle, and airtight tins for tobacco, the latter becoming the firm’s main product. Under George Evans Williamson (1887-1970), grandson of the founder, the firm made the bold step of entering the food canning industry but the need to raise capital ended the family ownership of the Worcester firm, which was subsumed into the Metal Box conglomerate.

Three Black Country figures continue to be remembered for their differing contributions to the region’s culture. Tipton, in the Black Country, is associated with the bargeman and prize-fighter William Perry (1819-1880), who honed his fighting skills on the Black Country’s canals. By eighteen years-of-age he was already known as the ‘Tipton Slasher’. To divert young men away from the attractions of such rough pastimes, John Blackham (1834-1923), a draper in West Bromwich, founded the Pleasant Sunday Afternoon association which aimed to provide convivial fellowship within a religious framework. The Oldbury fish-stall holder and ironworker, John Thomas [Jack] Judge (1872-1938) earned beer money by writing songs, of which ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’, composed in 1912, achieved national popularity when sung by troops disembarking in France in August 1914.

Black and Asian lives

The September 2013 selection of black and Asian lives begins with the African-American dancer William Henry Lane (c. 1824-c. 1854), who performed as Master Juba in New York, where Dickens saw him in 1842. He came to England in 1848 where he became a star attraction. Lane faded from view, and it is likely that he died in a Liverpool workhouse. A decade later a fugitive slave, Jack Burton [alias John Anderson] (fl. 1831-1862) turned to the powers of the British courts to over-rule those of Canada, after he was threatened with extradition from Canada to the USA for killing a slave-catcher. He was able to come to Britain, where he was warmly received, and spent some time in Corby, Northamptonshire, before sailing for Liberia. Edward Peter [Eddie] Whaley (1877x80-1960), born in Montgomery, Alabama, and Harry Clifford Scott (1879-1947) from Cleveland, Ohio, formed an African-American comic double-act who in 1909 made their first appearance in Britain, where they settled, and where, for thirty years, they enjoyed headline billing. A singer and actor of Barbadian descent Isabelle Harriet Lucas (1927-1997) travelled to London in 1954 and appeared on stage and television for forty years. One of the post-Windrush exodus of West Indians to Britain, Kelso Benjamin Cochrane (1926-1959), a carpenter born in Antigua, also arrived in England in 1954 and settled in Notting Hill, scene of racial violence in 1958. Cochrane was fatally stabbed by a group of white youths in May 1959, but none of the culprits was ever charged.

Asian subjects now added to the ODNB include Princess Catherine Hilda Duleep Singh (1871-1942), a daughter of the deposed ruler of Punjab. She was born in London and brought up in Suffolk, becoming a supporter of the women’s suffrage movement, but spent most of the interwar years in Germany before returning to Buckinghamshire where she opened her home to refugees. Anna May Wong (1905-1961), born into a Chinese family in California, entered the film industry, and based herself in Britain during the 1930s where she starred in films and on the variety stage, and was a prominent society figure. Also during the 1930s Dosabhoy Framji [Dosoo] Karaka (1911-1974), born in Bombay, spent eight years in Britain, including a period at Oxford University where he became the first Indian president of the Oxford Union, before returning to India as a reporter for a nationalist paper. Medical practitioner Diwan Singh (1894-1983) qualified in medicine at Amritsar and set up in general practice in Birmingham as the first turbaned doctor in Britain, before moving to Shepherd’s Bush, where he was president of the Sikh place of worship and chief spokesmen of the British Sikh community. Gyani Sundar Singh Sagar (1917-1996) was uprooted from his Punjab birthplace after the partition of post-independence India, and settled in Manchester where he fought against restrictive rules which excluded turban-wearing Sikhs from employment as bus conductors. Sagar went on to incur fines and imprisonment before he successfully secured exemption for turban-wearers from the law that required helmets to be worn by riders of motor-cycles.

Empire and Commonwealth lives: Indians in British East Africa

Six lives reflect different aspects of the Indian community which became established in British East Africa. After leaving his home in Kutch, India, in search of work, Alidina Visram (1851-1916) went on to establish a large-scale business enterprise in British East Africa, laying the foundations for the sugar, cotton, rubber, and tea industries there. Alibhai Mulla Jeevanjee (1856-1936), a businessman from Karachi, India, moved to East Africa during the construction of the Uganda railway, established east Africa’s first non-white newspaper, and became the first Indian member of the legislative council of the British East Africa Protectorate, where he campaigned for equal rights for Indians. Manilal Ambalal Desai (1879-1926), a lawyer from Bombay, moved to Nairobi, where he founded newspapers which adopted an anti-colonial stance, and was a leading representative of Indians in Kenya while also forming close links with African political activists. Muljibhai Prabhudas Madhvani (1894-1958) from Saurashtra, India, joined his elder brother in Uganda in 1908, and went on to become managing director of a large family business there—growing and refining sugar, as well as operating cotton ginneries, oil mills, and soap factories. Considered a socially-responsible employer, Madhvani was a major philanthropist in Uganda, especially in education and health. A printer, Makhan Singh (1913-1973), born in the Punjab, had moved with his family to Nairobi when still a child, and founded the Labour Trade Union of East Africa, open to workers of all races and religions. At a general strike in 1950, during which he demanded full independence for Kenya, he was arrested and detained without charge until 1961. Also born in the Punjab, Sophia Mustafa (1922-2005) was brought up in Nairobi and—after becoming a refugee following the partition of India and Pakistan—she returned to East Africa where in 1958, backed by the Tanganyika African National Union, she was elected the first non-white woman on the legislative council of Tanganyika. Her concern was to create one nation, irrespective of race; after independence she became a member of parliament.

The late-medieval religious

New additions to our coverage of the medieval religious range from instances of revival and expansion in the thirteenth century, to an example of failure of leadership on the eve of the dissolution of those communities in the early sixteenth century. Matilda de Bailleul (d. 1212), abbess of Wherwell, from the Flemish town of Bailleul, probably took vows as a nun at Wherwell Abbey in recompense for the sacking of the abbey by William of Ypres in 1141. After her arrival in about 1173, the abbey was reborn: she restored its buildings and properties, restructured its administration, won new patrons, and expanded its community of nuns. Michael of Amesbury (d.1253) was elected abbot of Glastonbury in 1235, having shown business acumen as the abbey’s chamberlain, notably in erecting a fulling mill. As abbot he continued to exploit the abbey’s resources, stripping peat from Godney moor to fuel the abbey’s hearths. Litigation was his preoccupation, though his long legal battle to remove the abbey from the patronage of the bishop of Bath was ultimately unsuccessful. Following the election of John of Taunton (d. 1291) as abbot of Glastonbury in 1274, the bishop surrendered his patronage to the crown, and the new abbot concentrated on an ambitious building programme on the abbey’s estates, incurring considerable debts, while helping to carry through a new code which placed more emphasis on intellectual study. Elected twenty-second abbot of the Cistercian abbey of Jervaulx in 1511, Robert Thornton (d. 1533) was a figure of significance in the north of England, appointed to a royal commission to gather corn in 1528, a year of famine. His rebus and a black mourning vestment are preserved in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Edmund Forest [Shoyer] (d. in or after 1525), from a Gloucestershire yeoman family, was elected prior of the Augustinian priory of Llanthony in Wales, one of the wealthiest Augustinian houses. As president of the Augustinian general chapter in 1518, Forest failed to respond to Cardinal Wolsey’s urgings for improvements within the order, and after a visitation of his own priory was himself removed.

Other lives: Northumberland, Aberdeen, Yorkshire, Cardiff, Fermanagh, and London

A dungeon in the castle at Newcastle, which is still known as Heron’s Pit, is associated with William Heron (d. 1257/8). A sheriff of Northumberland, Heron spent his career in administration in the north of England at a time when the country’s rulers sought to squeeze more money from the counties; Heron is recorded as carrying out his office in a grasping and arbitrary manner. The identity of the medieval war poet John Page (fl. 1418-1422) is not precisely known, but from several possible candidates of that name from among Henry V’s army and royal retinue it is possible to narrow the likely candidates. His narrative poem The Siege of Rouen, an account of Henry’s siege of Normandy’s garrison between 1418 and 1419, is both a valuable historical source and a thoughtful literary response to the atrocities committed during the Hundred Years’ War. A City of London merchant and politician Sir John Swinnerton (bap. 1564, d.1616) lost out in rivalries between syndicates competing to acquire rights to manage customs revenues, but was a notable lord mayor of the City in 1612-13, when the corporation began building work in Londonderry and that city received its charter. He was also closely associated with literary life, was dedicatee of about twenty published works, and sufficiently conspicuous to be satirized in a contemporary play.

Two lives illustrate aspects of Jacobite allegiance in the early eighteenth century. John Gordon of Glenbucket (c.1673-1750), spent his working life as a factor on the duke of Gordon’s estates in north-east Scotland, where support for the royal house of Stuart was strong, and fought with the Jacobite army in 1715. After his surrender he became a Hanoverian agent, but reverted to his earlier Jacobite allegiance and took part in the 1745 rising, after which he fled abroad. Robert Gordon (bap. 1703, d.1779), consecrated in 1741 as the last bishop of the nonjuring Church of England, was present when Charles Edward Stuart addressed fifty English Jacobites during a clandestine visit to London in 1750. A late eighteenth-century political movement is reflected in two Yorkshire lives. Pemberton Milnes (1729-1795) of Wakefield, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, was head of the county’s most successful woollen business and, as a leading religious dissenter in the West Riding, was a keen supporter of parliamentary reform, attending the first meeting of the Yorkshire Association. That he was said to have drunk more port-wine than any man in Yorkshire secured his reputation for conviviality. The full-time clerk of the Yorkshire Association was an attorney and founder of the Yorkshire Law Society, from Hedon, near Hull, William Gray (1751-1845), a devout Anglican, who managed successful election campaigns, but is now as well known for his surviving note books and autobiographical records and the insights they provide into domestic life in the period.

Business, philanthropy, and Wales’s place in the transatlantic economy are the themes of two Cardiff-based subjects. Sir William Reardon Smith, first baronet (1856-1935) established a successful merchant shipping line based in Cardiff, where he became a notable benefactor, contributing to hospitals, a nautical training school, and most significantly the National Museum of Wales at Cathays Park. A professor at University College, Cardiff, the economist Brinley Thomas (1906-1994), was most widely remembered for his study of migration of both population and capital from Great Britain to the USA in the context of the cycles of the economies either side of the Atlantic; also active in public life in Wales, he chaired the Council for Wales.

Two final lives, now added to the Oxford DNB, record the results of two painstaking studies of very different phenomena. For forty years the county surveyor in Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, James Parsons [Jim] Burkitt (1870-1959) pursued an amateur interest in ornithology. He was reckoned one of the most important British ornithologists in the first half of the century, mainly on account of his study of robins at his home Lawnakilla, near Enniskillen, undertaken over several years in the mid-1920s during which time he charted their territories and behaviour. Ralph Rylance (1782-1834), from Bolton-le-Moors, Lancashire, embarked on a literary career in London, where he undertook a series of small editorial jobs. He spent two years compiling the Epicure’s Almanack, published in 1815 with notices of 650 eating houses in London. However, the idea of a Regency ‘good food guide’ did not take off and nearly two-thirds of the copies were pulped within two years. It would be 150 years before there appeared another comprehensive guide to dining in the capital.

Our next online update

Our next online update will be published on Thursday 9 January 2014 and will add biographies of 220 men and women who died in the year 2010.

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