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2014 updates: introductions

January 2014

New online contents, January 2014

Welcome to the 28th update of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography which, since it was first published in September 2004, has been updated in January, May, and September of each year. The January 2014 update adds biographies of 219 people who died in 2010. Of these, the judge Alan King-Hamilton, was the earliest born (in December 1904), while Lee Alexander McQueen, fashion designer, was the latest, born in March 1969. Among the group as a whole there are seven centenarians, but the majority of those now added were born between the two World Wars. Of the 219 people who died in 2010, 49 are women. They also include 27 former contributors to the Oxford DNB and the supplements of its predecessor, the Dictionary of National Biography. We note in particular Tom Bingham, an associate editor of the Oxford DNB for the lives of twentieth-century judges, and Tony Howard, the associate editor for twentieth-century journalists, both of whom were especially helpful advisers to the dictionary. Also noteworthy are the relationships between several of the subjects now included: the actors Corin and Lynn Redgrave were siblings; Raymond Allchin, an expert in the material culture of the Indian subcontinent, and Donald Allchin, a theologian and scholar, were brothers; and Lucienne and Robin Day, respectively a textile and a furniture designer, were husband and wife.

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 (59,003 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.

Medicine and veterinary science

The January 2014 update includes a number of figures from medicine, notably the Nobel laureate and pharmacologist Sir James Whyte Black (1924-2010), who invented a range of drugs including the first successful beta-blocker, propranolol, used to treat heart conditions, and cimetidine, used to treat stomach ulcers and the first drug to achieve annual sales in excess of £1 billion. He is joined by Alex Bangham (1921-2010), a haematologist and the inventor of liposomes (originally called Banghasomes), used in drug delivery for chemotherapy, in vaccine production, and in the cosmetics industry; by Wallace Fox (1920-2010), who treated tuberculosis by short courses of chemotherapy, thereby leading to treatment at home and the closure of sanatoria worldwide; and by the neurosurgeon John Gillingham (1916-2010) who made important contributions to stereotactic surgery in the management of Parkinson's disease and other movement disorders. Three of our subjects were involved in paediatrics: John Waterlow (1916-2010) was a physiologist and nutritionist who transformed the treatment of severe infant malnutrition in the developing world, saving numerous lives; Otto Wolf (1920-2010) described Edwards' Syndrome and worked on metabolic disorders in children; and John M. Tanner (1920-2010) was an auxologist who broadened the range of human growth patterns considered ‘normal’, and whose work on variations in human growth across time and between social groups has been influential in many other disciplines. Tanner's growth charts are now used extensively. He also criticized the over-use of growth hormones. The psychiatrists David Hazell Clark (1920-2010) and Bertram Mandelbrote (1923-2010) were pioneers of social therapy in psychiatry and the development of therapeutic communities—Clark at Fulbourn, near Cambridge, and Mandelbrote at Littlemore, near Oxford. Sir Donald Acheson (1926-2010) was the chief medical officer between 1983 and 1991 who oversaw the response to HIV/AIDS and BSE during that period and who later published an influential report into health inequalities in Britain.

The veterinary scientist Walter Plowright (1923-2010) devised a successful vaccine for rinderpest, which is only the second disease (after smallpox) to have been completely eradicated. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation later estimated the cost of the programme at $3 million, with benefits in excess of $300 billion. Another veterinary surgeon now included, Mary Brancker (1914-2010), whose interests included zoo animals, amphibians, invertebrates, and other exotic species, was the co-founder of the Society of Women Veterinary Surgeons. As the first, and for almost forty years the only, woman president of the British Veterinary Association, her presidential year coincided with a major outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in 1967.

Mathematics, natural sciences, and engineering

Peter Hilton (1923-2010) was a wartime code-breaker at Bletchley Park who made significant contributions to algebraic topology and homology theory. The statistician John Nelder (1924-2010) worked on generalized linear models and statistical software packages, and combined his statistical and ornithological interests by exposing the fraud of the ‘Hastings rarities’ (an unusually large set of rare birds reported in the Hastings area by the taxidermist George Bristow). Muriel Nissel (1921-2010) was the government statistician who launched the ground-breaking Social Trends series in the 1970s. They are joined by three pioneers of computer science, pre-eminently Sir Maurice Wilkes (1913-2010), often described as the father of British computing, who led the Cambridge team which built EDSAC, the world's first operational stored-program computer. Robin Milner (1934-2010) is regarded as one of the foremost theorists of computer science and the founder of ‘informatics’, who saw computers as ‘prosthetic devices’ that extend our reach. Peter Denyer (1953-2010) developed CMOS image sensors (allowing mobile phones and other devices to act as cameras) and was the first academic to lead a Scottish spin-out company that became a public limited company.

Brian Flowers, Lord Flowers (1924-2010) was a nuclear scientist who was recruited to the wartime atomic bomb project and then to the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell; he was subsequently a leading ‘statesmen of science’ as a popular rector of Imperial College, London and vice-chancellor of the University of London. He is joined by the astronomer Brian Marsden (1937-2010), an authority on comets and asteroids who, as director of the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams, was responsible for verifying and naming new astronomical phenomena, and who led the campaign to ‘demote’ Pluto from its status as a planet. The astrophysicist Geoffrey Burbidge (1925-2010)—together with his wife Margaret, Fred Hoyle, and William Fowler—wrote one of the most influential papers in astronomy, on the ‘synthesis of elements in stars’. Burbidge was later known for his advocacy of the ‘steady state’ as opposed to the ‘big bang’ theory of the universe's origin. The chemist Sir Charles Reece (1927-2010) spent his career at ICI, where he was a key figure in integrating the company's scientific research with its business objectives. Dudley Williams (1937-2010) was an organic chemist whose pioneering work involving nuclear magnetic resonance and mass spectrometry led to advances in numerous areas of biological chemistry; in particular by elucidating the metabolism of vitamin D he enabled life-saving treatments for patients with kidney failure, and his work on vancomycin led to the development of new classes of antibiotic. The physiologist Richard Darwin Keynes (1919-2010) worked on the ionic basis of nerve impulses, contributing to Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley's Nobel prize-winning discoveries. Later he became a noted authority on his great-grandfather, Charles Darwin. The biochemist Patricia Clarke (1919-2010) did important work on the genetics and biochemistry of bacteria, and campaigned to get more women involved in science. The mycologist Terence Ingold (1905-2010) discovered and pioneered the study of aquatic fungi. Known as the ‘grand old man of British mycology’, Ingold published more than 100 papers after his eightieth birthday. Harry Whittington (1916-2010), geologist and palaeontologist, undertook painstaking work on the exceptionally well-preserved fossils of the Burgess Shale in Canada to reveal an astonishing array of ‘weird wonders’ that laid the scientific basis for understanding the ‘Cambrian evolutionary explosion’. David Cockayne (1942-2010) played a key role in the development of electron microscopy. The experimental psychologist Richard Gregory (1923-2010) made important contributions to the scientific understanding of perception, wrote widely on optical illusions, and contributed more generally to the public understanding of science.

Among the engineers now added in the Oxford DNB are two notable car designers, Harold Beach (1913-2010), responsible for the Aston Martin among other marques, and Spen King (1925-2010), designer of the Range Rover, who also worked on gas turbine cars and was described by a colleague as being ‘as near to the textbook definition of a boffin as anybody I've ever met’. The aeronautical engineer Gordon Lewis (1924-2010) pioneered jump-jet technology. The mechanical engineer Sir Hugh Ford (1913-2010) started as an apprentice with the Great Western Railway and went on to do wide-ranging work which led to new techniques in the manufacture of plastics and metals. Sir Frederick Warner (1910-2010), a leading expert on water pollution, chemical safety, and the design of chemical plants, led the first international team to Chernobyl in the Ukraine after the nuclear power-station disaster there in 1986 and called for the establishment of a group of retired scientists to enter radiation zones.

Scholarship and education

The philosopher Philippa Foot (1920-2010) was a leading thinker in the field of ethics and morality, whose classic paper on the ‘trolley problem’ (concerning whether it is permissible to take life in order to save more lives) gave rise to a sub-discipline of ‘trolleyology’. A philosopher of a different type, Anthony Quinton, Lord Quinton (1925-2010), was an urbane and witty scholar who chaired the BBC's ‘Round Britain Quiz’ as well as producing highly regarded books on metaphysics and Conservative political philosophy. The art historian Rozsika Parker (1945-2010) brought feminist perspectives to the study of art history and was known especially for her history of embroidery, The Subversive Stitch (1983). Carola Hicks (1941-2010) reached a wide audience with her studies of the Bayeux tapestry and Tudor stained glass. In archaeology Raymond Allchin (1923-2010) was a leading figure in the study of the Indian subcontinent, while Honor Frost (1917-2010) was a pioneer of underwater archaeology—becoming an authority on stone anchors and pre-Roman Mediterranean ships.

Among the classicists and ancient historians now included are Sir Kenneth Dover (1920-2010), whose most famous and controversial study was of Greek homosexuality; Bernard Knox (1914-2010), a leading scholar of Greek literature who defended the study of ‘dead white males’; the Assyriologist Donald Wiseman (1918-2010), who combined pioneering work on ancient Near Eastern tablets and inscriptions with a lifelong Christian evangelism, and R. A. Markus (1924-2010), one of the leading scholars of ‘late antiquity’ of his generation. Claude Blair (1922-2010) was the pre-eminent scholar of medieval and early modern arms and armour.

Historians now included demonstrate the international range of British scholarship. Jack Pole (1922-2010) was the leading British historian of the United States of his generation, and especially of the origins of the American Revolution. His work was as admired in the US as in Britain. After a distinguished career in SOE, Basil Davidson (1914-2010) pioneered the study of pre-colonial and modern Africa, to the extent that many Africans thought him one of their own. Alan Milward (1935-2010) emphasized the calculations of national interest involved in early European integration, provocatively titling his most famous book The European Rescue of the Nation State. Fred Halliday (1946-2010), a leading scholar of international relations and of the Middle East in particular, was a noted commentator on the Iranian revolution and Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, but broke with colleagues on the left over his support for intervention to restore Kuwaiti sovereignty in 1990-1. The historian and public intellectual Tony Judt (1948-2010) produced acclaimed books on twentieth-century European history but (having served as an interpreter with Israeli forces in the Six Day War in 1967) encountered fierce opposition for his later criticisms of the Israeli state. Also included is A. T. Q. Stewart (1929-2010), one of the leading Northern Irish historians of his generation, whose books elucidated the roots and patterns of sectarian violence in the province, and Kay Jones (1922-2010) a pioneering historian of the mental health services who was nevertheless unimpressed by the growing influence of revisionist historians and the ‘anti-psychiatrist’ movement.

Among economists, three figures stand out. Wynne Godley (1926-2010) was famous for his critical assessments of the British economy and his withering attacks on monetarism in the 1980s, though many of his predictions proved inaccurate. Robin Matthews (1927-2010) wrote pioneering works on trade cycles and a definitive account of recent British economic history, and was also a world authority on chess problems. Angus Maddison (1926-2010) was an economic historian with an interest in the long view who estimated global economic output back to the year 1 AD, and—in an argument that placed Asia at the centre of world economic history—provided evidence that the recent ‘rise’ of the economies of east Asia was merely restoring a natural balance and the status quo ante. The geographer Richard Lawton (1925-2010) was an internationally recognized expert on urbanization, population change, and migration in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe. The sociologist Mildred Blaxter (1925-2010) was a key figure in the emerging field of medical sociology. Mixing academic work with public administration, William Plowden (1935-2010) was a scholar of government who had a direct impact on policy as a member of the Central Policy Review Staff in the 1970s, as director of the Royal Institute of Public Administration, and as an expert adviser to many developing countries.

Religious lives

The January 2014 update includes several religious leaders from different faith communities. Graham Leonard (1921-2010) was a conservative bishop of London who transferred his allegiance to Roman Catholicism in protest at the ordination of women, but was disappointed when few other Anglicans followed him. Conversely, Colin Slee (1945-2010) was dean of Southwark and the most courageously outspoken liberal Anglican of his generation. Donald Allchin (1930-2010) was a different sort of Anglican again—a theologian who was fascinated by the monastic tradition and the Orthodox church, and was a key figure in the revival of interest in Celtic spirituality. Michael Goulder (1927-2010) was also a leading theologian and biblical scholar who contributed to The Myth of God Incarnate (1977) but later became an atheist. Gai Eaton (1921-2010) was one of the most prominent British Muslims, who attacked extremist interpretations of Islam, as well as atheism, secularism, and materialism.

Finance, business, and trade unionism

In this update we include three notable bankers from the City of London. Gordon Richardson, Baron Richardson of Duntisbourne (1915-2010), was first a merchant banker (chairman of Schroders) and then governor of the Bank of England from 1983 to 1993. He reorganized the Bank and oversaw its response to the secondary banking crisis of 1973-5 but his faith in informal arrangements for banking supervision was misplaced and he presided over a period when the Bank of England lost control of monetary policy to the government. Sir Brian Pitman (1931-2010) is widely regarded as the outstanding commercial banker of his generation. As chairman of Lloyds he built up its domestic business and saw its stock market value increase from £1 billion to £20 billion, notably avoiding the costly mistakes of his contemporaries and successors. John Gillum (1928-2010) was a merchant banker at Kleinwort Benson, Samuel Montagu, and N. M. Rothschild, and a key figure in various corporate takeover battles in the 1960s and 1970s, and in the privatizations of the 1980s.

Industrialists include the Northern Irish businessman and philanthropist Sir Allen McClay (1932-2010), who built up the pharmaceuticals giant Galen from scratch to become Northern Ireland's first billion-pound flotation in 1997, and later created another firm, Almac, after Galen decided to shed jobs in Northern Ireland. Sir Michael Angus (1930-2010) was a dynamic chairman of Unilever, Whitbread, and Boots and also president of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI). As deputy chairman of British Airways he orchestrated the removal of Lord King as chairman in the wake of the ‘dirty tricks’ dispute with Richard Branson and Virgin Atlantic. Sir Trevor Holdsworth (1927-2010) turned GKN into a key player in the motor components industry and was another president of the CBI. Sir Michael Hornby (1934-2010), chairman of the stationer and bookseller W. H. Smith, expanded and diversified the firm, and was also a controversial chairman of the Royal Horticultural Society. Hector Laing, Lord Laing of Dunphail (1923-2010), was chairman of United Biscuits but was probably better known as the treasurer of the Conservative Party and a personal friend of Margaret Thatcher. He was a firm advocate of corporate social responsibility who was described by one colleague as ‘the sort of man that most people would die for 90 per cent of the time—and the other 10 per cent of the time they could kill him’.

January's update also includes the biographies of some pioneering and colourful retailers who made their businesses, and sometimes themselves, widely known to the British consumer. Retail tycoon Joseph Ettedgui (1936-2010), founder of the Joseph womenswear label, helped establish the modern retailing environment. The entrepreneur Vladimir Raitz (1922-2010), a pioneer of the package holiday as the founder of the Horizon holiday group, started in business in 1950 with 11 paying customers flying to Corsica (attracted, perhaps, by the inclusion in the package of as much local wine as they could drink). David Quayle (1936-2010) opened a DIY ‘superstore’ with his brother-in-law Richard Block in 1968, thus laying the foundations for the ‘B&Q’ chain, which he sold to Woolworth's in 1980 for £16.8 million. Later he also founded the Ritz Video chain (with 800 stores by 1989). The most well-known of this group is undoubtedly the turkey farmer Bernard Matthews (1930-2010) who began in 1950 with 20 turkey eggs and a single paraffin oil incubator, and by the time of his retirement had built a business with 2500 employees and an annual turnover of £335 million. Often on television extolling the virtues of his ‘bootiful’ products, Matthews was much criticized for the quality of such culinary inventions as Turkey Twizzlers, and for the poor hygiene and cramped conditions on his turkey farms. As retailing grew in its importance to the British economy it spawned new academic disciplines to study its impact, as represented in the life of marketing scientist Andrew Ehrenberg (1926-2010), who made significant contributions to the understanding of consumer behaviour and the impact of advertising. John Shepherd-Barron (1925-2010) meanwhile was one of the pioneers of cash dispensing machines, although (as our article points out) not of ATMs as such: Shepherd-Barron's machine dispensed cash in return for vouchers, and was similar to a chocolate vending machine.

From the other side of the negotiating table we include the lives of two significant trade unionists of the 1970s. Jimmy Reid (1932-2010) led the successful work-in at the Upper Clyde Shipyard in 1971-2 in defiance of Edward Heath's Conservative administration which wanted to close it down, but his attitudes softened and he was later critical of Arthur Scargill's leadership during the miners' strike of 1984-5. Jayaben Desai (1933-2010) was the leader of the ultimately unsuccessful Grunwick strike from 1976 to 1978 in a factory where photographs were developed and printed at cut price. The strike attracted media attention and the support of many politicians and celebrities. Desai famously told her manager, ‘What you are running here is not a factory, it is a zoo. There are many types of animals in a zoo. Some are monkeys who dance to your tune, others are lions who can bite your head off. We are those lions, Mr Manager’.

Political lives

Among those who joined the picket lines at the Grunwick factory was the leading political figure included in this update, Michael Foot (1913-2010). Foot was a scion of a famous west-country political dynasty, though the Foots were traditionally Liberals rather than socialists. He came to prominence as a journalist and as the author of Guilty Men, an indictment of the foreign policies of Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain, and their governments which was published in the summer of 1940. Foot was a man of contradictions: a firebrand left-wing orator and editor of Tribune, and yet a sensitive writer on history and literature. He was one of the ablest parliamentarians of his generation but disastrous as a Labour party leader in the early 1980s, ‘unable to cope with internal challenge—perhaps because he was too nice a man’ in the words of our article. He was the most pleasant of companions and yet a PR nightmare. In 1983 Foot led the Labour party to its worst election result since 1918, its manifesto described by Gerald Kaufman as ‘the longest suicide note in history’. Albert Booth (1928-2010), a traditional ‘Old Labour’ politician, was secretary of state for Employment in the same cabinet as Foot under the prime minister James Callaghan in the late 1970s, but he lost the safe seat of Barrow-in-Furness (whose principal employer was Vickers) in 1983 as a result of his commitment to CND. Ken Coates (1930-2010) was another socialist committed to nuclear disarmament, a tireless left-wing author and activist in the forefront of campaigns for workers' control, who served as Labour MEP for Nottingham from 1989 to 1999, but was expelled from the party in 1998.

Three figures whose careers were spent in local government are indicative of Labour's problems and divisions at this level of politics. Andrew Cunningham (1910-2010) was a trade unionist, a local government politician, and a Labour ‘baron’ in Durham whose involvement in the Poulson scandal in the north-east in the early 1970s led to his downfall. Frances Morrell (1937-2010) was a hard-left adviser to Tony Benn in the 1970s and the controversial leader of the Inner London Education Authority from 1983 to 1987, who later became a noted Europhile. Meanwhile, Andrew McIntosh, Lord McIntosh of Haringey (1933-2010), was the Labour leader of the Greater London Council who, after winning the GLC election in May 1981, was ousted immediately by Ken Livingstone but went on to a frontbench career in the Lords that lasted more than 25 years.

The other side of the House is represented by Dame Angela Rumbold (1932-2010) a forthright Conservative who served as education minister, was a key figure in the Thatcherite ‘No Turning Back’ group, and was later a strong Eurosceptic. Nicholas Lyell, Lord Lyell of Markyate (1938-2010), was solicitor-general under Thatcher and attorney-general under John Major, and was criticized by the Scott Report for his role in the Matrix Churchill affair. Peter Walker, Lord Walker of Worcester (1932-2010), was a self-made millionaire and ‘One Nation Conservative’ who nevertheless served as a minister throughout Thatcher's administration. Relatively uncontroversial in cabinet, his method of purchasing companies in order to strip them of their most valuable assets was widely condemned in the 1970s. Winston Churchill (1940-2010), a Conservative MP with a colourful personal life, infuriated the party leadership with his right-wing views and the general public for profiting enormously from the sale of his grandfather's papers. Sir Robin Maxwell-Hyslop (1931-2010) was a principled and independent-minded Conservative backbencher, an authority on parliamentary procedure, and ‘an archetypal member of the awkward squad’.

This update also includes the biography of Sir Cyril Smith (1928-2010), the prominent Liberal MP for Rochdale, known for his bulk and for plain speaking; regarded as one of the ‘characters’ in politics in the 1970s and 1980s, Smith's reputation suffered a devastating blow after his death following revelations of child abuse. Billy Wolfe (1924-2010) was a left-of-centre leader of the Scottish National Party from 1969 to 1979 who helped transform it into a credible political force. Frank Crichlow (1932-2010) was the owner of the Mangrove Restaurant in Notting Hill and a key figure in the black community there. Anthony Wright (Antony Grey) (1927-2010) was a gay rights campaigner who was secretary of the Homosexual Law Reform Society and who was described by Lord Arran (who promoted the Sexual Offences Act 1967 in the Lords) as having done ‘more than any single man to bring this social problem to the notice of the public’. Edna Healey (1918-2010), a noted author and biographer in later life, was much more than just a leading politician's wife. We also include the biography of Colin Tennant, third Baron Glenconner (1926-2010), one-time laird of Mustique and confidant of Princess Margaret who spent much of her time on the Caribbean island.

Government, diplomacy, and the armed forces

Those whose careers were spent in public service include three notable civil servants. Sir Peter Baldwin (1922-2010) was first permanent secretary of the Department of Transport, 1976-82, later a transport historian, a campaigner for better transport for the disabled, stalwart of the Motorway Archive Trust, and the contributor of several Oxford DNB entries. Sir Kenneth Clucas (1921-2010) was permanent secretary of the Department of Trade in the early years of Margaret Thatcher's government and a thoughtful advocate of civil service reform. Sir Idwal Pugh (1918-2010) was ombudsman from 1976 to 1979, in which role he produced a series of hard-hitting reports on Whitehall and the National Health Service. Sir Robert Mark (1917-2010) was the reforming commissioner of the Metropolitan Police from 1972 to 1977 who rooted out corruption and made it his ambition to ‘arrest more criminals than we employ’.

The update also includes five distinguished diplomats. Sir Peter Ramsbotham (1919-2010) was the British ambassador to Washington unceremoniously dumped in favour of the prime minister's son-in-law, Peter Jay, in 1977. Sir Donald Maitland (1922-2010) was a leading Arabist who later became Edward Heath's press spokesman, Britain's permanent representative to the EEC, and (to some surprise) permanent secretary of the Department of Energy from 1979 to 1982. Sir Percy Cradock (1923-2010), ambassador to Beijing in the 1980s, helped negotiate the return of Hong Kong to China. Sir Robin McLaren (1934-2010), was also ambassador to Beijing at a time when the extension of voting rights in Hong Kong by its last governor, Chris Patten, led to chilly relations between Britain and China. Sir Marrack Goulding (1936-2010) had a high-flying career with the British diplomatic service before becoming a senior official at the UN from 1986 to 1997, where he transformed the UN's peacekeeping operations. He ended his career as warden of St Antony's College, Oxford.

Among those included from the armed services we include two quite different aviators. Air Chief Marshal Sir Thomas Prickett (1913-2010) was a Second World War bomber pilot who planned air operations at Suez in 1956 and played polo with King Hussein of Jordan. By contrast, Squadron Leader Mahinder Singh Pujji (1918-2010) was a Sikh RAF fighter pilot who served in all three major theatres of the Second World War, and was later a key figure in the campaign for recognition of the Indian and colonial contribution to Britain's victory in the conflict. Also included in the January update are two naval officers who both entered the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, aged 13. Vice-Admiral Sir Lancelot Bell Davies (1926-2010) saw action against the German battleship Scharnhorst in 1943, and was later commandant of the NATO Defence College in Rome, while Vice-Admiral Sir Louis Le Bailly (1915-2010), a naval engineer, served on cruisers during the Second World War, produced a hard-hitting report on naval training, and ended his career as director-general of naval intelligence. Captain John Moore (1921-2010) was a submariner who devised a number of techniques to improve the covert landing and recovery of special forces, and who was later an acerbic and opinionated editor of Jane's Fighting Ships.

The special operations and security services are represented by two women: Eileen Nearne (1921-2010) was a wartime SOE agent in France who was captured and tortured by the Gestapo, and never fully recovered from the ordeal, and Daphne Park, Baroness Park of Monmouth (1921-2010) was an intelligence officer who displayed ingenuity and bravery in a series of difficult postings during the Cold War and was later principal of Somerville College, Oxford.

Legal lives

Our coverage of legal lives in this update takes in many different elements of the profession. Pride of place must go to Tom Bingham, Lord Bingham of Cornhill (1933-2010), a judge widely regarded as possessing the finest legal mind of his generation, who filled all the highest judicial offices (including as senior law lord) and paved the way for the creation of the Supreme Court. He is joined by three very different and controversial members of the judiciary. James Pickles (1925-2010) was a judge who frequently clashed with his superiors and who was described by Lord Hailsham, a former lord chancellor, as ‘a sort of anti-Judge who does all the things that a Judge ought not to do’. Pickles was later a columnist for The Sun and the Daily Sport. Alan King-Hamilton (1904-2010) was an outspoken Old Bailey judge who presided over the trial of Gay News editor Denis Lemon for blasphemy in 1977 and who called for the return of corporal punishment. Sir Cecil Clothier (1919-2010) was another judge who ruffled feathers, in his case as the first chairman of the Police Complaints Authority. They are joined by two legal academics. Sir Ian Brownlie (1932-2010) was a leading international lawyer and an authority on human rights; he represented Nicaragua against the US at the International Court of Justice but on the ‘cab rank principle’ also represented Yugoslavia against NATO. J. A. G. Griffith (1918-2010) was a radical legal scholar whose books questioned the independence and prejudices of judges. Cyril Glasser (1942-2010) was a solicitor who acted as adviser to Bishop Abel Muzorewa during the later stages of the process that led to majority rule in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe and the election of its first democratic government. He was also a key advocate for legal aid, and later built a substantial practice largely in the music industry.

Social service and philanthropy

Philanthropists, social workers, and social entrepreneurs include Sir Harold Haywood (1923-2010), a key figure in the youth clubs movement who arbitrated between gangs of ‘mods’ and ‘rockers’ during their violent confrontations in Brighton in 1964. Later Haywood was director of the Royal Jubilee Trust and the Prince's Trust (famously taking Prince Charles on a ‘plain clothes’ tour of Centrepoint in London in 1985), and a key figure behind the creation of the Multi-Faith Centre in Derby. Raymond Clarke (1925-2010) was an influential charity worker and social reformer with the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, the Personal Social Services Council, and the National Council of Voluntary Child Care Organisations. Lady Anne Tree (1927-2010) was the founder of Fine Cell Work, enabling prisoners to earn money through fine needlework; she was a firm believer in the therapeutic qualities of craftsmanship. Among philanthropists we include Mortimer Sackler (1916-2010), an Anglophile American pharmaceuticals entrepreneur who made money with the drugs MS Contin and OxyContin, and whose bequests benefited a wide range of British universities, museums, and art galleries. Also added is the biography of Leonard Wolfson, Lord Wolfson (1927-2010), who succeeded his father as chairman of Great Universal Stores but was happier running the Wolfson Foundation, which disbursed funds amounting to £600 million under his stewardship.

Journalism, broadcasting, and food

Tony Howard (1934-2010), the left-leaning editor of the New Statesman in the 1970s, broadcaster, and obituaries editor of The Times, was one of the most astute and fluent political commentators of his generation. He is joined in the Oxford DNB by Alan Watkins (1933-2010), another independent-minded political journalist and columnist for 50 years who invented such phrases as ‘young fogey’ and ‘chattering classes’. Christopher Cviic (1930-2010) was a Croatian-born journalist and a leading commentator on the Balkans during the period of their instability in the 1990s. Among broadcasters associated with the BBC we include Brian Hanrahan (1949-2010), the much-admired BBC foreign correspondent best known for his coverage of the Falklands War and the Tiananmen Square massacre; Mary Malcolm (1918-2010), one of the first female announcers on the BBC, frequently called on to ad lib while technical faults were fixed, provide continuity, and wish viewers goodnight at closedown; Margaret Dale (1922-2010), a former dancer who brought ballet to television screens as a BBC television director between 1955 and 1976; and the radio arts broadcaster Judith Bumpus (1939-2010) who specialized in intimate portraits of great twentieth-century artists including Picasso, Hockney, and Francis Bacon. Stephen Hearst (1919-2010), was a refugee from Austria and an innovative television executive who brought Kenneth Clark's Civilisation (1969) and Alistair Cooke's America (1972) to the BBC and then ran Radio 3 from 1972 to 1978. Two notable commercial television executives are also included. David Hennessy, Lord Windlesham (1932-2010), was a liberal Conservative politician who was briefly leader of the House of Lords under Edward Heath, and pursued a parallel career in broadcasting as managing director of Grampian Television and later ATV. He clashed with the Thatcher administration over his report on the Thames TV programme Death on the Rock (1988). George Townshend, seventh Marquess Townshend (1916-2010), was not only a Norfolk landowner but also founding chairman of Anglia Television. The Welsh-language broadcaster Owen Edwards (1933-2010) was, from 1981 to 1989, the first chief executive of S4C.

Claire Rayner (1931-2010) was a trained nurse and widely-known ‘agony aunt’ for Woman's Own and The Sun who published more than 100 books and was involved in numerous healthcare organizations and charities. Les Gibbard (1945-2010), the New Zealand-born Guardian political cartoonist, caused a political storm with his cartoon on the sinking of the Belgrano in 1982. Mary Evans (1936-2010), the founder of the Mary Evans Picture Library, supplied historical images to all forms of publication. Egon Ronay (1915-2010) was a Hungarian-born food critic who may well have done more to improve the quality of British food, restaurants, and hotels than any other person. Ronay was the founder of the series of eponymous restaurant guides, a scourge of British motorway, airport, and pub catering, and a tireless self-promoter. He would surely have approved of the inclusion in the Oxford DNB of Rose Gray (1939-2010), co-founder with Ruth Rogers of the River Cafe in London, once described as the best Italian restaurant in the world, and where Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, television chefs, began their careers, and of Shanta Pathak (1927-2010), co-founder with her husband Laxmishanker of the Patak's spice empire, which has helped to revolutionize modern British eating habits and culinary practices.

Literature and languages

Our list of popular and admired writers is headed by Beryl Bainbridge (1932-2010). She was briefly an actress (on stage and in Coronation Street) but is better known as a novelist whose dark and spare early works drew on her childhood and early adulthood, and who later turned to history for material in such books as Master Georgie (the Crimea), The Birthday Boys (Scott's expedition to the Antarctic) and According to Queeney (Dr Johnson). Five times shortlisted for the Booker Prize, she received a posthumous special award in 2011. Alan Sillitoe (1928-2010) was the Nottingham-born author whose novels Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) and Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1959), both of them made into successful films, placed him firmly among the ‘Angry Young Men’ of his generation. The playwright, novelist, and screenwriter Alan Plater (1935-2010) was best known for his work for television, including scriptwriting for Z Cars and Softly, Softly, numerous short plays, and adaptations such as A Very British Coup (1988). Dick Francis (1920-2010) was famous as a jockey who in 1956 was in first place and within sight of the finishing line of the Grand National, riding the Queen Mother's horse Devon Loch, when his mount collapsed under him. Later he became an enormously successful author of crime fiction. Elizabeth Jenkins (1905-2010) was a novelist and also a biographer best known for the semi-autobiographical The Tortoise and the Hare (1954) whose later biographical subjects included Lady Caroline Lamb, Jane Austen, and Elizabeth I.

This update includes three notable writers of children's fiction. Eva Ibbotson (1925-2010) was a refugee from Nazism who went on to write acclaimed children's books including Which Witch? (1979) and The Secret of Platform 13 (1994). Elisabeth Beresford (1926-2010) is best known for creating the Wombles of Wimbledon Common, and William Mayne (1928-2010) was the highly regarded author of more than 100 children's books whose career and reputation were ruined by a conviction for child abuse. We also include the poets Peter Porter (1929-2010) and Edwin Morgan (1920-2010). Porter, born in Australia, won many admirers for the range of his subject-matter and the elegiac quality of his verse, and Morgan was popular for his playfulness and inventiveness, and was declared ‘national poet of Scotland’ by the Scottish parliament in 2004. Sir Iain Noble, third baronet (1935-2010), a financier whose passion for the Gaelic language led him to found the Gaelic college, Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, on Skye, is included in this update. So too is Hywel Teifi Edwards (1934-2010), a leading scholar of nineteenth-century Welsh language and literature, and historian of the Eisteddfod.

Among critics pride of place goes to Sir Frank Kermode (1919-2010), the leading literary critic of his generation, who sought to bridge the gap between academics and the general reader and who was at home in all periods of English literature since the Renaissance. Stephen Wall (1931-2010), literary critic and Oxford academic, was a longstanding editor of Essays in Criticism. Experts in foreign literatures include the French scholar (and champion fencer) Dorothy Knowles (1906-2010), an authority on nineteenth- and twentieth-century French theatre; the BBC script editor and translator Barbara Bray (1924-2010), who brought the work of Samuel Beckett and others to English-speaking audiences; the Hispanist Anthony Close (1937-2010), a world-renowned expert on Cervantes; Arthur Hatto (1910-2010) a German scholar whose interest in archaic poetry led him to learn and then translate from the Kirghiz, Ostyak, and Mohave languages; and the Hong Kong-born Chinese scholar Din Cheuk Lau (1921-2010), who taught at SOAS in London and produced Penguin translations of classic Chinese texts as well as influential monographs on aspects of Chinese literature and language.

Theatre, cinema, and entertainment

Notable figures from the theatre who died in 2010 include Corin Redgrave (1939-2010) and his sister Lynn Redgrave (1943-2010). Corin was an actor hugely admired by his peers who for many years set aside his career to engage in militant left-wing politics (but was perhaps best known for his sensitive portrayals of establishment figures). Meanwhile Lynn was a talented comic actress and star of Georgy Girl (1966) who moved to the US to escape the shadow of her famous family. Ian Carmichael (1920-2010) was best known for his portrayals of bumbling toffs such as Bertie Wooster and the detective Lord Peter Wimsey. He starred with Peter Sellers in the Boulting brothers' film satire on British industrial relations, I m All Right, Jack (1959). Cy Grant (1919-2010) was one of the first black actors to appear regularly on British television, combining calypso versions of the news on BBC's Tonight (1957-60) with a raft of more serious roles.

Among film actors, we include Sir Norman Wisdom (1915-2010), the enormously popular slapstick comedian in the Charlie Chaplin mould, a hapless innocent in his screen roles who became a national hero in Albania. Jean Simmons (1929-2010) was a film star whose early promise in such films as Great Expectations (1946) and Hamlet (1948) was never fulfilled, but who kept working until the age of eighty. She is joined by two less elevated film actresses: Pamela Green (1929-2010) was a 1950s pin-up best known for her role in Peeping Tom (1959) and in various ‘naughtie nudies’, and Ingrid Pitt (1937-2010), a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp, who found fame as the Hammer studio's ‘Queen of Horror’.

The wide range of directors and producers includes Wendy Toye (1917-2010), a talented dancer and choreographer who went on to direct ballets, musicals, operas, plays, and films. The Scottish actor, director, and broadcaster Tom Fleming (1927-2010) was an actor and director with the RSC and the Scottish Theatre Company, but was best known to the British public for his radio and television commentaries for state occasions. Also included is the theatre director Peter Cheeseman (1932-2010), a pioneer of theatre-in-the-round who preferred to work in the Potteries (first in Stoke and then in Newcastle-under-Lyme) than in London; and Clive Donner (1926-2010), the film director responsible for two of the stand-out films of the Swinging Sixties, What's New Pussycat? (1965) and Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1968). Lionel Jeffries (1926-2010) was a much admired and successful theatre and film actor specializing in eccentrics (such as Grandpa Potts in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) who is best known for adapting and directing The Railway Children (1970). Ronald Neame (1911-2010) was a cinematographer, producer, and director of more than 70 films in a 50-year career, including Oliver Twist (1948), Tunes of Glory (1960), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969), and The Poseidon Adventure (1972). Finally, ventriloquist Ray Alan (1930-2010) was a frequent entertainer on television in the 1960s and 1970s, most famous for his pairing with the snobbish and drink-sodden character, Lord Charles.

Art, design, and architecture

Among fashion designers, the most notable new addition to the Oxford DNB is Lee Alexander McQueen (1969-2010), who was one of the most radical and innovative fashion designers of the age: the ‘enfant terrible’ of fashion, known for his tailoring skills, outlandish designs, and frequently provocative catwalk shows, he also created the fashion for ‘bumster’ trousers. Catherine Walker (1945-2010) was the French-born fashion designer who helped make Diana, princess of Wales, a fashion icon. Lucienne Day (1917-2010) was a textile designer whose vibrant patterns brightened up many British homes in the 1950s. Her husband, the furniture designer Robin Day (1915-2010), was one of the key figures in post-war British design; over 50 million of his stackable polypropylene chairs were produced in his lifetime. Day's design was manufactured and marketed by Hille, the family furniture firm transformed into a leader of contemporary design by the entrepreneur Rosamind Julius (1923-2010) and her husband Leslie. The potter and ceramic artist Gillian Lowndes (1936-2010) was best known for her radical and innovative use of new materials. The fashion photographer Brian Duffy (1933-2010) was a key figure in the Sixties who became almost as famous as his celebrity subjects. Among architects, Sir Roger Walters (1917-2020) was the architect to the GLC who oversaw the redevelopment of Covent Garden and commissioned the Thames Barrier, and Oliver Cox (1920-2010) was known for his colourful designs for Hertfordshire primary schools, and later for his pioneering low-cost developments in Jamaica.

Music

Sir Charles Mackerras (1925-2010), the Australian-born composer, conductor, and musicologist, heads our list of classical musicians and conductors. Known for his wide repertoire, he also championed the work of Janáček. He is joined by a group of admired and well-known singers led by Dame Joan Sutherland (1926-2010), the great Australian soprano known simply as ‘La Stupenda’. Anthony Rolfe Johnson (1940-2010) was a farmer whose talent for singing led to an international career as a tenor best known for his interpretations of Bach and Britten. Philip Langridge (1939-2010) was an operatic tenor also known for his performances of works by Britten, and for emphasizing the theatrical dimension of opera. John Reed (1916-2010) was the principal comic baritone with the D Oyly Carte for more than twenty years, renowned for his mastery of Gilbert and Sullivan's ‘patter’ roles. And Kenneth McKellar (1927-2010) was a Scottish lyric tenor who turned from classical roles to Scottish popular and folk songs. He was a key figure in the White Heather Club (1959-68), regularly ushering in the new year on BBC television.

The most notable figure from pop music included here was better known as a promoter than a performer. Malcolm McLaren (1946-2010) was the businessman and impresario who opened a King's Road boutique with his then partner Vivienne Westwood, and then, from 1976, masterminded the rise of the punk band, the Sex Pistols. Only later did he enjoy some limited success as a recording artist himself. Charlie Gillett (1942-2010) was a highly regarded music writer and broadcaster who wrote a seminal book on the history of rock n roll but was best known for introducing ‘world’ music to Western audiences. Mick Green (1944-2010) was an influential rock n roll guitarist with Johnny Kidd and the Pirates who influenced punk musicians, and later played with Paul McCartney, Van Morrison, and Brian Ferry. Two notable figures from the British jazz scene join this group. Sir Johnny Dankworth (1927-2010) was a jazz musician who enjoyed a sixty-year career as saxophonist, band leader, and composer (including of film music), often appearing with his wife Dame Cleo Laine. Harry Beckett (1923-2010) was a Barbadian-born jazz trumpeter and flugelhorn player who played with Charles Mingus and later the Jazz Warriors. Geoffrey Burgon (1941-2010) was a talented composer best known for his television and film scores, including Monty Python and Brideshead Revisited.

Sporting lives

The largest personality among the sporting figures now added to the Dictionary was undoubtedly the footballer, Malcolm Allison (1927-2010), known as ‘Big Mal’. Allison made 238 appearances for West Ham United between 1951 and 1957, though he was most successful as team coach for Manchester City in the late 1960s. He was famed for his fedora, panache, and outspoken manner. He is closely followed by the snooker player Alex Higgins (1949-2010), known as ‘Hurricane Higgins’ for the speed with which he took his shots, who won two snooker world titles but succumbed to drink and his inner demons. Cricketer Sir Alec Bedser (1918-2010) was a complete contrast to these two. A master of seam bowling (who once clean-bowled Don Bradman for a duck), he played for Surrey and England in the 1940s and 1950s. In retirement Bedser became an England cricket selector in which role he was less successful, notably when he and his fellow selectors declined to pick Basil d Oliveira for the 1968-9 tour of South Africa. Bedser was an old-school cricketer who looked with dismay on the antics of a younger generation. We include two rowers and a yachtsman in this update. Bert Bushnell (1921-2010) won a rowing gold at the 1948 Olympics with Dickie Burnell, and Andy Holmes (1959-2010) was a rower who won Olympic golds in 1984 and 1988, the latter with Steve Redgrave. Reg White (1935-2010) was a boat-builder and yachtsman who helped develop the popular Tornado catamaran, and won a gold medal at the 1976 Olympics. Greville Starkey (1939-2010) was a leading jockey who rode almost 2000 winners in a career on the flat lasting 33 years. Percy Sekine (1920-2010) was a key figure in the popularization of judo in Britain. Also included are two figures from Rugby Union. Jim Greenwood (1928-2010) was a Scottish rugby player and coach whose books, notably Total Rugby (1978), helped transform the modern game. Bill McLaren (1923-2010) was a Scottish schoolmaster who became the BBC's ‘voice of rugby’ but turned down a full-time post since ‘A day oot' a Hawick's a day wasted’: viewers and listeners were all the better for the enthusiasm and interest he brought as a part-timer to his famous commentaries. Another household voice and face who did much to popularize and dignify the sport with which he was most associated was Harry Carpenter (1925-2010), the BBC boxing commentator. Carpenter commentated on most of the great fights in the 1960s and 1970s, including those of Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali, the world heavyweight champion, and later he formed a famous friendship with the British fighter, Frank Bruno. The life of Arnold Beckett (1920-2010), a pharmacologist who played a key role in the campaign against ‘doping’, reminds us of some of the less admirable realities of modern sport.

Our next online update

Our next online update, which will be published on Thursday 29 May 2014, 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 early modern nuns in continental exile and the makers of the British film industry.

Back to top of January 2014 preface

May 2014

New online contents, May 2014

Welcome to the twenty-ninth 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 modern period. The May 2014 update adds biographies of 99 individuals active between the early thirteenth and the late-twentieth century, with a special focus on the shapers of a century of British cinema. The first of two sets of biographies (the second to appear in May 2015), this selection includes entries on actors, directors, producers, and cinematographers—from the silent era of the 1910s to genre films, such as Carry On and Get Carter, in the 1960s and 1970s. The selection also records the life and work of individuals responsible for three celebrated films with strong British connections—Mary Poppins, Zulu, and Becket—which mark their fiftieth anniversary in 2014.

The May 2014 update also draws on recent scholarly research on the post-Reformation Catholic diaspora to offer a set of biographies of nuns who were among the 4000 ‘women religious’ forced into exile in continental Europe between the mid-sixteenth and late-eighteenth century. A number of those now included were responsible for establishing and running English convents in Europe and North America, several of which continue today. We also have five new feature essays (highlighting existing biographies in the ODNB) which address two notable anniversaries: in June the 700th anniversary of the battle of Bannockburn (seen from the perspectives of the Scots and the English); and in August the tercentenary of the Hanoverian succession—with three features on the politics of succession, literary responses to George I, and a wider-ranging discussion of the Hanoverian influence for British politics, society, and culture.

May's release also includes the first of two sets of biographies that extend the Dictionary's coverage of individuals active during the period of the British civil wars. Here we focus on those who participated in the conflicts of the 1640s and on the role played by European diplomats who commented on the turbulent events of the mid-seventeenth century. The update also continues another of our long-term research projects: to extend the dictionary's coverage of the abbots, abbesses, priors, prioresses, monks and canons who made up the late-medieval religious. Finally, and in addition to these themed sets of biographies, we offer a section of lives of men and women active from the thirteenth to the late-twentieth century; these include an early fourteenth-century anchoress, who was unusually twice enclosed in her cell, and two men who did much to promote football in Brazil and Argentina from the 1890s.

As ever, we have a free selection of these new entries, together with a full list of the new biographies and themes. The complete dictionary (59,102 biographies and 511 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.

Our next online update will be published on Thursday 25 September 2014 and will mark the tenth anniversary since the first publication of the Oxford DNB, in print and online, on 23 September 2004. To celebrate the anniversary, September's update—the 30th to be added to the ODNB's online edition—will include biographies with a special focus on aspects of British life and national character.

A century of British cinema

The May 2014 update sees the publication of the first of two sets of new biographies (the second to follow in May 2015) of men and women who shaped the history of British cinema. Here we include accounts of twenty-seven individuals who—as actors, directors, producers, screenwriters, and cinematographers—were active in Britain and the United States between the late-nineteenth century and the 1970s.

Producers financed and sought markets for their films. The travelling showman (Arthur) William Haggar (1851-1925) began showing films on fairgrounds in South Wales during the coal-mining boom years of the late 1890s. In the early twentieth century he moved into film production, and displayed an instinctive grasp both for the new techniques of motion pictures, and for the tastes of his audiences, establishing a chain of cinemas across South Wales. During the 1920s the German producer Erich Pommer (1889-1966) headed a series of prestige products for international distribution. Believing in the potential of pan-European cinema, and driven from his native Germany by the Nazis' racial policies, Pommer moved to Britain where he made patriotic films in the 1930s, and established the ill-fated Mayflower Pictures, aimed at the US market. An insight into British film finance of that period is provided by another refugee from Nazism, Max Schach (1886-1957) whose Capitol Films, funded by City of London loans, made a series of lavish productions before the extent of unfunded borrowings brought the company's collapse, amidst law suits, in 1939. Gabriel Pascal (1894-1954), born in modern Romania, moved from Hollywood to England to produce a series of film adaptations of George Bernard Shaw's plays, of which Pygmalion (1938), filmed at Pinewood, was the most expensive British film then made. At the time of his death, Pascal was working on the musical version of what became My Fair Lady. During the 1950s and 1960s the producer Michael Klinger (1920-1989) was at the centre of London's Soho sex industry, and supplied films for that market, but later his production company, funded by Hollywood studios, made the cult thriller Get Carter (1971). Also included is the writer Alfred Edward [Ted] Lewis (1940-1982) whose novel Jack's Return Home (1970)—set in Scunthorpe, not Newcastle—was adapted by Lewis as the script for Klinger's film of the following year.

By the First World War, the phenomenon of cinema stardom had been established, exemplified in Britain by the London-born film actress Alma Louise Taylor (1895-1974) who had begun her career as an extra in Hepworth films, made in Walton-on-Thames, in 1907. Between 1914 and 1924 she was consistently the most popular star in British silent cinema, starring in some forty feature-length films and regular topping polls as voted for by picture-goers. Post-war shorts featured Walter Forde (1898-1984) in the popular character of his creation, Walter, who reappeared in Britain's first feature-length comedy, Wait and See (1928). After demobilization from the Royal Flying Corps, actor-manager Tod Slaughter (1885-1956) leased the Elephant and Castle theatre, where he revived the villains of Victorian melodrama, which fed into film roles such as Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1936). John Stuart [real name John Alfred Louden Croall] (1898-1979) was invalided out of France with trench fever and decided to become an actor in the post-war world. He enjoyed a film career of remarkable longevity, spanning nearly sixty years and traversing the transition from silent to sound, in which he played a range of parts from leading men to character roles. The German actor Conrad Veidt (1893-1943) had been discharged as medically unfit from service with his country's forces in Poland, and after beginning a stage career was soon spotted by film producers. He was first brought by Michael Balcon to Britain, where his most memorable role was as the U-boat commander in The Spy in Black (1939). A vicar's son (Arthur) Basil Radford (1897-1952) who saw active service on the Western Front, before training at RADA, is remembered for his screen pairing with the solicitor's son Naunton Wayne (1901-1970) as Charters and Caldicott in Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (1938), as well as a succession of vehicles for their characters. Although principally a stage performer, celebrated for his Shakespearian tragic heroes, Ernest Gianello Milton (1890-1974) had small film parts in the 1930s. Of German descent, Cecil Parker (1897-1971) started out in Shakespearean productions, and appeared in leading West End productions in the 1930s and 1940s, but after the war his career was defined by parts in English comedy films, such as The Chiltern Hundreds (1949) and The Ladykillers (1955). Jill Esmond (1908-1990) was born into a theatrical family and appeared on stage from her teens. She was a major influence on the acting career of her husband, Laurence Olivier, though she herself sacrificed the opportunity for Hollywood stardom; instead she became a regular character player both in the USA and back in Britain. Charles Hawtrey (1914-1988) had a series of small film parts between the wars and it was after an appearance on ITV in 1957 that he gained a role in the first Carry On film. This began an association that established Hawtrey as a key member of that celebrated comic team, though one who was increasingly embittered and disruptive. Born in November 1914, Hawtrey, whose real name was George Frederick Joffre Hartree was named after the French First World War commander Joseph Joffre. Another of the Carry On team, born in the last months of the First World War, was Kenneth Connor (1918-1993). He made his break in radio comedy during the early 1950s, and after Carry On, became an established television presence. Stage appearances by the Liverpool-born repertory-trained actor John Gregson (1919-1975) brought him to the attention of film agents, and to stardom through the comedy Genevieve (1953). The imposing physique of RADA-educated stage actor Nigel McGown Green (1924-1972) led him to be cast in historical action series on television, and then in film as Hercules in Jason and the Argonauts (1963) and most notably as Colour-Sergeant Frank Bourne in Zulu (1964).

Finally, the release explores some significant examples of directorial careers. During the First World War Adrian Hope Brunel (1889-1958) devised instructional films for the Ministry of Information, and his first opportunity to direct a feature film resulted in Blighty (1927)—the story of a family whose son had been killed in action. Reluctant to abandon the sophisticated techniques of silent cinema, Brunel failed to make a successful transition to ‘talkies’, unlike the director and producer (Frederick) George King (1900-1966) for whom the upheaval represented an opportunity to make large numbers of low-budget ‘quota quickies’ in the 1930s, followed by higher-quality productions during the Second World War, notably First of the Few (1942). Compton Bennett (1900-1974) began his career in the film industry as an editor, but during the Second World War had the opportunity to direct documentaries, and achieved a major success with the melodrama The Seventh Veil (1945). He followed this with The Years Between (1946) which, like Brunel's Blighty, explored the social and emotional aftermath of war on family life. They Drive by Night (1939) was a gritty murder thriller made by Arthur Bickerstaffe Woods (1904-1944), and based on the novel of James Curtis, another recent addition to the Oxford DNB. The film was distinctive in hindsight, though was not followed up immediately with others of this genre. Woods, who directed seventeen films for Warner Bros. at Teddington, was killed in a mid-air collision while serving in the RAF. Another Warner Bros. studio director Roy William Neill (1887-1946) moved from Hollywood to Teddington in the late 1930s, reportedly bored by the endless sunshine and blue skies of southern California. In Britain he directed Max Miller comedies, though he achieved his greatest successes back in the USA during the war, when he directed an updated series of Sherlock Holmes films. These conveyed a Hollywood view of England later associated with Mary Poppins (1964), whose director Robert Edward Stevenson (1905-1986), a former president of the Cambridge Union, had worked for Gainsborough films in Britain during the 1930s before moving to the United States, where he directed nineteen films for Disney Studios between 1957 and 1976 and became Disney's top director. Among technicians, the director of photography Geoffrey Gilyard Unsworth (1914-1978) won two Oscars (for Cabaret (1972) and Tess (1979); his British Film Academy awards included Becket (1964), in which he lit the reconstruction of Canterbury Cathedral in Shepperton Studios, and 2001: a Space Odyssey (1968).

Nuns and English convents in exile, 1550-1800

One of the aims of the Oxford DNB since 2005 has been to reflect new scholarship and to record in its updates the lives of historical individuals as they come to light, or as sufficient information becomes known to write first-time biographies. One instance is the addition in May 2014 of the biographies of 20 early modern nuns who were forced into exile following the dissolution of the monasteries in England in the 1530s. It draws on prosopographical research, directed by scholars at Queen Mary, University of London (Who were the nuns?), to identify the nearly 4000 women who joined monastic communities in continental Europe and North America between 1540 and 1800. The biographies now added to the ODNB offer a selection of some of the most notable convent founders, abbesses, and chroniclers active in this period of exile.

In the wake of the Reformation, the majority of nuns professed at convents that had been founded expressly for English and Irish women. However, in the early decades of exile women such as Margaret Clement (1539-1612) joined established continental houses. Clement, a descendant of Sir Thomas More, rose to prominence at the Flemish Augustinian convent of St Ursula's in Louvain, and was elected prioress at the age of thirty; this despite her being ten years too young to hold the post, and one of only two English women in that community. She was fluent in Greek, Latin, English, and Flemish, and was renowned for her spiritual guidance and strict regulation at the convent.

Clement's educational accomplishments are remarkable, but by no means unique. There are many examples of well-read women religious who employed their time translating and composing original devotional works, governance documents, chronicles, and letters. The Benedictine nun, Barbara Constable (1617-1684), is now remembered as the translator and author of spiritual guidance manuals written for nuns, monks, priests, and lay people; from her exile in Cambrai, Constable aspired through her writing to re-establish a sense of Catholic heritage and identity that the Reformation had suppressed. Others noted for their literary and intellectual contributions include Winefrid Thimelby (1618/19-1690), whose letters—written first as a choir nun at St Monica s, Louvain, and later as its prioress—offer insights on religious practice and convent management. Another is Joanne Berkeley (1555/6-1616), the first abbess of the Convent of the Assumption of Our Blessed Lady, Brussels, whose house statutes were used well into the nineteenth century. Nuns' surviving literature reveals the difficulties and dangers of exile. A striking example is Elizabeth Sander (d.1607), a Bridgettine nun and writer of the community of Syon Abbey, who was imprisoned at the Winchester bridewell in 1580 while on a return journey to England—her crime being the possession of Catholic books. Sander escaped several times, once by means of a ‘rope over the castle wall’, but she returned to prison upon the advice of priests who urged her to obey English law. She escaped again, and travelled under a pseudonym to the continent, where she rejoined her community at Rouen, and later wrote about her experience.

Nuns throughout the exile period faced similar perils to those narrated by Sander. The Catholic convert, Catherine Holland (1637-1720), defied her protestant father and ran away from her family home in England in order to join a convent in Bruges, where she penned her lively autobiographical conversion narrative. Others such as the Carmelite Frances Dickinson (1755-1830), travelled to North America to form new communities, in Dickinson's case the Port Tobacco Carmel, Maryland. Dickinson's narrative of her transatlantic journey, undertaken in 1790, is one of the few extant accounts of its kind written by a woman in the eighteenth century.

Convent life could be equally dramatic in what were years of political and military turmoil across much of continental Europe. Women religious frequently endured sieges, famine, plagues, and floods, and were sometimes forced to move on in the aftermath of violence, as in the case of the Irish Poor Clare abbess, Mary Browne (d.1694?), who professed in Rough Lee, before relocating to Galway during the civil war and then to Madrid after 1653, the year the convent at Galway was dissolved by Cromwell's forces. Browne's history of the Poor Clare order offers a lively account of these events and is now the sole surviving chronicle of its kind relating to early modern Ireland. Convents could also serve as safe-houses or stopping off points for English exiles on the continent. These included not just the friends and family of the nuns, but monarchs and their courts or military forces who relied on the generosity and hospitality of English convents to sustain their time away from Britain. Many exiles bequeathed money, gifts, and relics to the convents, including embalmed hearts, as is described in the group biography of Anne Throckmorton (1664-1734), prioress of Convent of Our Blessed Lady of Syon, Paris, which also includes accounts of her niece, Elizabeth Throckmorton (1693/4-1760), who succeeded her as prioress, and her great aunt Margaret Throckmorton (1591-1668), prioress of St Monica's, Louvain.

Convents in exile employed British and Irish chaplains and spiritual directors who worked closely with senior nuns to deliver pastoral care. Sometimes these relationships caused controversy, a prime example being the legacy of the writings of the Benedictine monk, Augustine Baker. Baker played a central part in the lives of several women religious—notably Barbara Constable, as well as Catherine Gascoigne (1601-1676), abbess of Cambrai, and Anne Cary (bap. 1614-1671), founder of Our Lady of Good Hope Convent, Paris—who perpetuated the monk's prayer methods and manuscripts, even under the threat of excommunication. The daughter of Viscountess Falkland, a notable Catholic convert, Anne Cary was one of six sisters whose biographies are also now included in the ODNB. Three of her siblings, Elizabeth (bap.1617-1682), Lucy (bap.1619-1650), noted for the biography of their mother, and Mary (bap.1622-1693), similarly converted and entered the Benedictine order—a reminder of the importance of family connections and kinship networks for sustaining the English convents in exile. Anne's two sisters who did not convert were Katherine (1609-1625), who became countess of Home, and the dancer, Victoria Cary (bap.1620-1694).

The lives of another two sisters, Margaret Mostyn (1625-1679) and Elizabeth Mostyn (1626-1700), prioresses of the Carmelite convent at Lierre, also provides an unusual example of possession and exorcism at an English convent. Having both displayed symptoms of unexplained illness, the sisters underwent exorcism over an eight-day period in April 1651 during which their confessor, Edward Bedingfield, is said to have exorcized 300 devils. Bedingfield's detailed narrative of these dramatic events is preserved alongside Mostyn's ‘Life’ in the convent annals and was clearly considered an important part of the community's collective history.

Prayer was, of course, central to the nuns' vocation, but as is demonstrated by these new biographies—and the scholarly work out of which they grew—convent life was multifaceted. In the wake of the Reformation, the convents in exile offered many educational opportunities for Catholic women. A notable educationist is Christina Dennett (1730-1781) who, as prioress of the Holy Sepulchre, Liège, expanded the convent's small school with the intention of providing Catholic girls with ‘the same advantages which they would have in the great schools in England.’ The school's registers for 1770-94 include the names of 350 pupils from six nationalities, studying a wide range of subjects. Many of the nuns who held teaching positions went on to become financial managers, abbesses, sub-prioresses, and prioresses. In these positions they controlled budgets, built new premises, and commissioned art works. In several instances their legacy to convent life continues in the survival of houses, such as Frances Dickinson's Carmel of Port Tobacco (now located in Baltimore) or English Augustinian Convent in Bruges, where Catherine Holland professed in 1664.

Other houses, founded in exile, came to England in the mid-1790s as they sought to escape fresh persecution following the outbreak of the French revolutionary wars. Among these was the Benedictine Convent of Brussels (whose first prioress Joanne Berkeley had been installed in 1599); the English Carmelite convent, Antwerp, whose founding prioress (in 1619) was Anne Worsley (1588-1644); and Our Lady of Consolation, Cambrai, where Catherine Gascoigne was abbess for 44 years. The latter, and its 1651-2 Paris filiation, continue today as Stanbrook Abbey, Wass, North Yorkshire and St Mary's Abbey, Colwich, Staffordshire—as does as Christina Dennett's convent school at Liège, which is now the New Hall School, Chelmsford.

The late-medieval religious, 1280-1540

One of the themes to emerge in the nuns' biographies is the important administrative role undertaken by prioresses and abbesses both within their houses and with political and religious authorities beyond convent walls. These internal and external responsibilities are likewise to the fore in the latest selection of biographies of the late-medieval religious—the continuation of our research project to extend the ODNB's coverage of monastic life in the several centuries prior to the Reformation. The successful management and advancement of her institution was a feature of the tenure of Elizabeth Cressener (d.1536/7), prioress of Dartford from 1489. Cressener's administrative thoroughness can be seen in her careful listing of priory estates and properties, and their rents due, and her willingness to go to law to resolve disputes over the priory's income. Cressener was also assiduous in building links between the convent and a network of gentry, professionals, and London merchants. Similarly adept was Margaret Pygot (d. in or after 1474), prioress of Carrow, whose success in increasingly her convent's finances, and developing its site, owed much to her establishment of close connections with the clergy and civic leaders in the nearby city of Norwich. Carrow's jurisdiction included several local parishes, one of which, the church of St Julian, was the site of the anchorhold, or cell, made famous by Julian of Norwich. The remarkable story of another anchorite is also told in the biography of Christina Carpenter (fl.1329-1332) who, having been enclosed in a cell at Shere, Sussex, in 1329, made a highly unusual exit from her hold. Carpenter's ‘escape’ was regarded as a serious threat to religious and moral order. Under threat of excommunication, she returned to her cell in 1332 where she was once more enclosed, presumably for life.

In contrast to the success of Cressener and Pygot, the perils of heading a religious house are made clear in other biographies. John Fossor (1283x5-1374), prior of Durham, suffered both a large-scale Scottish invasion in 1346—which wrought considerable damage to his property—and the trauma of the Black Death in which half of his monks died. Despite these set-backs, Fossor oversaw the most comprehensive campaign of renovation in the later medieval convent's history. His near contemporary, John de Cariloco (d.1396), prior of Lewes, faced an assault by troops from an invading Franco-Castilian in August 1377. Prior John raised 500 men to repel the attackers but was taken prisoner and required to pay 7000 marks to secure his release a year later. The appointment in 1497 of Alexander Banke (c.1467-1531?) as abbot of Furness, then the second richest Cistercian abbey in England, was contested and disputed. He was removed from office between 1514 and 1516 and restored only after an appeal to Pope Leo X, so resuming an abbacy described by Banke's ODNB biographer as ‘characterized by discord, chicanery and irresponsibility.’ Two final biographies chart religious careers brought to an end by the dissolution. William Browne (d.1557/8) was prior of Monk Bretton, near Barnsley, which escaped suppression in 1536 only to be ‘voluntarily’ surrendered by Browne in late 1538; in retirement, and with a generous settlement, Browne began to reassemble the monastic library. John Stonywell (d.1553), abbot of Pershore, increasingly set himself against the royal administration and its treatment of the monasteries during the 1530s. This led one of his monks to report alleged misdeeds to Thomas Cromwell, including that the brethren ‘cum to mantens as dronck as myss [mice]’; though Stonywell resisted pressure to surrender the abbey until early 1540, he too received a sizeable pension, together with lodging among the abbey buildings, a garden, orchard, and pools.

Civil war lives, 1630-1660

In addition to the nuns in exile, the Dictionary's seventeenth-century coverage is extended in May 2014 with fifteen new biographies of men and women active—in different capacities, and in pursuit of different ends—in the period of the British civil wars and the Commonwealth and protectorate. Several, including William Ashhurst (bap.1607-1656) and Robert Scawen (bap.1602-1670), held parliamentary office in the 1640s and 1650s. Elected in 1642, Ashhurst generally sided with the war party at Westminster and with the supporters of the New Model Army. He earned a reputation as a hardliner and one of the ‘violent spiritts’, though in 1648 he published an attack on the Levellers' Agreement of the People as the route to ‘government without authority’. Elected in 1640, Robert Scawen became a central figure within parliament for the work of recruiting, equipping, and paying the New Model Army, later introducing measures to tighten the Independents' grip on London. Scawen was able to resume his parliamentary career in 1660 and his son, William (another recent addition to the ODNB), became a prominent City merchant and the second governor of the Bank of England.

Others took to the field in the 1640s and 1650s, among them Edward Carne (1623/4-1650) from Glamorgan. In 1645 Carne raised 1000 men within a week in support of the king, though soon after he declared himself leader of ‘the peaceable army’, and variously declared his sympathies for both parliamentarians and royalists. Edward's uncle, Thomas Carne (d.1649) was the effective governor of the Isle of Wight between 1642 and 1647. He drew on the support of influential MPs to secure the island from attack, though he was also censured at Westminster for his personal indulgence of royalists. A third army officer, John Humfrey (c.1597-1651) supported the parliamentary cause in Ireland in 1642, but is better known as an agent and apologist for the Massachusetts Bay Company, and for his promotion of further expansion from New England to Providence in modern-day Columbia. In north-east Scotland the brothers George Gordon, Lord Gordon (c.1616-1645) and Lewis Gordon, third marquess of Huntly (c.1626-1653) took up arms for the royalists in the wake of the covenanting revolution before—under the influence of their uncle, the marquess of Argyll—signing the national covenant in 1641 and the solemn league and covenant in 1643. However, both men had a further change of heart and came back to the royalists in 1645. Lord Gordon was killed in action later that year, while Lewis was active in the royalist rising intended to bring Charles II to power in Scotland on his own terms in 1649-50.

There was no such wavering by Samuel Hyland (fl.1638-1663), a distiller from Southwark whose discontent in the early 1640s gave rise to political activism and his recruitment to the Levellers. Through the 1650s Hyland consistently opposed moves to offer the crown to Cromwell and to restore executive government which he believed would ‘set all honest people of this nation to weeping and mourning.’ Another Londoner, though one active a little earlier, was John Squire (c.1587-1653), Church of England clergyman and author of a lord mayor's show, The Tryumphs of Peace (1620), in which he praised James I's securing of peace for a unified Britain. Within several decades, however, Squire was caught up in the growing religious tensions, resulting in his arrest in 1642 for declaring support for the king and bishops.

Three of the additions to the Dictionary's seventeenth-century coverage were overseas observers of events before, during, and after the civil wars. The diplomat René Augier (d.1658/9) worked from 1619 for the British ambassadors to France, though by the mid-1640s he had taken up, in Paris, as the envoy of the English parliament. It was parliament's hope that their man on the ground would serve to secure a degree of recognition from a foreign power. The Spanish diplomat Alonso de Peralta Cárdenas (c.1592-1666) lived in Britain for 17 years from 1638 in which time he represented the Spanish government first to the king and then, after Charles's flight to Oxford in 1642, to the parliamentarians at Westminster. However, Cárdenas is better known as the representative of the Spanish crown during the sale of Charles I's art collection following the king's execution in 1649. By the time Cárdenas withdrew from the sale in 1653 he had acquired more than fifty of the finest paintings in the late king's collection, having spent just under £6000 on paintings and £4000 on tapestries and statues. From Geneva, in 1631, came Jean [later Sir John] Colladon (1608-1675) who became the protégé of the royal physician, and fellow Genevan, Sir Theodore Turquet de Mayerne. From the mid-1630s Colladon, who retrained and practised as a physician, established himself as the lynchpin of Anglo-Swiss relations for the coming decades, undertaking several political missions in this period, and taking over the representation of Genevan interests in England following Mayerne's death in 1655. Anglo-Swiss relations are also the theme of the joint biography of the pious laywoman Elizabeth Penington (bap. 1604/5-d.1642x5) and her husband Daniel Penington (d.1665). In 1634 the Peningtons met the Reform theologian, Johann Heinrich Hummel, who visited England while studying in the Netherlands. The Peningtons offered Hummel support during his time in England, and Elizabeth maintained a correspondence with the Swiss that (extant on her side) exemplifies from the lay perspective the beliefs and mores, the collegiality, and the international networks of the metropolitan godly. Posthumous celebrations of Hummel's life, published in 1675, acknowledged the support and hospitality given by ‘Mother and Father Penington’. Philanthropy on a grander scale is a theme in the life of a final, slightly later, seventeenth-century individual now added to the ODNB. Sarah Seymour, duchess of Somerset (1631-1692) acquired considerable personal wealth, and a peerage, through three skilfully compiled marriage settlements. Aside from her marriages, Sarah is remembered for her bequests in support of godly learning that saw her wealth divided between two Oxford and Cambridge colleges, and schools in Manchester, Hereford, Marlborough, and Tottenham, Middlesex. Several of these benefactions continue to the modern day, as does her almshouse for poor widows at Froxfield, Wiltshire, which is now the Duchess of Somerset Hospital.

Britons in Latin America: football and trade

May's update also extends the Dictionary's coverage of the British presence in Latin America, the subject of a previous release in October 2009. Charles William Miller (1874-1953) was a prominent figure in the commercial life of São Paolo, to whom legend attributes the introduction of football to Brazil in 1894. The Edinburgh-educated schoolmaster Alexander Watson Hutton (1853-1936), who founded a high school in Buenos Aires, built up a culture of team sports and founded the first football league in Argentina, the third oldest after those of England and the Netherlands. Recently commemorated as England's first football captain, Cuthbert John Ottaway (1850-1878) was better known in his own lifetime as an Oxford University cricketer, and a member of a touring team who crossed the Atlantic to promote cricket in North America. Lilian Beck (1878-1921), Ottaway's daughter, who was born after his premature death, had a transatlantic reputation as an equestrian. The interdependence of Britain and Latin America is illustrated by the lives of Horatio Bland (1802?-1876) and his nephew Thomas Bland Garland (1819-1892); the former, based in Chile, made his fortune shipping Peruvian guano, and established a country estate in Berkshire. Bland amassed a collection of anthropological and ethnological artefacts, which his nephew Thomas Garland also a successful businessman in Chile and heir to the Berkshire property—presented to the corporation at Reading, where it formed the centrepiece of a museum, art gallery, and public library.

Labour and the Great War

Three lives illustrate the impact of war on the world of labour. Fred Knee (1868-1914) was a socialist-minded printer from Frome in Somerset, who trained as a compositor in the firm of Butler and Tanner. Having moved to London, he promoted housing reform and in 1914 succeeded in creating a united Labour Party, though his hopes that international working class solidarity would avert war were unfulfilled. George James Wardle (1865-1947) was a Wesleyan Methodist railway trade unionist and a member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP). In 1906 he was elected as a Labour MP, but unlike other ILP members Wardle supported the war effort and was one of the first Companions of Honour, a new order instituted by George V in 1917. Also among the first on whom that honour was conferred was the Scottish shipwright and Labour MP Alexander Wilkie (1850-1928), another supporter of the British war effort.

Birmingham: metals and the stage

Continuing the Dictionary's recent survey of Birmingham lives (published in September 2013), two additional figures illustrate the city's long association with metal-working. Sir Henry Samuel Wiggin, first baronet (1824-1905) was head of the business which dominated the nickel industry in Britain, and entered politics as a Liberal Unionist. James Webster (1820/1821-1904), by contrast, avoided public life and secretly conducted experiments at his Solihull home for over a decade to develop a commercially-viable process to manufacture aluminium—which was then a precious metal; his breakthrough in this field was dramatically undercut by a rival method within a year. Three daughters of a Birmingham brass worker began their stage careers in the city before achieving success in variety performance at London's Gaiety theatre and elsewhere: Letty Lind (1861-1923) was noted for her performances as a skirt dancer as well as musical comedy, while her younger siblings, Millie Hylton (1870-1920) and Fanny Dango (1878-1972), made their name in pantomime and musical hall.

Medieval and early modern lives, 1200-1800

Other new additions in May 2014 range from the early thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and from civic administration and agriculture to the theatre and church architecture. Andrew Bukerel (d. 1237) was a noted civic official in London who rose to become mayor in 1231. He also amassed a considerable fortune from property, which gave him both income and a standing as one of the great men of the city, and he remains a presence in the City of London thanks to Bucklersbury Street. Thirty years on from Bukerel's appointment, Thomas of Wymondham (d.c.1278) became Henry III's treasurer. He was set the formidable task of restoring the crown's finances which he began during his period in office, not least by reviving an exchequer that had effectively ceased to function. Commercial sense was an attribute of John Heritage (c.1470-c.1536), a Gloucestershire sheep farmer and wool dealer whose surviving account book reveals much about the business at a time when few such sources exist, reminding historians of the vital role played by prosperous if seldom wealthy woolmongers in the commercial life of late-medieval England.

Another figure now remembered principally for and through his written work is John Wylde (fl. 1425x1450), an Augustinian canon and musical compiler, whose manuscript anthologies (now in the British and Bodleian libraries) reveal his expertise in English music. So too the Cheshire landowner, Humphrey Newton (1466-1536), whose miscellaneous notebooks were compiled between 1497 and about 1520. Newton recorded household accounts, family prayers, literary extracts, a collection of courtly love lyrics, and more besides. His text that has since been studied by early modern antiquaries (to construct Cheshire genealogies) and by modern historians interested in late-medieval conduct literature, book keeping, and the social and cultural history of the gentry. The Kent-born administrator and poet Peter Idley (d.1473/4) likewise owes his place in the historical literature to conduct writing. Idley's verse Instructions to his Son was addressed to his eldest child, Thomas, and ran in its fullest form to over 9500 lines. The Instructions proved relatively popular and survives in ten manuscripts, the latest dating from the early sixteenth century, though it was not until 1935 that a critical edition was published. As a young man William Bourchier, third earl of Bath (1557-1623) made what his mother considered to be an inappropriate marriage, leading to its forced annulment and his dispatch to the family's seat in north Devon; here Bourchier served as lord lieutenant at a time when the county was integral, in the face of a Spanish threat, to England's defence.

Five eighteenth-century lives are similarly characterized by their lasting associations with several English cities and counties. The Italian-born opera singer Giovanna Sestini (1748/9-1814) arrived in London from Portugal for the 1774-5 season and established herself as a popular performer at theatres in the Haymarket and Covent Garden. Sestini's was a theatrical family: her brother Vincenzo Sestini (1746/7-1829) began his career as an opera singer and later became a noted costume designer, while Giovanna's sons also appeared on the London stage in the 1780s. London was also home to the engraver William Henry Toms (d.1765) who made his name through his collaboration with the painter Robert West on his views of London churches in the late 1730s, and later (also with West) as co-illustrator of William Maitland's monumental History of London. Church architecture, in Leeds and the West Riding of Yorkshire, is the legacy of Thomas Taylor (1777/8-1826) who is known for a succession of accomplished Gothic churches that did much to influence the dominant architectural idiom for northern Anglican churches of the early nineteenth century. Between 1729 and 1755 John Secker (1716-1795), mariner and navigator, sailed the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific oceans aboard East Indiamen, coasters, warships, merchantmen, and privateers. His life as a mariner is known to us on account of his valuable memoir, written soon after 1765 once Secker had settled as a shopkeeper in Norfolk. One of only a handful of personal narratives by a merchant seaman to survive before the Napoleonic wars, the account reminds us that (as his ODNB biography concludes) ‘an empire built on maritime trade, Britain needed its John Seckers just as much as its Horatio Nelsons.’

Groups and anniversary features: Hanoverians, Noetics, & others

Among the new thematic content in May 2014 are two essays on historical networks that illustrate the interaction between religious commitment and public life. The Noetics (act. 1810s-1840s) were a small group of largely clergymen-scholars, centred on Oriel College, Oxford, whose influence on British governments extended to economic, social, and colonial policy. A century later the revivalist Oxford Group, later Moral Re-Armament (act. 1921-2001), whose roots also lay in college rooms, involved thousands of people, and attracted the interest of public figures under the looming threat of war in the 1930s, before establishing itself after the Second World War as an international movement.

This update also includes five new feature essays which offer introductions to the events of, and the people involved in, notable historical events with anniversaries in 2014. Two of these essays—one from the perspective of the Scots, one from the English—record the participants in the battle of Bannockburn at which Robert Bruce defeated Edward II in June 1314. Our remaining three essays examine aspects of the Hanoverian succession which followed the death of Queen Anne on 1 August 1714. Two of these essays discuss the events and personalities of the years immediately before and after the succession, exploring the reasons for the succession and the literary responses to the King George I, both among his whig champions and later satirists such as Pope and Swift. The third essay looks beyond 1714 to consider some of the principal themes and legacies of the century that came to be known as ‘Georgian’.

Back to top of May 2014 preface

September 2014

Editor's introduction, September 2014

Welcome to the thirtieth 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 modern period. The September 2014 update adds biographies of 119 individuals active between the thirteenth and the early twenty-first century. In addition we include one further entry that of the prehistoric skeleton, the 'Red Lady of Paviland' which extends the ODNB's coverage back to c.33,000 BP.

The Red Lady is a rather unusual addition to the Oxford DNB in what is a special update, marking the 10th anniversary of the Dictionary's publication, in print and online, on 23 September 2004. In September 2004 the Dictionary offered biographies of 54,922 people (all deceased) from the 'earliest times' to 31 December 2000. Over the past decade the ODNB's coverage has been extended in 30 online updates which have added first-time biographies of 4299 individuals. Of the new inclusions, 2172 died in the period 2001 to 2010. The remaining 2127 individuals were active (with the exception of the Red Lady of Paviland) between the 1st century AD and the late-twentieth century. In addition, the first ten years of the ODNB online have seen the publication of 513 Theme articles and the inclusion of a further 1183 portrait images. Online updates since 2004 have also corrected and amplified many biographies in the light of new research and publications, keeping the ODNB in-step with recent scholarship. In September 2014, the ODNB offers biographies of 59,221 men and women who have shaped the British past in 54,090 articles; the Dictionary also includes 11,240 portrait likenesses, researched in partnership with the National Portrait Gallery, London.

The 119 biographies added to the ODNB in the September 2014 update reflect the chronological and thematic breadth of a decade of updates and of the Dictionary as a whole. As befits a published work of national record, a selection of these new biographies are people remembered for their contributions to national heritage, conservation, and manners, as well as to 500 years of printing, librarianship, and the book trade. You ll find more information on the new biographies in our Summary of new content below.

As ever, we have a free selection of these new entries, together with a full list of the new biographies and themes. The complete dictionary (59,221 biographies and 513 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 in 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.

After 10 years' involvement with the Dictionary, this is the last update published under my editorship. Let me take this final opportunity to thank the permanent staff of the Oxford DNB, contributors to it, and the many readers who have contacted us, for their help and advice over the past decade in extending and updating the Dictionary. Our next online update the first under my successor, Professor Sir David Cannadine will be published on Thursday 8 January 2015. It will further extend the ODNB's coverage of contemporary Britain, with biographies of 231 men and women who died in the year 2011.

New online contents, September 2014

The 119 new biographies that comprise the Oxford DNB's 10th anniversary update published on Thursday 25 September represent examples of the chronological and thematic range of the Dictionary's coverage of 'the lives of the peoples of the British Isles and their connections overseas' (to quote the Introduction to the Oxford DNB which first appeared in September 2004). The selection includes subjects whose lives span 35,000 years: from the prehistoric period to 2010, the current terminal date for people included in the ODNB.

Heritage and conservation

Several subjects added in this update preserved, in different ways, the heritage of the national past. As chief architect of the Office of Works Sir Frank Baines (1877-1933) oversaw the restoration work (completed in 1922) that saved the medieval timber hammer beam roof of Westminster Hall the oldest part of the Palace of Westminster, and the largest such structure surviving in Europe. He went on to promote the preservation of English vernacular buildings. Late in 1918, as the First World War neared its end, Stonehenge was made a gift to the nation by its last private owner, Sir Cecil Herbert Edward Chubb (1876-1934), first baronet, a Wiltshire asylum proprietor who had been born nearby. Chubb had purchased the stones two years earlier at an auction. His concern was that encroachment by military bases on Salisbury plain might ruin its setting, and his gift forestalled development within a certain radius of the site. In 1937 the daughter of a successful northern businessman, Edith May Pretty (1883-1942) began archaeological investigations at her Sutton Hoo estate in Suffolk, which she had purchased a decade earlier. The subsequent excavations revealed the Anglo-Saxon ship burial which ranks as one of Britain's most significant archaeological finds. Pretty's offer to donate the treasures to the British Museum was announced shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War and, seventy-five years on, is now on display in a new gallery at the museum.

Two literary shrines in the north of England were preserved through the initiative of individuals who are now added to the Dictionary. A noted Yorkshire philanthropist, Sir James Roberts, first baronet (1848-1935) sold his interest in the Saltaire textile mill early in 1918 and in 1928 purchased Haworth parsonage, the former home of the Bronte family. Sir James presented it to the Bronte society, which has since preserved it as a museum. Another Yorkshire man the journalist and copywriter Kenneth Mackay Monkman (1911-1998) was from his student days an avid admirer of the work of the eighteenth-century writer, Laurence Sterne. Monkman later dedicated himself to the restoration of Sterne's one-time residence, Shandy Hall at Coxwold, near York. The hall, which was derelict when Monkman first visited in 1963, took seven years to restore. It subsequently became a museum, archive, and study centre where Monkman lived as honorary curator until his death.

The September update also records the legacy of three notable individual collectors. For almost fifty years from 1891,Ethel Stokes (1870-1944) worked as a record agent at the Public Record Office in Chancery Lane and was involved in research for the Victoria County History and the Complete Peerage. Following changes in land law in the 1920s, she was active as chairman of the British Records Association in preserving manorial records, and during the Second World War mobilized a large network of volunteers to save documents from indiscriminate destruction for wartime paper salvage. Soon after her marriage in 1893, (Augusta) Gabrielle Eden Enthoven (1868-1950) herself an active amateur player began pasting up press cuttings relating to the theatre, and went on to start a collection of play bills. By 1924 her collection numbered over 50,000 items, which she presented to the Victoria and Albert Museum as the foundation of a national collection of the performing arts. A trade union clerk from a radical family, Walter Charles Southgate (1890-1986) had begun collecting memorabilia documenting the socialist, trade union, and radical movements in Britain. From the early 1960s he was involved with others in promoting the idea of a permanent museum, which came to fruition in 1975 with the opening, in East London, of the National Museum of Labour History; it continues today, in Manchester, as the People's History Museum.

Cultural exchanges: Britain and Europe

Between 1549 and 1554 Johannes Spithovius [Spithoff] (d.1563) was the tutor in Greek and Latin to Princess Elizabeth, the future queen. Born in Westphalia, Spithovius was a graduate of the University of Copenhagen. After Elizabeth's accession he returned to England on two missions to promote an Anglo-Danish alliance, and corresponded with the queen's principal secretary, Sir William Cecil. A Huguenot refugee, born in the Bourbonnais in central France, Claudius Hollyband (1534/5-1597)settled in London as a teacher in the first decade of Elizabeth's reign. He was noted for compiling two bestselling language textbooks, The French Schoolemaister(1573) and The French Littleton (1578), both noteworthy for the lively treatment of their themes, and for the information they contain on daily life in sixteenth-century Europe. Hollyband also introduced into England the Calvinist criticism of the immorality of dancing, and launched the campaign against it in Elizabethan England. The French diplomat Jean de Montreuil [known as Montereul] (1613/14-1651)was secretary to the French ambassador to the court of King Charles I from 1637 to 1640, and charge d'affaires from 1640-1. Returning in 1645 as French resident in Scotland, he encouraged Charles to place himself in the hands of the Scottish army, with fatal consequences for the king. Montreuil's bulletins to Cardinal Mazarin between 1645 and 1648 first published in Britain in 1898 but relatively little used thereafter document the central role he played in the conflict of the three kingdoms in Britain.

An accomplished linguist and a practising physician, William Aglionby (1641-1705) likewise became a career diplomat and was sent on a succession of foreign missions. Noting the widespread appreciation of paintings in Dutch society, he urged on his fellow countrymen an awareness of and regard for history painting. His hope was to deflect the English nobility from what he regarded as their gluttony and drunkenness towards patronising and collecting this highly esteemed form of art. A nobleman born into a family committed to pursuing the fine arts, George Greville, second earl of Warwick and second Earl Brooke (1746-1816) suffered financial difficulties when he sought to maintain this ancestral tradition. Anxious to expand his inherited art collection, he acquired a number of items from Italy, notably the Warwick vase, which he had installed in a dedicated greenhouse in Warwick castle. In avoiding vice, while cultivating virtue and taste, Warwick neglected the financial management of his estate so that in 1782 it was placed in trust.

An admirer of the English aristocracy, the French liberal Catholic politician, Charles-Ren -Forbes de Montalembert, comte de Montalembert (1810-1870), who was born in London, kept in contact with leading figures in British politics after returning to France, where he became an opponent of Napoleon III. He wrote two admiring books on England published in 1856 and 1858, celebrating the survival there of the system of aristocratic liberty, of which he saw the new Palace of Westminster as a powerful symbol. An enduring legacy of de Montalembert's writing on England was his placing on record the alleged remark of Wellington, that the battle of Waterloo had been won on the playing fields of Eton. A visit to Normandy, in 1873, was to shape the life of Sir Everett Millais, second baronet (1856-1897), eldest son of the artist. Given a basset hound by his French host, which Millais went on to enter in dog shows, he developed an interest in breeding and biomedical research on the subject. He popularized in the dog-breeding world the results of new research on the science of inheritance. In a series of experiments using the method of artificial insemination pioneered by the Italian natural philosopher Lazzaro Spallanzani, Millais demonstrated the possibility of cross-breeding to introduce new blood into his kennel, and to return to the original breed within three generations. A historian of early modern Italy who wrote a survey volume for Cambridge University Press (1909), (Katharine) Dorothea Ewart (1870-1956) had taken first class honours in history at Oxford in 1893 before women students there were permitted to graduate and went on to contribute to the Cambridge Modern History. Dubbed 'L'Entente cordiale comedian', the Anglo-French music hall performer and composer Harry Fragson (1869-1913), enjoyed his peak of popularity between 1902 and 1913. His composition, 'Hello! Hello! Who's Your Lady Friend?', a chorus song designed for audience participation, was recorded in October 1913, shortly before his death.

Born in London to German parents, Frederick Norman (1897-1968) was in Germany in 1914 when war broke out. He was interned on declining to join the German army, and spent the war at the Ruhleben camp. After the war he made an academic career, holding a chair in German at King's College London for nearly thirty years. However, his most significant role was in military intelligence during the Second World War at Bletchley Park, where he deduced the location of a German V1 and V2 experimental rocket facility. A journalist born in Hungary to a family of Jewish ancestry, George Mikes (1912-1987)was sent to London in 1938 to report on the portents of war, and remained in Britain, where he was naturalized a British subject. His humorous insight into English life and manners, How to Be an Alien (1946), was an immediate success through its pithy observations notably 'Continental people have sex life; the English have hot-water bottles' and categorizations of personality types, such as the 'Bloomsbury Intellectual' and 'Mayfair Playboy'.

Transatlantic exchanges

The family of the alchemist and nonconformist minister John Allin (1623-1683) was driven from Suffolk by episcopal persecution of puritan nonconformists. Allin consequently spent his early life in Massachusetts. Returning to Sussex in the interregnum, he lived in Rye and then in London, before returning to North America, his surviving letters recording both his intellectual networks and his experiments in alchemical metallic transmutation and in pharmaceutical chemistry. The owner of the Stroke Gifford estate in Gloucestershire, and an MP for the county, Norborne Berkeley, fourth Baron de Botetourt (1717-1770, signified his allegiance to the Hanoverian regime (his family had been Jacobites) and successfully renewed a claim to the Botetourt peerage. After an unsuccessful venture in zinc manufacturing, his financial interests were saved when in 1768 he was made governor of the colony of Virginia. Though his time in office was brief, Berkeley maintained good relations with the colonists, sympathizing with their grievances. Following his death in Williamsburg, a marble statue of him was erected, and was later placed in the College of William and Mary where it remains today.

John Edward Maddock Pritchard (1889-1921) was a First World War airship commander who spent much of the war on sea patrol duties. He accompanied Edward Maitland Maitland as part of the crew of the R34 airship which, in July 1919, made the first east to west aerial crossing of the Atlantic. Pritchard parachuted out onto Long Island to secure the airship's mooring, a feat which led to him being hailed as the first person to land by air in the New World from the Old. He and Maitland both died two years later in the R38 crash over the Humber estuary. The sales manager to a piano manufacturer in Canada, Sir (Arthur) Beverley Baxter (1891-1964)enlisted in the Canadian army during the First World War, served on the Western front, and settled in Britain. He was appointed editor of the Daily Express by his fellow Canadian Lord Beaverbrook, assisting the latter's Empire Free Trade crusade and sitting as a Conservative MP from 1935. In the 1930s Baxter promoted the mutual benefit of close relations between Britain and Canada, and the importance of commonwealth unity as the basis for the survival of the British empire as a world power, though twenty years later, after Suez, he saw Britain's future as lying in Europe. The urban planner (Mary) Jaqueline [Jacky] Tyrwhitt (1905-1983), born in South Africa, was brought up and studied in Britain, where she was influenced by the ideas of the city planner Patrick Geddes, and made them the basis for her textbook (1950), the first guide to town planning for students published in Britain. A visit to the US in 1945 was life changing, and she went on to make her career in North America, as the first female member of Harvard's graduate school of design.

Two hundred years after George Greville, the ownership of Warwick Castle passed to (Charles Guy) Fulke Greville, seventh earl of Warwick and seventh Earl Brooke (1911-1984). As a young man, the seventh earl preferred to try his hand as a film actor and, though his career was brief, he attracted considerable attention as a British aristocrat in Hollywood. On his return to Europe he resumed his love of skiing and high living which he financed in part through a systematic and highly controversial sale of the castle's art collection. The practice was continued by Greville's son and heir, David Robin Francis Guy Greville, eighth earl of Warwick and eighth Earl Brooke (1934-1996), who as Lord Brooke also initiated a programme of public events and entertainments at the castle. On leaving Britain in 1975, Brooke provoked fierce criticism by continuing to sell works of art while resident in Italy. Three years later the castle was sold to the entertainment company, Madame Tussaud's.

Black and Asian Britons

Between 1507 and 1512 John Blanke was employed as a trumpeter at the courts of Henry VII and Henry VIII. He is thought to have come from Africa, though few biographical details are known beyond his brief musical career. Depicted twice on the 60-foot long Westminster tournament roll of 1511, Blanke is the only identifiable black person portrayed in sixteenth-century British art. The clay figure portrait-maker Chitqua [Tan-Che-Qua] (c.1728-1796), who was probably born in Guangdong province, China. He arrived in London in 1769 where he met James Boswell, who noted his ingenuity in making portrait models in terracotta. Chitqua remained in Britain for three years, where he moved in elite social and artistic circles, and sat for Zoffany's group portrait of the founders of the Royal Academy. He undertook numerous commissions, though owing to the fragility of his work unfired clay on bamboo very few examples of his work survive. The first black international footballer Andrew Watson (1856-1921) was born in British Guiana to a local woman and a Scottish plantation manager, who sent him to Britain for his education. Watson spent a decade in Glasgow, where he took up association football and represented Scotland on three occasions. He moved to Liverpool where another black sportsman from British Guiana, the professional boxer Richard William Adrian [known as Kid Tanner] (1911x14-1963) arrived in 1938. Ranked among the world's top ten flyweights, Tanner was prevented from competing for a British title by the colour bar which lasted from 1911 until 1947, by which date he was past his peak as a fighter.

Identities: Prehistoric to modern

Four subjects added in the September 2014 update illustrate, in different ways, questions of biographical identity. Since 2004 the Dictionary has included entries on 'unknown' figures, among them Lindow Man (whose discovery thirty years ago is marked this year) and the Unknown Warrior. To these are now added the Red Lady of Paviland (fl. 33,000 years BP?) , a partial prehistoric human skeleton discovered in 1823 in the Paviland cave on the Gower peninsular of Wales. The 'biography' of the person whose skeleton this was has evolved dramatically since its discovery nearly 200 years ago. Originally the skeleton was thought to be that of a female ancient Briton, from the time of the Roman occupation, a dating in accordance with biblical chronology. However, in the early twentieth century the body was identified as male, and the dating as prehistoric. With the aid of radiocarbon dating technologies, this was revised in the early twenty-first century to 33,000 years BP, identifying the Red Lady as the earliest known subject of ceremonial burial in Europe. Housed in Oxford since the 1820s, the Red Lady's skeleton formed part of an exhibition on prehistoric man at the National History Museum, London, in 2014. A largely intact and partially clothed skeleton discovered during excavations in Worcester Cathedral in 1987 has become known as the Worcester Pilgrim (fl. 1450s?). The man's vocation as a pilgrim is indicated by the presence, near the body, of a cockleshell (an emblem for those who journeyed on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela), and is further suggested by the discovery of a staff and evidence of knee damage in the extant bones. Subsequent research points to the possibility that these are the remains of Robert Sutton (d. in or before 1457), a prominent dyer in the city.

The persona of the naval officer and freemason Thomas Dunckerley (1720?-1795) went through several stages of construction. The son of a royal porter at Somerset House, who occupied grace and favour apartments, Dunckerley served for nearly twenty years as a gunner in the Royal Navy. Financial difficulties prompted his own fictional reinvention in 1766, when he circulated to noblemen and naval officers an account of his origins suggesting that he was the illegitimate son of George II. The next phase of his life was as an organizer of provincial freemasons, an activity which encouraged later hagiography, and a further recasting of his life story. By contrast, the anonymously published memoir of an early life spent as a beggar boy gripped the imagination of the Victorian reading public. Its authors was later identified as James Burn [McBurney] (1800x03-1889), who related a struggle for modest respectability and independence from origins of the most deprived sort, materially and emotionally. That the author's precise place and date of birth was not known to himself pointed to his obscure origins. Despite having written a widely-read book, Burn made little money from it, and the secure social position which he had seemed to enjoy was undermined by the poverty of his later years.

Medieval religious and the modern church

September's update continues a research project on lives connected with England's religious houses in the three centuries prior to the Reformation. When, in 1284, the Benedictine monk, John of Gamage (d.1306)was elected abbot of Gloucester, the abbey was heavily encumbered with debt. He set about restoring the abbey's position, acquiring advowsons and increasing its holding of livestock to 10,000 sheep. John re-founded the Benedictine College at Oxford Gloucester College and at his instigation new ordinances were approved for the government of Gloucester abbey, setting out his own rights and duties. The manorial barn at Frocester, Gloucestershire, is one of the surviving legacies of his energetic management and expansion of the abbey's estates. In old age John was described as a handsome man with becoming white hair; it was the opinion of Edward I that 'Nobody in my kingdom looks as venerable as the abbot of Gloucester.' Other religious lives relate to the period when the monasteries were dissolved and their wealth appropriated by the crown and its servants. In an early phase of suppression, Thomas Towers (fl.1525) who had previously held a canonry at Bayham abbey, Sussex attempted to reverse the seizure of Bayham by Thomas Wolsey in 1525. Towers led an armed band of up to 100 followers, drawn from the neighbouring area, reoccupied the abbey buildings, and reinstalled the deposed abbot. However, Wolsey's men recovered the abbey without sustained force, and the suppression proceeded. The remains of Bayham abbey are now in the care of English Heritage. At the end of 1530 William Dent [known as Thornton] (b.1546) born in Coxwold, Yorkshire, was elected abbot of St Mary s, York, then the wealthiest and most important Benedictine house in the north of England. Throughout the following decade Dent attempted to protect his monastery by courting the favour of Thomas Cromwell and demonstrating his loyalty to the crown. His hopes of maintaining a reformed monastery ended when Cromwell's officials oversaw its surrender, and pensioned off the abbot into retirement. The Cistercian monk Stephen Sagar [known as Whalley], (d. in or before 1551) entered the order at Whalley Abbey, Lancashire, before migrating to Hailes abbey, Gloucestershire, where he was elected abbot in 1527. Confronted with increasing crown interference after 1534, Sagar managed to secure the relative favour of Thomas Cromwell presenting himself as a reformist who was not opposed to the removal of his abbey's celebrated sacred relic of holy blood, in 1539. He nevertheless surrendered the abbey in that year having, apparently, made concealed grants of its property, verging on misappropriation. He later enjoyed crown patronage, receiving a prebend at Lichfield cathedral.

The lives of two successive abbots of Rievaulx abbey in North Yorkshire illustrate their respective fortunes following the dissolution. Edward Cowper [known as Kirkby] (d.1557) , elected abbot in 1530, had attracted complaints concerning his alleged dissolute life when studying theology at Oxford. His rule at Rievaulx soon divided the community, some of whom accused him of authoritarian behaviour and extortion. Reprieved from sentence of death for his overtures to the rebel Pilgrimage of Grace, Cowper acquired church livings in both London and Yorkshire, his family benefiting by his will from his accumulated wealth. Roland Blyton (d. in or after 1555) was installed in his place at Rievaulx in 1533, and was abbot at the dissolution in 1538. In this year Blyton retired with a comfortable pension to a former property of the abbey, though there is evidence during Mary's reign of his continued attachment to monastic life. Changes of religious regime during the Reformation also shaped the life of Ralph Clayton (1507/8-1553), a Franciscan friar who was among those who surrendered the priory at York to the crown in 1538. He next held a chantry in the city until 1547, subsequently becoming vicar of a North Yorkshire parish when chantries were abolished. Clayton took advantage of the end of obligatory clerical celibacy to marry, in 1553, but by then Mary had acceded to the throne, restoring the prohibition on clerical marriage. This led to litigation over Clayton's will in which he had bequeathed the bulk of his property to his wife, who was now held ineligible to receive his bequest.

A major re-endowment of the modern church resulted from a bequest made by Maria Mary Fussell [married name de Gendre] (1834-1881), the heiress to a family fortune made in the Somerset agricultural implement manufacturing business. While on a tour of Italy in 1857, she attracted the attention of a young member of the Swiss guard to the king of Naples, who had learned of her wealth, and drew her into marriage. Divorce and other legal proceedings later enabled her to recover control over her fortune, which she bequeathed to the London Diocesan Home Mission. Twenty years after her death, considerable benefaction had enabled the creation of twenty-three new parishes, and was marked by unveiling of a tablet to her memory in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral.

The book trade and libraries

The Cologne-born Theodoric Rood (fl.1481-1484?) is the second printer known to have been active in the university city of Oxford, and the earliest of this profession to be identified. Evidence of his editions suggests that he concentrated on publishing English authors writing in Latin. In 1480 he began renting a tenement in the city, and was printing there until 1483 or 1484, after which there was no further printing in the city until 1517. The day book kept in 1520 by a bookseller and stationer, John Thorne [Dorne] (d. 1548?),who occupied a small shop in Oxford's High Street, provides invaluable information about the book trade and book prices in early sixteenth-century England. Like Rood, it is probable that Thorne came from continental Europe, and there is a strong case for identifying him as the German, Johannes (Hans) Dorn from Brunswick. Fabian Stedman (bap. 1640, d.1713), born in Herefordshire, the son of a clergyman, was apprenticed to a London printer and set up on his own account as a bookseller and stationer in Fleet Street. He published the first book on the art of change ringing (the very English art of ringing bells systematically in constantly changing orders) and himself wrote a theoretical account Campanalogia (1677), which established Stedman as an important figure in its early development. In the 1930s David Archer Alderson Archer (1907-1971) opened a left-wing bookshop in Parton Street in the centre of London's Fitzrovia. It quickly became a meeting place for the literary intelligentsia, among them a young Dylan Thomas, whose centenary is marked this October. Archer funded publishing ventures from his personal income, including Thomas's first collection of poems in 1934.

Appointed chief public librarian of Kettering in 1896 and one of fewer than twenty female chief librarians employed by English library authorities Kate Edith Pierce (1873-1966)oversaw the opening of the town's new library with Carnegie Trust support in 1904. She held many positions in the profession nationally, where she was an outspoken advocate of women's rights to pursue librarianship on equal terms with men. A Belfast-born mathematician (Frederic) Gordon Foster (1921-2010) spent the Second World War at the Government Code and Cypher School, Bletchley Park, and later held a chair of computation methods in London. When the UK book trade decided to adopt a standard numbering system for all book titles, Foster was responsible for devising the original nine-digit code, adopted in 1966, which formed the basis of the international standard book number (ISBN).

Medicine and nursing

On the eve of the First World War, the Glasgow public health physician John Brownlee (1868-1927), an authority on infectious diseases, and author of papers applying statistical methods to the pattern of epidemics, was appointed head of the newly-formed statistical department of the Medical Research Committee. While continuing research on tuberculosis, Brownlee was also involved in estimating German manpower, and compiling records of sick and wounded British forces, later used to assess ex-servicemen's pension claims. In 1919 he also came to public attention with a hypothesis about the intervals between influenza epidemics. The experience of working in a Birmingham munitions factory during the First World War drew the Oxford physiologist and college science tutor Horace Middleton Vernon (1870-1951) to studies of industrial fatigue. Vernon subsequently joined the staff of the Medical Research Council's Industrial Health Research Board where he produced a series of pioneering reports on the effects of working conditions, such as rest breaks, upon industrial output.

During the war years, Elizabeth Casson (1881-1954)studied medicine at the University of Bristol, becoming one of the university's first female medical graduates. During her first hospital appointments on qualifying, she developed an interest in the new health care discipline of occupational therapy. Using her own resources she founded a residential clinic in 1929 and went on to launch the first British school of occupational therapy, of which she was regarded as a leading exponent. In 1949 Casson created a trust to promote occupational therapy. Early experience of nursing in geriatric wards led Doreen Norton (1922-2007) to take a special interest in the care of elderly patients. Her research on geriatric nursing in hospitals, published in 1962, was of international significance, highlighting the correct management of pressure sores. She went on to hold the world's first chair of gerontological nursing, though she reflected that the care of the elderly sick remained a neglected area.

Art and design

A former pupil and assistant to John Ruskin, Sarah Angelina [Angie] Acland (1849-1930) became an amateur pioneer of colour photography, successfully exposing colour images as early as 1900. Her most admired colour photographs were taken on visits to Gibraltar, and were still admired for their technical accomplishment a generation later. G.F. Watts hailed the Hereford painter and child prodigy Brian Hatton (1887-1916) as potentially a leading figure in British art. Hatton's death in action has given rise to a debate whether he had already exhausted his early promise and would have settled down as a proficient and 'charming' provincial artist or whether he would have embraced modernism and fulfilled the hopes invested in him as a child.

The font and regimental badges used for the standard military headstones of the Imperial War Graves Commission were designed by the artist and decorative cartographer Leslie MacDonald [Max] Gill (1884-1947), younger brother of Eric Gill. Max Gill's other notable work included a series of map posters for London's underground railways (from 1914) and a series of maps for the Empire Marketing Board, notably 'Highways of Empire', unveiled as a mural at Charing Cross at the close of 1927. The marine artist Norman Wilkinson (1878-1971) enlisted in the RNVR during the First World War and in 1917 developed 'dazzle' camouflage for merchant ships designed not to 'hide' a ship but to reduce the ability of enemy submarines to predict its course and speed. Between the wars he became a leading poster artist for railway companies. His contemporary, the graphic artist Frank Parkinson Newbould (1887-1951), created a series of posters for the new London and North Eastern Railway in the 1920s. During the Second World War he produced (in collaboration with Abram Games) celebrated images of rural England for the Army Bureau of Current Affairs, with the slogan 'Your Britain, fight for it now'

The typographer and graphic designer (Richard) Jock Kinneir (1917-1994) established his own design practice in London in 1956 and, in a working partnership with Margaret Calvert, began a distinguished career in public signage. Kinneir's highly-legible signs for Gatwick Airport led to their appointment as design consultant for Britain's motorways, for which the lettering that he and Calvert devised with its echoes of European modernism was initially controversial. They went on to develop the signage system for all of Britain's roads, as well as the NHS and British Rail. Kinneir and Calvert's legacy in Britain's public spaces is ubiquitous their work enduring to the present day with only minor modifications. So too the schools built in post-1945 Britain to accommodate the 'baby boom' by the architects Mary Beaumont Medd [n e Crowley] (1907-2005) and her husband David Leslie Medd (1917-2009). Employed in Hertfordshire to tackle the county's backlog of school building, and the urgent need to provide for new towns and overspill estates, Mary Crowley studied how design could reinforce best practice in teaching in primary schools. David Medd, who (like Norman Wilkinson) had done wartime work in the camouflage development, notably on dummy tanks, also went to work in Hertfordshire, where he and Crowley were recruited to the Ministry of Education to produce exemplary designs for the secondary school building programme of the 1950s. They contributed significantly to the reputation for humanity and thoughtfulness which British school architecture enjoyed in that period.

Innovation and manufacturing

In 1867 the Gloucester saw mill owner Samuel John Moreland (bap. 1828, d.1924)diversified into the manufacture of matches. Fourteen years later he acquired the noted brand 'England's Glory', subsequently promoted by his sons who had more of a gift for advertising the product. Following studies in engineering-related subjects in Zurich, the Prussian-born inventor Henry Simon (1835-1899) had been encouraged by his uncle to move to Manchester, where there was a thriving German business community. In search of an industrial sector on which to focus his activities, Simon turned to flour milling, where roller plant was replacing stone-grinding in parts of continental Europe. He developed the 'Simon system' of roller milling, which by the early 1890s had displaced the old stone milling method from the bulk of British flour milling. A member of a firm of brass workers, begun by William Britain senior (1831-1907) who was originally from Birmingham, William Britain junior (1859-1933) applied the technique of hollow-casting to produce toy soldiers, which used less metal than the solid figures, made in Germany and which then dominated the market. Launched at Gamages department store in 1893, the range of toy soldiers proved popular (being cheaper than their German counterparts), with Britain's company emerging as the world's leading manufacturer under William junior's sons, notably (Leslie) Dennis Britain (1903-1996). Their products flourished in the golden age of British-made toys, and were for more than sixty years a staple part of middle-class boyhood. Within two generations the Riley family (act. 1890-1969) of Coventry diversified from making fringes and tassels for furniture to, in 1890, the new cycle manufacturing business. This was followed in 1906 with the production of the family's first recognizable motor car. Their members included William Riley (1851-1944), his sons (William) Victor Riley (1876-1958) and (William Herbert) Percy Riley (1880-1941), and daughters-in-law Dorothy Conyers Nelson Champney [married name Riley] (1909-1968) and Norah Riley (1895-1984). The inventiveness of the sons of the founder led them to set up a new company to manufacture cars, the first of which was exhibited at the London motor show in 1913. With the motto 'As old as the industry, as modern as the hour', the company enjoyed longevity, and Lord Nuffield, the founder of Morris Motors, was willing to pay for its reputation when he acquired the company in 1938.

The Cambridge oarsman and air force officer Geoffrey Hill Ambler (1904-1978) entered his family textile firm in Bradford, where in 1946 he developed a precision unit, the Ambler Superdraft, which increased the speed with which wool could be spun. The theoretical principles behind his invention were first understood by a textile scientist (Dorothy) Margaret Hannah (1922-1999) with whom Ambler collaborated in publishing the results of their research, which was reckoned the most important advance in wool textile production for nearly two hundred years. John William Fozard (1928-1996) was a Yorkshire-born and educated aeronautical engineer who joined the fighter design team at Hawker Aircraft in 1950 as one of Sydney Camm's 'young gentlemen'. In 1963 he was made chief designer for a 'vertical and short take-off and landing' type fighter, which resulted in the famous Harrier jump jet, introduced into RAF service in 1969. Fozard adapted the design for naval operations, resulting in the Sea Harrier, which played a crucial part in the Falklands' Conflict in 1982. Second World War service in the Royal Engineers, during the D-day landings and after, introduced the civil and structural engineer Sir Alan James Harris (1916-2000) to the potential of pre-stressing concrete. His wartime experience was followed by a formative period working for the French pioneer of the technique. Returning to Britain, Harris formed his own consultancy which was responsible for many innovative schemes, including hangars at Gatwick Airport, pressure vessels at nuclear power stations, and the roof of the Commonwealth Institute in London.

Performance and entertainment

Self-exhibition was a source of income for the physically-impaired artist Matthias [Matthew] Buchinger (1674-1739) who was born in Nuremberg without hands, feet, legs or thighs, and never grew taller than 29 inches. He came to England in the retinue of George I following the Hanoverian succession, giving performances of his remarkable dexterity he sketched by holding a pen beneath his chin to wealthy patrons, as well as undertaking private commissions. The fashionable rake, Sir Francis Blake Delaval (1727-1771), heir to Northumberland estates, was drawn to the stage, appearing as Othello at Drury Lane in 1751 in a production attended by royalty. Much of his life was devoted to performance whether as an MP, or briefly taking up arms in the St Malo expedition of 1761 for which he was knighted. A legal action involving one of his mistresses, in 1763 requiring him to deliver her to the court of king's bench on a writ of habeas corpus was a leading case in the evolution of that court's jurisdiction under Lord Mansfield. More than a century after Delaval's performance there, the manager and sole lessee of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, Frederick Balsir Chatterton (1834-1886) strove to restore its position as the national theatre for what he called 'legitimate' (meaning serious) drama, though unlike other European theatres he did so without government aid. He found, however, that 'Shakespeare spelt ruin, and Byron bankruptcy'. He duly subsidized his Shakespearean productions by staging popular melodramas and pantomimes, but in 1879 when the latter failed, he was forced to cease productions after thirteen seasons. Towards the end of his life, he was haunted by the fear that his contributions to theatre would be forgotten as they largely were. By contrast, the songs of the imaginative music hall lyricist,Fred W. Leigh [real name William Frederick Bridgen] (1869-1924) continued to resonate in late twentieth-century Britain. His 1906 evocation of marital misfortune, 'Waiting at the Church', was recited over seventy years later by the Labour prime minister James Callaghan in a conference speech to dampen expectations of an imminent general election. The phrase 'My Old Man' the opening words of Leigh's 1919 composition 'Don't Dilly Dally on the Way' was used by another former prime minister, John Major, as the title for a personal history of music hall.

Britain's first female disc jockey, Doris Grace Arnold (1904-1969) , an accomplished pianist in her spare time, secured a trial as a staff accompanist while employed as a typist at the BBC. In 1937 she became the first woman at the BBC to produce and present her own music show, followed in 1938 by her long-running series of extracts from light and classical gramophone records, These you have Loved. The new genre of rock n roll was spearheaded in Britain in the late 1950s by the impresario Laurence Maurice [Larry] Parnes (1929-1989) who managed a stable of young, mainly male, stars, whom he launched under names of his devising (thus, Reg Smith became Marty Wilde). So pervasive was Parnes's influence in the popular music world before the Beatles that the self-styled 'Popfather' became the subject of parody and fictional depictions. The counter-culture of the following generation is represented by Arabella Spencer [Bella] Churchill (1949-2007), granddaughter of the wartime prime minister. 'Debutante of the year' in 1967, she rebelled against conformity when invited to be the 'azalea queen' at a NATO gathering in 1971. Churchill escaped to Worthy Farm, Glastonbury, where she helped to organize the alternative Glastonbury Fayre in 1971. She returned to Worthy Farm at the end of the decade and, with Michael Eavis (author of the ODNB's new entry), ran the Glastonbury Festival until her death.

Literature and journalism

Lydia Rogers White (bap. 1760, d. 1827), the daughter of a prosperous Bristol merchant, first came to notice as a hostess of literary salons in Bath. By 1815 she had established a salon in London. Unlike rival hostesses, such as Lady Holland, White's 'menagerie' was strictly literary, and the record of it is preserved in the anecdotes of those who attended her entertainments. The poet, actress, and socialite Iris Tree (1897-1968), held court in London during the First World War, entertaining young officers on leave. Her poetry evokes the reality of the war for those like herself and her friend, Nancy Cunard, who were not participants.

The intellectual context (or the 'background') in which literature was created over three centuries was the central theme of the teaching and writing of Basil Willey (1897-1978), professor of English literature at Cambridge, whose academic career coincided with the emergence of the Cambridge English tripos. The daughter of schoolteachers in the Glamorgan valleys, Dorothy Edwards (1902-1934) won scholarships that led to university studies at Cardiff, where she belonged to a circle of ambitious, unconventional women. She went on to a precarious career as an author. Her collection of short stories (1927) and a novel (1928) had as their themes the marginalization of women in contemporary British society. Taken up by the Bloomsbury circle, Edwards was frustrated by her dependence on its members, and awareness of her socially inferior position. Largely forgotten after her early death, her writing experienced a resurgence of interest from the mid-1980s and was republished in the early twenty-first century. The Edinburgh novelist Dorothy Emily Stevenson (1892-1974), who married a regular army officer in 1916, enjoyed her first major success in 1932 with a book drawing on incidents from her experiences as an officer's wife. She wrote eight novels in the 1930s and a further eight during the Second World War, picturing everyday life in wartime Britain. By 1974 four million copies of her books had sold in Great Britain and three million in the United States.

The children's writer and book illustrator Eve Cynthia Ruth Garnett (1900-1991) broke away from the conventions of much existing children's fiction set in the worlds of nannies, nurseries, country houses, and boarding schools with her best-known work The Family from One-End Street (1937). Garnett's story, which won the Library Association's prestigious Carnegie medal for children's books, traced the fortunes of the child of a working-class family. The son of a bookseller, (Leonard) Malcolm Saville (1901-1982)spent over twenty years working in book sales before starting to write on his own account, with the first of what became the Lone Pine Club stories in 1943. He went on to write more than eighty children's books, mainly outdoor holiday adventures, set in real places, and with a pedagogic moral thrust.

Contemporaries' understanding of the societies in which they lived was partly framed by the writings of journalists. The Edinburgh journalist Hector Carsewell MacPherson (1851-1924), editor from 1894 of the Edinburgh Evening Newswas closely associated with the Young Scots' Society, which promoted the causes of free trade, land reform, and Scottish home rule in early-twentieth century Scottish politics. His historical survey of The Intellectual Development of Scotland (1911) was a contribution to the movement for Scottish home rule. Discussion of the effect of trade unions on the British economy was influenced by a series of articles in 1901-2 by the special correspondent of The Times, Edwin Augustus Pratt (1854-1922), who exposed the practice of ca canny (deliberate limitation of effort). He later used his privileged access to official wartime records to produce a monumental history of British railways in the Great War, revealing the carefully planned train movements which had enabled the British Expeditionary Force to embark at Southampton to cross the Channel in the first month of the war. Reckoned to have one of the most lucrative contracts in Fleet Street, Godfrey Herbert Winn (1906-1971) wrote regular columns in the Daily Mirror and then the Sunday Express in the late 1930s. His human-interest brand of popular journalism was well received by readers, though accorded little respect by critics such as George Orwell, who regarded his writing as symptomatic of a trivial mass culture. In the mid-1950s a former Labour parliamentary candidate Robert Percy Pitman (1924-1969) gave up school teaching to write for the Sunday Express, moving in 1963 to a weekly column in the Daily Express where he became a pungent critic of permissiveness and sixties liberal reforms associated with the Labour home secretary, Roy Jenkins.

Costume and cuisine

2014 marks the bicentenary of a series of forty coloured engravings, published as The Costume of Yorkshire, sketched by George Walker (1781-1856) a gentleman-amateur artist from Leeds. His realistic images of those engaged in the county's productive occupations, at a time of social unrest, have been quarried for their insight into industrial Yorkshire. Many modern readers will know at least one of Walker's images from the original cover of E.P. Thompson's Making of the English Working Class (1963). The Savile Row tailor Henry George Poole (1814-1876) advertised his fashionable wares by clothing a celebrity jockey and appealing to the hunting fraternity. He numbered royalty both British and foreign among his clientele, making a short smoking jacket (the forerunner of the dinner jacket or tuxedo) for the prince of Wales. In 1893 the journalist and amateur historian Georgiana Hill (1858-1924) published a history of English dress from the Saxons to the late-nineteenth century that was critical of extravagant, uncomfortable, and inconvenient fashions. She found much to admire in medieval dress, and took a similar qualified view of historical progress in her survey of the position of women in English life (1896), noting that the contemporary women's movement was sometimes recovering rights and opportunities previously accorded to women in earlier centuries.

A namesake Georgiana Hill (1825-1903), often conflated with the historian, can now be established as having a separate identity. Resident in a village on the Hampshire/Berkshire border, she wrote a series of popular cookery books from the late 1850s to the late 1860s. Unlike Mrs Beeton's manual of household management, Hill specialized in types of ingredients and dishes, drawing upon continental recipes and sprinkling her texts with classical allusions. Florence Petty (1870-1948) was a domestic science teacher who became known as the 'Pudding Lady' for her work in showing mothers in deprived areas of Edwardian London how to prepare inexpensive nutritious meals, often based on flavoured suet puddings. During the First World War, Petty expanded her work to promote economical cookery, using wholemeal flour and non-meat dishes, and lectured under the auspices of government departments, to help make best use of food supplies to nourish the civilian population. When the Second World War broke out, the general secretary of the National Federation of Women's Institutes Dame Frances Margaret Farrer (1885-1977) ordered over 400 tons of sugar for a countrywide jam-making project under the auspices of the WI, to ensure that fruit in abandoned gardens did not go to waste. Jam became the most conspicuous, but far from the only, contribution of the WI to the war effort, as Farrer became a link between government and hundreds of thousands of Institute members around the country. In post until 1959, she was remains the longest-serving general secretary of the WI, which marks its centenary in 2015.

Women at Westminster

As the daughter of a Liberal MP, Katharine [Kate] Parry Frye (1878-1959) was brought up in politically-aware household; in her teens she watched the proceedings of the House of Commons from the Ladies' Gallery. In 1911 she became a professional women's suffrage organizer. Her diary of campaigning, mainly in Norfolk, Kent, and Berkshire, is a unique record of the daily activity of a full-time suffragist. She ceased campaigning with the outbreak of war, and as a contribution to the war effort opened a workroom for dressmakers.

Three women in the September 2014 update spent much of their working lives in the Palace of Westminster. The daughter of a Cumberland vicar, Mary Howard Ashworth (1863-1928) moved to London where, in her mid-twenties, she set up her own agency providing shorthand and typewriting services. When the House of Commons belatedly adopted typewriting, in 1895, Ashworth's firm was appointed its official agency, and its proprietor became known as the 'Lady Typist to the Houses of Parliament'. Ashworth continued to run the operation until her death. Another trained shorthand typist Rose Rosenberg (1892-1966), a former suffragette, became an adviser on the technicalities of the Military Service Acts, contesting cases at conscription tribunals during the First World War. A Labour Party activist, she became private secretary to the Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald, a role of considerable importance when he formed the first Labour government in 1924 and, not trusting his civil servants, relied heavily on her. Rosenberg handled the press arrangements for MacDonald's diplomatic mission to the USA in 1929, during his second administration the first transatlantic visit by a serving British prime minister. After working as a shorthand typist in London, and studying for secretarial diplomas, Kathleen Margaret [Kay] Midwinter [married name Midwinter-Vergin] (1909-1995) gained a position in the League of Nations secretariat in Geneva, where she worked from 1930 to 1940. Her experience in committee work recommended her for a clerkship in the House of Commons, where in May 1940 she became the first woman to hold one of these positions. In 1943 Midwinter transferred to the Foreign Office when that department opened its ranks to women and in 1946 she moved to the secretariat of the United Nations, where she spent the remainder of her career.

War and peace

In July 1914 the attention of the British political class was directed at the possibility of civil war in Ulster. Sir George Lloyd Reily Richardson (1847-1931) was then a retired Indian army officer and accomplished horseman, who had served in campaigns on the north-west frontier of India, and latterly in China. He had been appointed on the recommendation of Earl Roberts to command the Ulster Volunteer Force, created in 1913 to resist the imposition of Irish home rule, and was involved in gun-running in April 1914. On the outbreak of war, his force was absorbed into the Ulster division of Kitchener's army and, too old for wartime command, he spent the war at his Ulster headquarters.

As a cadet and a young naval officer, Sir Trevylyan Dacres Willes Napier (1867-1920) displayed excellence in the performance of his duties and gained rapid promotion, and was soon at the heart of the naval professional elite. Taking command of a light cruiser squadron he was effective at Jutland, but fell short at the Second Battle of Heligoland Bight in 1917, in what was seen as a failure of independent command. Also marked out early as an outstanding officer, Sir Arthur Cavenagh Leveson (1868-1929) was appointed by Churchill to the Admiralty war staff on the eve of the First World War. However, his lack of initiative in failing to remove the armoured cruisers on the Dutch coast led to disaster when they were sunk with heavy loss of life by U-boats in September 1914. Leveson was more effective as a sea officer, serving at Jutland and commanding the Australian fleet in the North Sea. The RNAS squadron commander Richard Bell Davies (1886-1966) was awarded the VC for his feat in rescuing a fellow officer from behind Turkish lines during the Gallipoli campaign in November 1915, considered to be the first search and rescue operation carried out in action. He remained with the Royal Navy after the RNAS was incorporated into the RAF in 1918.

A Welsh-born former coal miner, Sir (James) Herbert Dunnico (1875-1953) became a Baptist minister and was active in the peace movement during the First World War, serving as secretary of the Peace Society. Dunnico was elected as a Labour MP in 1922 when he was one of two nonconformist ministers in the House of Commons. His wife Harriet Emma Dunnico, Lady Dunnico (1877-1952) was active in public life promoting infant welfare. The ironmonger and Primitive Methodist lay preacher, Benjamin Charles [Ben] Spoor (1878-1928), joined the Independent Labour Party in 1903 and spoke against the war at meetings of the Union of Democratic Control. His experience as a YMCA commissioner in Salonika convinced him that in future wars civilians would suffer most, and led to his involvement in the inter-war peace movement. Elected an MP in 1918, Spoor was chief whip in Ramsay MacDonald's government of 1924 Britain's first Labour administration, whose 90th anniversary falls in 2014. The seventieth anniversary of the battle of Arnhem (Operation Market Garden) in September 1944 is marked by the life of John Ormsby Evelyn Vandeleur (1903-1984) commander of the Irish Guards battle group. The son of an officer who had served in the First World War, Vandeleur had shown ability in a rapid assault on a canal crossing in the allied advance in northern Europe. As a result, he was chosen to lead the armoured column to relieve airborne troops at Arnhem in which speed was a vital factor. His role in this bold but doomed operation was represented in the 1976 film, A Bridge Too Far.

Collaborations: Olympians

Several entries in this selection document collaborations, whether as spousal or working partnerships, and this theme is illustrated by the final set of biographies. The mountaineer Oscar Johannes Ludwig Eckenstein (1859-1921), the son of refugees from the 1848 revolutions in Germany, climbed regularly in Snowdonia with other whose biographies already appear in the Dictionary. Eckenstein was also a member of the first recorded mixed-sex climb in 1897. Latterly his regular climbing partner was the occultist Aleister Crowley with whom he climbed Popocatapetl in 1901 and attempted K2 in 1902.

In May 2012 the biography of Jennie Fletcher the first female swimmer representing Great Britain to win an Olympic medal was added to the Oxford DNB. Fletcher is now joined by the other members of the gold-medal winning women's freestyle relay team at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics. Their diversity of origins and nationalities within the United Kingdom reflect how widespread competitive swimming for women had become by the first decade of the twentieth century. Recently inducted into the Scottish Sports Hall of Fame, Isabella McAlpine [Bella, Belle] Moore (1894-1975) was the Govan-born daughter of a journeyman iron turner, who learned to swim in the public baths provided by Glasgow Corporation, where swimming had been made compulsory in local authority schools. Her two remaining teammates were the Liverpool swimmer Annie Coupe Speirs (1880-1926), who worked for most of her life as an upholsterer, and Cardiff-born Irene Steer (1889-1977), daughter of the proprietor of a draper's shop, who was also the Welsh champion.

Our final pairing are remembered for their achievement in the 4x400m track relay at the Berlin Olympics of 1936 when the quartet who also included the Cambridge undergraduate Godfrey Brown, and the army officer Godfrey Rampling (both already in the ODNB) won gold. William [Bill] Roberts (1912-2001), who ran the third leg of the relay, had been brought up in a Salford working-class family, and was employed in a timber yard; he worked his way up from competing for a tea-pot at a local sports day to the national championships. Roberts, who also won gold in the individual 400m event at the British Empire games in Sydney (1938), later recalled that there was no civic acknowledgement when the quartet returned from Berlin. The first leg of the 1936 relay had been run by Frederick Ferdinand [Freddy] Wolff (1910-1988), a member of a City of London family firm of commodity brokers. He later travelled widely to promote London as a centre for the global metal commodity trading business.

Group portraits of the First World War

Finally, the Dictionary completes its coverage of the personnel depicted in the three group portraits of the leading men of the conflict civil and military commissioned in 1918 by the South African financier Sir Abe Bailey, and presented to the National Portrait Gallery, where they now hang. In addition to the entry on the army officers included in John Singer Sargent's 'General Officers of the First World War (included in the ODNB in 2008), there are now entries on the companion paintings: the Statesmen of World War One, by the leading Scottish portraitist Sir James Guthrie, first displayed in 1930, and Naval Officers of World War One, painted by Sir Arthur Stockdale Cope, which was first exhibited in 1921, and restored by the NPG in 2014.

Our next update: January 2015

Our next online update the first under the new editorship of Professor Sir David Cannadine will be published on Thursday 8 January 2015. It will further extend the ODNB's coverage of contemporary Britain, with biographies of 231 men and women who died in the year 2011.

 

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