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2015 updates: introductions

January 2015

Highlights of the January 2015 update

Introduction to the update, by David Cannadine

The New Year brings with it a new instalment of Oxford DNB lives, encompassing 226 people who died during 2011 (it also includes six subjects who died before 2011, and who have been included with new entries). This is the 31st 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. These new biographies were commissioned by my predecessor as editor, Lawrence Goldman, but having recently assumed the chair, I take full and appreciative responsibility for introducing them and for commending them.

Once again, these entries bear vivid and memorable witness to an astonishing diversity of personal experience, individual achievement, and occasional delinquency, or even criminality; and they range from Claude Choules (b. 1901), the last British-born veteran of the First World War, who died at the age of 110, to the singer Amy Winehouse (b. 1983), who died from alcohol poisoning before reaching the age of thirty. The great majority of the new subjects (191, or 84%) were born before the outbreak of the Second World War, and the majority (137, or 60%) before 1930; typically, therefore, most were active between the 1940s and the 1980s, but some (such as Choules) are included for their activities before 1918, and several (such as Winehouse, or the anti-war campaigner, Brian Haw) only came to prominence in the 2000s.

The lives of Choules and Winehouse the one exceptionally long, the other cut tragically short draw attention to two of the most significant groups to be found in this latest selection of biographies. A generation after Choules, many Britons served bravely during the Second World War, among them the SOE veterans Nancy Wake (who killed German soldiers with her bare hands) and Patrick Leigh Fermor, as well as the Japanese prisoner of war, Leslie Audus, whose skills as a botanist kept alive many of his fellow POWs. Yet as was the case with Amy Winehouse, there are other entries on entertainers for whom the celebrity-devouring world of show business was a place of disenchantment and disappointment, among them Kathy Kirby, Marian Said, and Gerry Rafferty.

There are many other lives of great interest in this selection. One such is Leslie Collier, a virologist who developed a vaccine for smallpox that eventually led to its complete eradication, as proclaimed by the World Health Organization in 1980. How many figures can claim to have abolished what was once a terrifying global disease? Another is Lucian Freud, by common consent the greatest British artist of his day, who was equally at home in high society and Soho watering holes, and whose depictions of human flesh are unrivalled in their impact and immediacy. Yet a third is Dame Elizabeth Taylor, the Queen of Hollywood, and who, like a number of those who died in 2011, was a major figure on both sides of the Atlantic.

As was true of its predecessor, the Oxford DNB's prime principle of inclusion is an individual's historical noteworthiness; but as existing entries make plain, that notability can have been for the bad as well as for the good. Hence the inclusion of an entry on Jimmy Savile, who was to many a popular performer and charity worker when he died in 2011, but whose reputation has collapsed in the intervening years. By turns a celebrated broadcaster and a rampant sexual predator, Savile was a prominent figure in British popular culture from the 1960s. And the change in his reputation since his death is a vindication of our policy of letting several years elapse before commissioning entries, in the hope that a more settled verdict may by then have been reached.

Whether long or short, good or bad, exemplary or deplorable, or something more nuanced and complex in-between, these lives make fascinating and sometimes sobering reading.

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 (59,453 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.

David Cannadine, General Editor, Oxford DNB

Summary of new content, January 2015

Jimmy Savile

Jimmy Savile (1926-2011) would almost certainly have been included in the Dictionary as a prominent figure in popular culture (notably as a presenter of Top of the Pops and of Jim'll Fix It), had he not also been a prolific criminal; but the extent of his crimes, and the massive impact the revelation of them has had since his death, only reinforce the need to include him. Indeed, he is unusual (although in the context of the dictionary by no means unique) in having an even greater impact, albeit in his case a wholly negative one, posthumously than in life. As Savile's ODNB biography makes clear, some at the time notably the psychiatrist Anthony Clare suggested grave flaws in his character, but it was only after his death that his true personality and record was revealed, leading to several inquiries and police investigations, self-scrutiny within the BBC and NHS in particular, and a sea-change in public attitudes towards the protection of children and other vulnerable individuals.

Broadcasting and journalism

The January 2015 update also includes entries on many other representatives of popular culture whose lives and careers brought pleasure rather than misery, among them David Croft (1922-2011), the comedy talent behind a string of popular series such as Dad's Army, Allo, Allo, and Are You Being Served?; John Sullivan (1946-2011), creator of Citizen Smith and Only Fools and Horses (the latter frequently voted the most popular British sitcom of all time), and Michael Bukht, otherwise Michael Barry (1941-2011), a star of the BBC2 series Food and Drink, who, in something of a double life, also launched the highly successful radio station Classic FM.

Others from the world of broadcasting include Stuart Hood (1915-2011) who, after fighting with the Italian partisans during the Second World War, joined the BBC and rose to be controller of programmes, television, then left to become a radical media scholar and a committed member of the Workers Revolutionary Party. In addition there are entries for John Read (1923-2011), who pioneered the arts documentary, most notably with his 1951 profile of the sculptor Henry Moore; Keith Fordyce (1928-2011), the Cambridge-educated host of Ready Steady Go! (a forerunner of Top of the Pops) and later Come Dancing; Robert Robinson (1927-2011), the witty and urbane host of Brain of Britain, Call My Bluff, and Stop the Week (who also, like Hood, wrote perceptively on the power of the broadcast media), and Alec Weeks (1927-2011), a television producer who oversaw the BBC's outside broadcast sports coverage for several decades.

Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) was a scabrous and iconoclastic journalist in the UK and US who gradually discarded his far-left sympathies and ended up a prominent supporter of George W. Bush's foreign policy, though his militant atheism and attacks on such figures as Mother Teresa failed to endear him to mainstream American opinion. The American-born Susan Crosland (1927-2011), wife of Anthony Crosland, pioneered the in-depth profile, wrote an acclaimed biography of her husband, and later developed a second career as a novelist. Penny Tweedie (1940-2011) was a photographer and photojournalist driven by a strong sense of ethics, who covered the birth-pangs of Bangladesh (but refused to take photographs of a public execution which won fellow photographers prizes) and is now most celebrated for her work with Australian aborigines. Tim Hetherington (1970-2011) was a photojournalist and film-maker who covered American troops in Afghanistan (most notably for the film Restrepo, released in 2010) and lost his life covering the insurgency in Libya.

Several other journalists carved out careers in particular niches. Stuart Maclure (1926-2011) was a longstanding Times Higher Education Supplement editor who influenced contemporary debates on education. The financial journalist Bill Clarke (1922-2011) who became known as the Boswell of the City later wrote an acclaimed biography of Wilkie Collins, while Bill Boddy (1913-2011) was editor of Motor Sport magazine for more than fifty years; Boddy pioneered the no-holds-barred style of motor journalism now associated with the likes of Jeremy Clarkson.

Stage and screen

January's update includes a number of prominent stage and film actors, active from the 1930s through to the 2000s. Foremost among them is Dame Elizabeth Taylor (1932-2011) who shot to stardom in National Velvet (1944) and remained ever after a figure of international standing, her private life garnering almost as much attention as her on-screen roles. As her Oxford DNB biography makes clear, Taylor was ahead of her time in her determination to make her own choices and in the way she used her celebrity status to further charitable causes close to her heart.

Elizabeth Taylor is joined by a clutch of other talented actresses, notable among them Googie Withers (1917-2011), described as the best bad girl in British films ; Anna Massey (1937-2011), whose work ranged from the lead role in Michael Powell's once-shocking Peeping Tom (1960) to critically-acclaimed stage versions of Chekhov and Beckett; Susannah York (1939-2011), whose English rose beauty belied her tough-minded independence and infinite adaptability, and whose credits included Tom Jones (1963) and The Killing of Sister George (1968). Also included is a life of Miriam Karlin (1925-2011), famous as the trade union militant Paddy in the BBC sitcom The Rag Trade; the comedienne and impressionist Janet Brown (1923-2011), best known for her portrayals of Margaret Thatcher, who also excelled in variety and straight roles; and Betty Driver (1920-2011), who made her London stage debut at the age of fourteen and was a favourite of wartime variety audiences, before playing the barmaid Betty Turpin in Coronation Street for more than forty years.

Among the actors in this update are John Howard Davies (1939-2011), the child star of Oliver Twist (1948) who forged a second career as a high-ranking television executive (responsible, inter alia, for launching Fawlty Towers and Mr Bean); Nicol Williamson (1936-2011), hailed by John Osborne as the greatest actor since Marlon Brando , but whose mercurial temperament prevented him fulfilling his undoubted potential; John Wood (1930-2011), the intelligent and versatile interpreter of Shakespeare, Pinter, and Stoppard; George Baker (1931-2011), who successfully made the transition from heartthrob to actor of substance, popularly acclaimed for his Tiberius in I, Claudius (1976) and his portrayal of Inspector Wexford in the Ruth Rendell Mysteries; and Pete Postlethwaite (1946-2011), one of the most popular actors of his generation, who combined mesmerizing screen and stage portrayals with a highly developed sense of social justice.

Film-makers include the enfant terrible of British film, Ken Russell (1927-2011), best known for Women in Love (1969) and Tommy (1975), whose work divided critics and audiences alike, and who seemed to take great delight in pushing the boundaries of taste; Jimmy Sangster (1927-2011), the screenwriter behind such Hammer horrors as The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Dracula (1958); Alastair Reid (1939-2011), whose innovative camera work in Baby Love (1968) and Something to Hide (1972) marked him out as a pioneer in film (and on television, with such series as Traffik and Tales of the City); and John Mackenzie (1928-2011), the Scottish-born director of The Long Good Friday (1980), whose career began and ended with a series of critically-acclaimed social realist dramas.

High and low culture: art and music

The longest biography in this update is that of Lucian Freud (1922-2011), arguably the most important British artist of the twentieth century. Freud effortlessly bridged the worlds of aristocracy and high society and the drinking culture of Soho, in a life that favoured instinct over reason, and appetite over inhibition . His frequently unsettling works strikingly interrogated the relationship between artist and sitter.

Other artists added to the ODNB in January 2015 include Leonora Carrington (1917-2011), the champion of Surrealism; the textile artist Susan Collier (1938-2011); Adrian Berg (1929-2011), acclaimed for his luxuriant and textile-like landscapes; Jack Smith (1928-2011), one of the most talented kitchen sink painters (albeit a label he himself rejected); the abstract painter John Hoyland (1934-2011); the leading pop artists Gerald Laing (1936-2011) and Richard Hamilton (1922-2011), the latter often referred to as 'the father of pop art'; and the cartoonists and graphic artists David Langdon (1914-2011) and Ronald Searle (1920-2011), the latter a survivor of the infamous Siam-Burma railway, and perhaps best known as the creator of the anarchic girls' school, St Trinian's.

Straddling the worlds of art and philanthropy was Sir Denis Mahon (1910-2011), the connoisseur and astute collector of Italian art who bequeathed to the nation a collection estimated to be worth more than 100 million (which he had built up at a cost of around 50,000). Another grandee of the art world, Hugh Fitzroy, eleventh duke of Grafton (1919-2011), devoted his life to the preservation of Britain's architectural heritage. Rather different figures from the world of architecture were Patricia Tindale (1926-2011), chief architect of the Department of the Environment, who championed public housing; William Barnes (1919-2011), a visionary director of housing for Camden (and previously a key figure in the launch of the London Business School), and Selwyn Goldsmith (1932-2011), a pioneer in the field of designing for the disabled.

The musical world also lost one of its grandest figures in 2011, George Lascelles, earl of Harewood (1923-2011), a first cousin once removed of the queen and great-grandson of King George V, whose passion for opera led him to establish the magazine Opera, serve as managing director then chairman of Sadler's Wells Opera (overseeing its transformation into the English National Opera), and lead the creation of Opera North, based in Leeds (near his country mansion, Harewood House). Other lives associated with classical music include the Welsh soprano Dame Margaret Price (1941-2011), and the Welsh tenor Robert Tear (1939-2011), famed for his interpretations of Handel, Mozart, and Britten.

The composer John Linton Gardner (1917-2011), best known for his setting of Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day , struggled for recognition in an age dominated by the avant-garde and atonal, but lived to see a revival of interest in his strong melodies. His fellow composer David Bedford (1937-2011) straddled various musical genres, working with children's choirs and rock musicians (including Mike Oldfield, on Tubular Bells). John Barry (1933-2011) was a hugely successful composer of film music: although perhaps best known for his scores for the James Bond films, none of his five Oscar-winning scores was in fact for a Bond film. Geraldine Connor (1952-2011) was an ethnomusicologist, theatre director, and composer best known for her Carnival Messiah, a re-working of Handel's oratorio with strong influences from the Caribbean and the African diaspora; among many spectacular performances of the piece was one at Harewood House in 2007, in connection with the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade. As befitted a student of F.R. Leavis, John Barry (J.B.) Steane (1928-2011) combined careers as a musicologist, most notably as a historian and connoisseur of opera, with substantial works of literary scholarship, including on Christopher Marlowe. Clive Robbins (1927-2011) recognized the therapeutic value of music-making, and established with the America musician Paul Nordoff the now universally acclaimed Nordoff-Robbins approach to music therapy.

Sir George Shearing (1919-2011) became one of the world's leading jazz pianists, and composer of over 300 titles including the jazz standard Lullaby of Birdland ; his achievements were all the more remarkable given that he was born blind, to poor working-class parents. Michael Garrick (1933-2011) was another innovative jazz pianist, composer, and educationist, remembered especially for his pioneering combinations of poetry and jazz. Latin inflections were the speciality of Edmundo Ros (1910-2011), who over several decades produced strings of hits with his big band; his Wedding Samba of 1949 sold over three million copies in the UK alone.

Several of the popular singers in this release led notably troubled lives. Kathy Kirby (1938-2011) was ubiquitous in the early 1960s with hit after hit, and was reputedly the highest-paid female singer of her generation; but she failed to adapt to the rise of rock n roll, and soon spiralled into drug and alcohol abuse, bankruptcy, and psychiatric problems. Marian Said, who was better known as Poly Styrene (1957-2011), lead singer with X-Ray Spex, was one of the most distinctive artists thrown up by the punk revolution, but also suffered recurrent financial and mental health problems, albeit she was able to make a comeback in her final decade. From a later generation, Amy Winehouse (1983-2011) was an enormously talented singer whose three studio albums were hugely popular and influential (one of them, Back to Black, selling more than 3.5 million copies in the UK alone) but whose self-destructive streak led to her eventual death at the age of twenty-seven. Gerry Rafferty (1947-2011) was yet another troubled singer, best known for his hit single Baker Street , dealing with loneliness in a big city; he too found fame hard to cope with, and eventually succumbed to alcoholism.

Like Rafferty, the guitarist and songwriter Bert Jansch (1943-2011) struggled with fame, but he eventually overcame his addictions, and was widely recognized as one of the most significant guitarists of his generation, his influence attested to by leading guitarists from across the musical spectrum, albeit with his roots firmly in the British folk revival of the 1960s. Another key figure in the folk revival, the singer and songwriter Mike Waterson (1941-2011), now joins his sister Lal, with whom he worked, in the Dictionary. The Scottish-born singer Ray Fisher (1940-2011) carved out a career as one of the leading performers of traditional Scots songs, while Ishbel MacAskill (1941-2011) was among the most feted Scottish Gaelic singers of her generation. From the other side of the Irish Sea, Belfast-born music entrepreneur Phil Solomon (1924-2011) introduced Van Morrison and the Dubliners to audiences in Britain, and showed a ruthless grasp of business principles as director-programmer of Radio Caroline.

Literary lives

Among the literary lives included from January 2015 are Shelagh Delaney (1938-2011), the Salford-born playwright who shot to fame with A Taste of Honey (1958) and went on to enjoy a distinguished career as scriptwriter for television, films, and radio; her fellow playwright Pam Gems (1925-2011), known for Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi (1976) and for a string of biographical plays including Piaf (1978) and Stanley (1996), and Stan Barstow (1928-2011), whose kitchen sink drama A Kind of Loving (1960) tended to overshadow a solid body of later work. Francis King (1923-2011) was a prolific novelist and man of letters who felt a particular affinity for Japan. The American-born Russell Hoban (1925-2011) wrote works for children and adults which spanned science fiction and magical realism, pushing the boundaries of each, most notably with his post-apocalyptic novel, Riddley Walker (1980). The British-born novelist, reviewer, and satirist Wilfrid Sheed (1930-2011) journeyed in the opposite direction, establishing himself as a key figure on the American literary scene.

Fantasy was also the speciality of Diana Wynne Jones (1934-2011), author of books for children and adults, including the best-selling Chrestomanci series. Dick King-Smith (1922-2011) was another children's author whose prolific output including The Sheep-Pig (1983), later adapted as the film Babe (1995) drew on his earlier careers as a farmer and teacher. Other writers in this release drew on their own personal experiences for their work, among them Emanuel Litvinoff (1915-2011), who recalled his upbringing in the Jewish East End for Journey Through a Small Planet (1972). There is also renowned SOE officer and travel writer Sir Paddy Leigh Fermor (1915-2011), whose A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986) recounted his travels through 1930s Europe (and whose own account of the wartime abduction of the Nazi officer, General Kreipe the basis for the film Ill Met by Moonlight (1957) has recently been published).

The poet Peter Reading (1946-2011) worked at an animal feed mill for twenty-two years while developing his reputation as one of the leading and most experimental poets of his generation, his poetry embracing humanity in all its malodorous defects . Christopher Logue (1926-2011) was a poet with radical political views who achieved both popular and critical success with his five volumes reworking Homer's Iliad. Josephine Hart (1942-2011) was an Irish-born novelist, and author of the best-selling Damage (1990), whose writings were frequently described as poetic; she was also a champion of poetry readings, in particular through her Josephine Hart Poetry Hour at the British Library, and four books detailing her love of poetry.

From the world of literary criticism we include John Gross (1935-2011), editor of the Times Literary Supplement and hugely knowledgeable gentleman of letters. David Holbrook (1923-2011) combined careers as an educationist and fellow of Downing College, Cambridge, with his own work as an acclaimed poet. The South African-born literary scholar Mark Kinkead-Weekes (1931-2011) became an acknowledged expert on two very different figures, Samuel Richardson and D.H. Lawrence. Robin Alston (1933-2011), another literary scholar, specialized in bibliography, working on the Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue, overseeing The Bibliography of the English Language (nearly complete in twenty volumes at the time of his death), and founding the Scolar Press to produce cheap facsimiles of literary and historical texts.

Scholarship, education, and religion

Among other scholars included in this update, the Assyriologist Wilfred Lambert (1926-2011) was an expert on one of the earliest forms of writing cuneiform and its development from simple pictographs to a simplified script. Edward Ullendorff (1920-2011) was a leading scholar of the Bible, and of Ethiopian and Semitic languages. Ernst Badian (1925-2011) was a classical scholar who defended robustly the study of dead white men . The archaeologist Rachel Maxwell-Hyslop (1914-2011), who worked with Max Mallowan and Mortimer Wheeler, became an expert on the jewellery and metalwork of the ancient Near East. Further from home, Peter Garlake (1934-2011) provided the evidence that Great Zimbabwe and related structures were the work of ancient Africans, not (as the authorities in white-dominated Rhodesia at the time wanted people to think) visitors from Portugal or Phoenicia.

Historians are well represented in the Dictionary's new update, among them Patrick Collinson (1929-2011), who redefined the study of the Elizabethan age (and was a valued member of the Oxford DNB's supervisory board); Kevin Sharpe (1949-2011), a revisionist historian of the Stuarts who also wrote pioneering books on early modern literature and the arts; John Ehrman (1920-2011), the biographer of William Pitt the Younger and historian of eighteenth-century warfare and foreign policy; Norman Hampson (1922-2011), historian of the Enlightenment and French Revolution; Dorothy Thompson (1923-2011), chronicler of the Chartists and, with her husband E.P. Thompson, champion of left-wing causes; and Richard Holmes (1946-2011), a military historian popular with students and television audiences alike. Though a geographer by training and profession, Bob Woods (1949-2011) was best known for his work on the demography of Victorian Britain. The economist Mark Blaug (1927-2011), while acclaimed for his work on the economics of education and on economic methodology, was also perhaps best known for his historical works, including a biography of Keynes and two volumes on other 'great economists'.

From the social sciences, John Rex (1925-2011) was a key figure in the sociological approach to race relations; Ray Pahl (1935-2011) developed the field of urban sociology and wrote a pioneering book on friendship networks; Rosemary Crompton (1942-2011) also examined modern class structures and the sociology of work, but with a marked feminist approach; while the social statistician Sir Roger Jowell (1942-2011) promoted high-quality survey work as a means to help politicians better address social and economic issues. Paul Wilkinson (1937-2011) also addressed issues of contemporary significance with a series of pioneering works on terrorists and terrorism.

Malcolm Mackintosh (1921-2011) was a highly-regarded scholar who, after war service in Yugoslavia with SOE, joined the BBC then the Foreign Office, and became one of the leading commentators on Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. Paul Foote (1926-2011) was also a scholar of Russia, though in his case an expert on the Tsarist system, and especially Tsarist censorship, his interest in the country having first been sparked by taking the six-month Russian language course at Cambridge University for selected wartime army recruits. A similar route (a wartime language course at Oxford) began Geoffrey Bownas (1923-2011) on his career as one of the leading scholars and interpreters of modern Japan.

Sir Michael Dummett (1925-2011) was one of the pre-eminent philosophers of his generation, most notably as an interpreter of Frege and a contributor to the philosophy of mathematics and logic; he was also a leading liberal and campaigner on race relations and civil rights issues. Two other philosophers made important contributions in their respective fields: Richard Peters (1919-2011) as a leading figure in the philosophy of education, and Basil Mitchell (1917-2011) as a philosopher of religion. The worlds of education and religion came together in the life of Peter Pilkington, Baron Pilkington of Oxenford (1933-2011), Church of England clergyman, headmaster of the King's School, Canterbury, and of St Paul's School, London an unapologetic elitist, and later a Conservative peer.

Among a remarkable group of religious figures in the January 2015 update are the theologian and hermit, Father Roland Walls (1917-2011), cited as an influence by many major religious leaders including Archbishop Rowan Williams; Marina Sharf, Mother Thekla (1918-2011), a Russian Orthodox nun who influenced the composer Sir John Tavener and many others; John Stott (1921-2011), a key figure in protestant evangelicalism in the twentieth century; Michael Mann (1924-2011), a former soldier and rather more low-key Anglican who served as dean of Windsor and chairman of St George's House (and rarely gave sermons lasting longer than seven minutes); Kingsley Barrett (1917-2011), one of the leading New Testament scholars of the twentieth century; and the Hebrew scholar, translator from Hebrew and Arabic, and poet Raphael Loewe (1919-2011), who felt a particular affinity for the Hebrew literature of medieval Spain.

Science and medicine

Several of the scientists in this update put their knowledge to very practical uses. Leslie Audus (1911-2011) was a botanist and expert on plant growth whose knowledge of mould fungi enabled him to produce a nutritional supplement from fermented soya beans, which saved him and hundreds of fellow prisoners of the Japanese from starvation during the Second World War. Derek Bryce-Smith (1926-2011) was a chemist who successfully campaigned for the banning of leaded petrol. Tony Sale (1931-2011) was an electronic engineer and computing enthusiast who built a replica of the Colossus computer.

Murdoch Mitchison (1922-2011), the biologist and zoologist, did important and pioneering work on cell division in yeast which laid the foundations for work by his student, the Nobel prize-winner Sir Paul Nurse, and others on the cell cycle. David Jenkinson (1928-2011) was a soil scientist whose research into what he termed the soil microbial biomass revolutionized understanding of the biological processes in soil. Gordon Stone (1925-2011) was an inorganic chemist who made great advances in organometallic chemistry, but whose plans for streamlining the number of chemistry departments in the UK encountered great opposition.

Also included in the January 2015 update are two scientists from the UK Atomic Energy Authority at Harwell: Tony Lane (1928-2011), a theoretical nuclear physicist who made significant contributions to the theory of photonuclear reactions, and Marshall Stoneham (1940-2011), a theoretical physicist and materials scientist who pioneered the application of solid-state theory to real world problems. The applied mathematician Rodney Hill (1921-2011) laid the foundations of plasticity theory, while the US-born mathematician Dan Quillen (1940-2011) found a proof of the Adams conjecture in topology which laid the foundations for algebraic K-theory. The geologist Ian Carmichael (1930-2011), in a career mainly spent in the US, became a world leading expert on igneous processes and volcanoes. Transatlantic ties were also much in evidence in the career of Baruch (Barry) Blumberg (1925-2011), the US-born Nobel prize-winning medical scientist who discovered the Hepatitis B virus and developed a diagnostic test and vaccine, and served as a very successful master of Balliol College, Oxford (where he had spent part of his earlier career).

Leslie Collier (1921-2011) was a virologist whose development of a heat-stable vaccine for smallpox led to the eradication of the disease by the late 1970s; he truly deserves the appellation a hero of modern science . Sir David Jack (1924-2011) was a chemist and pharmacologist whose development of salbutamol improved the lives of millions of asthma sufferers, and whose successes provided the foundation for the success of Glaxo, while David Grahame-Smith (1933-2011) was a clinical pharmacologist who worked on serotonin and psychopharmacology. Noreen Murray (1935-2011) was a molecular geneticist whose work with her husband Kenneth made important advances in genetic engineering, and who championed the role of women in science as well as providing a very successful role model. Dame Barbara Clayton (1922-2011), the pathologist, made important contributions to hormone chemistry.

Pat Mollison (1914-2011) was a haematologist who was a pioneer of blood transfusions in the Second World War and made important advances in techniques. The cardiothoracic surgeon Alfred Gunning (1918-2011) pioneered the use of pig valves in aortic valve replacement surgery. He is joined in this update by Leslie LeQuesne (1919-2011), a surgeon whose focus on the outcomes of surgery led to a sea-change in the pre- and post-operative care of patients, and by the leading urologist and urological surgeon John Blandy (1927-2011). Quentin Gibson (1918-2011), a Scottish-born physiologist (working latterly in the US), was best known for his work on the kinetics of ligand binding to haemoglobins. Harry Smith (1921-2011) was a microbiologist who worked on bacterial infection and the chemistry of virulence. The neurophysiologist Sir John Gray (1918-2011) worked on sensory systems in fish, and served as an influential secretary of the Medical Research Council. The psychoanalyst Hanna Segal (1918-2011) kept alive the teachings of Melanie Klein, while David Bowen (1924-2011), a forensic pathologist, was central to the investigation into the serial killer Dennis Nilsen and other high-profile cases.

Two women in this release made important contributions to the wider understanding of medicine: Ann McPherson (1945-2011), a GP who worked tirelessly to promote better public health, including through her highly successful Diary of a Teenage Health Freak, and campaigned for the right to assisted suicide, and Jennifer Worth (1935-2011), author of the highly popular Call the Midwife series.

From the world of animal medicine, Peter Storie-Pugh (1919-2011) was a Colditz prisoner who became a leading veterinary surgeon and promoter of co-operation among European veterinary scientists, while Bill Jarrett (1928-2011) was a distinguished veterinary scientist whose work on viral and parasitic diseases (including the discovery of the retrovirus which causes leukaemia and lymphoma in cats) led also to major advances in human medicine.

Engineering and business

Among the engineers in the update, Sir William Hawthorne (1913-2011) was a mechanical engineer who helped Frank Whittle solve a key problem in the development of the jet engine, and went on to become a world-leading expert in turbomachinery design (with a sideline in conjuring), while Sir Bernard Crossland (1923-2011) was a leading academic mechanical engineer who was a key scientific member of several investigations, including that into the King's Cross fire of 1987. Ron Hickman (1932-2011) was a car designer for Lotus who struck gold with his invention of the Black and Decker workmate. The master watchmaker George Daniels (1926-2011) produced the first significant new watch mechanism for hundreds of years; his creations fetched astronomical prices.

Several knights and peers of the commercial and financial worlds are included in this update, among them Sir Arthur Bryan (1923-2011), the first non-family chairman of the Wedgwood pottery firm, who led its international growth; the industrialist Sir Arthur Norman (1917-2011) who oversaw the diversification of De La Rue and was an influential president of the CBI; Sir Frank Lampl (1926-2011), an Auschwitz survivor who became chairman of the construction firm Bovis; Sir Robert Horton (1939-2011), a forceful chairman of BP and Railtrack whose record at both was mixed. Also included is Sir Anthony Tennant (1930-2011), an executive who cleaned up Guinness after the share support scandal but was himself brought down as chairman of Christies by his involvement in the Christies/Sothebys price-fixing scandal; and Sir Geoffrey Chandler (1922-2011), an SOE veteran who became a director of Shell and later a leading proponent of ethical business principles. Richard Marsh, Baron Marsh (1928-2011), was a Labour cabinet minister once tipped for party leadership who quit politics to run British Rail and then the Newspaper Publishers Association, and in 1979 announced his intention of voting Conservative.

Among the other business leaders included in this release, Edward Stobart (1954-2011) was an entrepreneur who transformed the haulage business of his father, Eddie Stobart, into one of the most recognizable brands in Britain, with its own fan club. George Walker (1929-2011) was a boxer and gangster who became a business tycoon, surviving the collapse of the Brent Walker business empire and creating a second fortune in post-Soviet Russia. Cyril Stein (1928-2011) was a businessman who transformed Ladbrokes from a sleepy bookmaker to the aristocracy into one of Britain's largest chains. Jane Packer (1959-2011) was an innovative flower arranger and founder of the eponymous chain of florists, with branches around the world. Mario Cassandro (1920-2011) was an influential restaurateur and entrepreneur whose trattoria La Terrazza in Soho attracted the brightest stars of 1960s London and was credited with changing British tastes.

Politics, law, and the state

The January 2015 update includes four very different figures from Northern Irish politics: Sir Oliver Napier (1935-2011), the Roman Catholic first leader of the Alliance Party who fought valiantly for an end to the conflict and for reconciliation; the highly controversial Bill Craig (1924-2011), who left mainstream Unionism to form the extremist Ulster Vanguard movement, and who at one point vowed to liquidate the enemy ; Gusty Spence (1933-2011), a leading figure in the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force who was nevertheless persuaded of the case for a Loyalist ceasefire; and Andrew Boyd (1921-2011), a working-class Ulster trade unionist who wrote hard-hitting socialist analyses of the causes of sectarian strife.

From the mainland , Michael Onslow, seventh earl of Onslow (1938-2011) was a genial, romantic tory with a pronounced libertarian streak, who spoke out against racism, identity cards, and the community charge, and was a popular and witty panellist on the BBC news satire programme, Have I Got News for You? Tim Raison (1929-2011) was a thoughtful one-nation tory who found himself frozen out under Margaret Thatcher and became increasingly critical of her government's line on social policy and international relations. From the other side of the political spectrum, Gordon McLennan (1924-2011), penultimate general secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain, from 1975 to 1989, failed to halt either the precipitate decline in the party's membership or the fissiparous tendencies within it, which led to the party's dissolution in 1991.

Among backroom figures in politics were the colourful David Hart (1944-2011), who built and lost several fortunes, espoused extreme right-wing views, and was an important but short-lived influence on Margaret Thatcher during the miners strike of 1984-5, helping found the anti-Scargill Union of Democratic Mineworkers; Philip Gould, Baron Gould of Brookwood (1950-2011), a political strategist who was a key figure in the modernization of the Labour Party under Tony Blair; and Sir Simon Milton (1961-2011), the highly-regarded leader of Westminster Council who became Boris Johnson's right-hand man at City Hall.

Several campaigners are included in this update, among them Madeleine Simms (1930-2011), an important figure in the movement for abortion law reform; Diana Lamplugh (1936-2011), who after the disappearance of her daughter Suzy in 1986 founded and led the Suzy Lamplugh Trust, campaigning successfully on a wide range of issues relating to personal safety; and Rodney Legg (1947-2011), a former British Empire Loyalist who went on to become a highly effective campaigner for environmental conservation, particularly in his native Dorset, about which he wrote scores of books. Also included are Campbell Christie (1937-2011), the Scottish trade unionist who played a leading role in the campaign for Scottish devolution; and Brian Haw (1949-2011), the rather less successful anti-war campaigner who for several years set up camp immediately opposite the Houses of Parliament and became an emblem of the anti-Iraq War protests.

Pre-eminent among servants of the state in this update was Douglas Allen, Baron Croham (1917-2011), head of the civil service from 1974 to 1977, who was central to many of the debates about postwar British economic policy. He is joined by Sir Peter Carey (1923-2011), another former SOE officer, who similarly played a key role on the civil service side of discussions about British economic performance in the 1970s and 1980s, and by Sir Robin Mountfield (1939-2011); Mountfield liked to recall that at the start of his civil service career he was involved in discussions about the renationalization of the steel industry, and at its end was charged with supervising the privatization of Her Majesty's Stationery Office (created by Edmund Burke in 1786). Julian Asquith, second earl of Oxford and Asquith (1916-2011) also saw substantial changes during his long career as a colonial administrator, and was the man chosen to see several small colonies through to independence. In a later age, Sir Hilary Synnott (1945-2011) capped a distinguished diplomatic career, spent mainly in South Asia, with appointment as coalition provisional administrator in Basra after the Iraq War, about which he wrote in Bad Days in Basra (2008).

Several SOE veterans are included in this release, but none was braver than Nancy Wake (1912-2011), who led a maquis in the Auvergne and remained formidable into her nineties. The RAF officers Billy Drake (1917-2011), Peter Twiss (1921-2011), Sir Brian Burnett (1913-2011), and Sir Geoffrey Dhenin (1918-2011) all saw service during the Second World War and went on to distinguished careers afterwards. Twiss entered the record books in 1956 when he became the first man to fly an aircraft faster than 1000mph (in the process breaking the existing record by more than 300mph), while Dhenin exhibited similar courage in being the first man to fly through the middle of an atomic bomb's mushroom cloud in order to collect air samples. Sir Chandos Blair (1919-2011), having been taken prisoner with the 51st Highland Division in France in 1940, became the first British officer to escape from a prisoner-of-war camp and make it back to England; he remained with the army until 1976, latterly as general officer commanding Scotland. Brigadier Anne Field (1926-2011) joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service shortly after the war, rising to become head of the Women's Royal Army Corps, and paving the way for the integration of women into regular army units. Admiral of the Fleet Sir Henry Leach (1923-2011) was First Sea Lord during the Falkland crisis, and played a crucial role in stiffening Margaret Thatcher's resolve to re-take the islands; his successor as First Sea Lord, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Julian Oswald (1933-2011), led the Royal Navy's contribution during the Gulf War of 1991, and also worked to widen the role of women in the service.

Three eminent women lawyers are included in the January 2015 update: Dame Barbara Mills (1940-2011), the first woman to be Director of Public Prosecutions, Ann Goddard (1936-2011), widely regarded as one of the ablest criminal barristers of her generation, and her friend and contemporary Ann Curnow (1935-2011), another criminal barrister who was reckoned one of the sharpest cross-examiners at the Bar. The world of legal scholarship is represented by Brian Simpson (1931-2011), who made important contributions in two different areas, the history of the common law, and human rights law, and by Sir Zelman Cowen (1919-2011), the leading scholar of constitutional law of his generation, who became governor-general of his native Australia before returning to Oxford University (his alma mater) as provost of Oriel College and chairman of the Press Council. Alan Rodger, Baron Rodger of Earlsferry (1944-2011), combined the roles of practitioner and legal scholar: lord president of the Court of Session in Edinburgh, a lord of appeal in ordinary, and a founding member of the UK Supreme Court, he was also a highly distinguished jurist, making signal contributions to the study of Roman law, Scots law, and commercial law, including fascinating discussions of several landmark historical cases.

From the police service, John Alderson (1922-2011) was a notably reforming chief constable of Devon and Cornwall, widely regarded as a key figure in the development of community policing; Shirley Becke (1917-2011) was the first woman to reach the rank of commander in the Metropolitan Police; and Peter Wright (1929-2011) was a controversial chief constable of South Yorkshire Police at the time of the miners strike in 1984-5 and the Hillsborough disaster of 1989.

Sporting lives

The update includes several prominent figures from the world of sport. Basil D Oliveira (1931-2011) was a Cape Coloured cricketer who played for Worcestershire and England, whose inclusion in a planned tour of South Africa in 1968 led to the D Oliveira affair , the cancellation of the tour by South Africa, and significant momentum towards a boycott of sporting links with South Africa. Trevor Bailey (1923-2011) was an Essex and England cricketer renowned for his defensive play (earning him the nickname Barnacle Bailey ) who later became a Test Match commentator and author of several books on cricket, while Fred Titmus (1932-2011), a Middlesex and England professional cricketer whose career spanned five decades, was only the fourth cricketer to take 2500 wickets and make 20,000 runs in the first-class game.

Sir Henry Cooper (1934-2011) was a much-loved British heavyweight boxing champion remembered especially for his encounters with Muhammad Ali (Cassius Clay) and his advertisements for Brut aftershave. The footballer Nat Lofthouse (1925-2011), the Lion of Vienna , scored thirty goals in thirty-three appearances for England, and played throughout his career for Bolton Wanderers. Ginger McCain (1930-2011) was a horse trainer who won the Grand National four times, three times with Red Rum, in 1973, 1974, and 1977, and a fourth time with Amberleigh House in 2004. Betty Callaway (1928-2011) was an ice skating coach who included among her successes the celebrated British duo Torvill and Dean. Finally, Peter Lunn (1914-2011) was an Olympic skier who in his day job was an SIS agent on the frontline of espionage against the Soviets.

Our next online update, May 2015

Our next online update to be published on Thursday 28 May 2015 will continue to extend the Oxford Dictionary DNB's coverage of men and women active from the middle ages to the late twentieth century. May's update will comprise a second, concluding set of biographies of prominent figures in the British film industry, the first of which was published in May 2014. The next update will also include biographies of men and women active in the British Jewish community from the 1700s, plus a continuation of our current research projects to extend the Dictionary's coverage of the late-medieval religious and individuals active in the civil wars of the 1640s.

Back to top of January 2015 preface

May 2015

Introduction to the update, by David Cannadine

Welcome to the thirty-second online update of the Oxford DNB in which, as every May and September since 2005, we extend the Dictionary's coverage of men and women from the earliest times to the modern period. The May 2015 update adds biographies of 105 individuals who were active between the fourteenth and the early twenty-first centuries, with a special focus on the history of the British cinema the second and concluding selection of a research project begun last year. May's update also begins a new study of men and women who shaped Britain's Jewish community from the eighteenth century onwards, as well as biographies on participants in the seventeenth-century British civil wars, on late medieval religious figures, and on composers and musical performers. This update also includes a specially commissioned entry on Magna Carta to mark its eight hundredth anniversary.

The biographies of those people who helped shape the history of the modern cinema includes men and women working on both sides of the Atlantic from the late nineteenth century onwards, as directors, producers and actors. Some of them, like Albert Edward Smith and Frank Lloyd, born in Kent and West London respectively, made their film careers entirely in the United States; some, like Christine Norden and Carl Foreman, moved back and forth from Britain to America; and some like Lewin Fitzhamon and Guy Newall did all their work in the United Kingdom. Two anniversaries are particularly noteworthy: the centenary of the release of The Battle Cry of Peace (1915), produced by Albert Smith, which sought to alert Americans to the dangers of German wartime aggression; and the one hundred and twentieth anniversary of the birth of Brian Desmond Hurst, whose wartime film Dangerous Moonlight (1941), featured the most famous score composed by Richard Addinsell, including his Rachmaninoff-like Warsaw Concerto.

These biographies are a vivid reminder of the (often-too-little-appreciated) significance of British figures in the creation of modern film, and as such they are a fine example of how such grouped lives can illuminate an important but neglected area of our national past and national life. The Oxford DNB's new collective project, on the shapers and makers of Britain's Jewish community, from the mid-eighteenth to the late-twentieth centuries, is similar in its focus and aim, and the first thirteen biographies are now available. Among them is that of Tobias Theodores, who was not only a brilliant linguist (is there anyone alive today who can speak fifty-two languages, as it was claimed he could?), but also combined a firm commitment to his Jewishness with a strong belief in the values of British liberalism; and of Charlotte Montefiore, who helped found and fund Jewish schools in London, and who also supported the publication of appropriate improving literature to be used in their classrooms.

Other collective group lives now made available include: the thirty Poplar Councillors of East London, who were imprisoned in 1921 for refusing to levy a rate in protest at the inequitable distribution of local taxation in the capital; a further selection of biographies of those involved in the civil wars in the British isles, ranging from Hans Behr, a professional soldier who had previously served with Swedish forces and took up a commission in the parliamentary army, to John Nixon, who was prominent in the affairs of Oxford from the 1620s to the 1660s; and the penultimate set of medieval religious figures, encompassing thirteen new biographies of abbots, priors, and abbesses who led houses across England from Sussex to Yorkshire, Malmesbury to Ely. My own favourite new entry is on John Bingham, seventh baron Clanmorris of Newbrook, who joined MI5 in 1940, controlled a network of spies who infiltrated the British Communist Party, and became the fictional alter ego of John le Carre's spymaster, George Smiley.

From May 2015, the ODNB offers biographies of 59,558 men and women who have shaped the British past in 54,393 articles; the Dictionary also includes 11,338 portrait likenesses, researched in partnership with the National Portrait Gallery, London.

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 (59,558 biographies and 524 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.

David Cannadine, General Editor

New online contents, May 2015

A century of British cinema, part 2

The May 2015 update sees the publication of the second of two sets of new biographies (the first of which appeared in May 2014 of men and women who shaped the history of British cinema. This second set includes accounts of twenty-four individuals who, whether as writers, directors, producers or actors, were leading figures in film-making in Britain and also the United States.

The earliest of the set to enter the industry was Albert Edward Smith (1874-1958), a market gardener's son from Faversham, Kent, who emigrated with his family to the USA in the late 1880s, where he established a variety act. He first began exhibiting films in New York in 1897. Initially a pirate , disregarding equipment patents and copying films, Smith established the successful Vitagraph Company, set up in Hollywood in 1913, and came to prominence in 1915 with the war drama, The Battle Cry of Peace. He became a successful and respected movie executive and a member of Hollywood aristocracy. Lewin Henry Dell Fitzhamon (1869-1961), the son of a public school headmaster, made the transition from music hall to film in 1900 with a part in a Boer war-themed feature, after which he joined the Hepworth company at Walton-on-Thames, helping to turn the town into a centre of the British film industry. His Rescued by Rover (1905), starring a pet dog, is considered a landmark in its cinematic narrative technique, while his twenty madcap comedies, featuring the Tilly Girls (1910-12), subverted restrictive social norms regulating female conduct. In all, Fitzhamon had a hand in some 400 films, though he faded from view in the 1920s. After training as a teacher, and becoming headmaster of a school in Essex, George William Pearson (1875-1973), made the unusual career change to film direction in 1912. Having made popular films during the war years, he reached his creative peak between 1918 and 1924, with the actress Betty Balfour in leading roles. With the coming of sound, Pearson reverted to making quota quickies , though he remained a figure of note in the industry. His thoughtful autobiography (1957) reflected on the power of film. The Oscar-winning actor Edmund Gwenn (1877-1959), born in Wandsworth, took to the stage in 1895 in the face of parental disapproval. A decade later he was given the first in a series of roles by George Bernard Shaw, before making his screen debut in 1916. In the 1930s he worked regularly with major British directors, moving to the USA where he appeared in the Lassie films; Gwenn received an Academy Award for his part in Miracle on 34th Street (1947).

In 1910 Geoffrey Herbert Malins (1886-1940) began work as a cameraman for a Croydon-based film company. On the outbreak of war he filmed scenes in Belgium for Gaumont's series War Topicals and in 1915 he was one of two official cameramen allowed by the British authorities to film at the front. His 75-minute feature film, The Battle of the Somme, with footage from the morning of 1 July, was a sensation on its release in August 1916. His desire for the limelight led to a breach with the military authorities. After the war he embarked on a series of overseas adventures, by yacht, plane, and motorcycle. Military service on the Western Front, for which he was decorated for his daring, was a defining experience for Walter George Thomas Summers (1892-1973). He went on to make a succession of impressive war films from 1925 (Ypres, Mons, Battle of Coronel) and adapted to talkies later in the decade. His Suspense (1930), a notable war film made at Elstree, is thought comparable to Hollywood's Journey's End. However, in the 1930s he was relegated to second-string films, and his career declined after the Second World War. (John Henry) Graham Cutts (1884-1958) entered the film business before the First World War, running cinemas prior to his move to film-making in the early 1920s. His productions earned critical acclaim and attracted Hollywood stars to Britain, and by 1926 he was reckoned the best-known director in Britain. But he did not make a successful transition to sound, was overshadowed by his former assistant Alfred Hitchcock, and no copy survives of his The Wonderful Story (1922), which was much admired by contemporaries. Guy Patrick Newall (1885-1937) began a stage career as a comedy dude before making his film debut in 1915. In 1919 he helped to found a British film company, establishing a studio at Beaconsfield, and attempted to meet American competition by drawing on English acting talent. He produced, directed, and acted alongside his future wife, the actress Ivy Ellis Duke (1895-1937) making his mark in the immediate post-war years with films of great emotional charge.

Born and brought up in Hammersmith, Frank William George Lloyd (1887-1960) appeared in musical comedies before emigrating to Canada in 1909. He moved to California, where he gained his film-acting credit in 1913, and directed his first film in the following year. He was one of the original thirty-six founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and won its second Oscar for direction, for The Divine Lady (1929), a drama about Lord Nelson and Lady Hamilton. Lloyd's Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) won an Oscar for best film. Most of his life was spent in California, where he adopted a Scottish persona, for which he was later remembered. A professionally-trained French actor, born in Paris, Marcel Varnel (1894-1947) worked as a director in Hollywood before coming to England in 1934, where he spent the rest of his life. Naturalized as a British subject, he made 34 films, working with leading British star performers including Will Hay and his blustering incompetents in Oh, Mr Porter! (1937). Hay's side-kicks included (George Thomas) Moore Marriott (1885-1949), from a theatrical family, who worked on one-reelers at Walton before the First World War, and had the title role in the silent version of Sweeney Todd (1928). The station dogsbody in Oh, Mr Porter!, Graham Harold Victor Moffatt (1919-1965) began his working life as a Shepherd's Bush delivery boy before securing a job at Lime Grove studios, where he was spotted for roles as an insolent office boy. He later became a publican.

The content of British films in the years between the world wars was strictly limited by the censors, two of whom are included in the set of biographies. From a Manchester nonconformist background, Joseph Brooke Wilkinson (1870-1948) became involved in operating cinema projectors and emerged as a leading figure in the trade. He joined the British Board of Film Censors on its creation in 1912 and during the war made propaganda films, including Britain Prepared (1915). He oversaw and enforced censorship, and was notable for decisions on politically sensitive issues in the 1930s, when he was very responsive to Foreign Office representations. On his retirement as a career soldier in 1922, John Connor Hanna (1871-1947) joined the British Board of Film Censors. On becoming chief censor in 1930, he encouraged film-makers to submit scenario reports for pre-vetting thus effectively determining the tone of films made and exhibited in Britain until his retirement in 1946. If the BBFC was mainly concerned with public morals, the film-making collective at the forefront of the British documentary movement in the 1930s, the GPO Film Unit (act. 1933-1939) the subject of a new group entry surveying its membership and activities sought by its depictions of ordinary life in Britain to contribute to a well-informed democracy. Many young creative people were attracted to GPO projects: Coal Face (1935), on working life in Britain's mines, and Night Mail (1936), on the postal service, drew on the talents of W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten, among others. On the outbreak of war the unit was taken over by the Ministry of Information and became the Crown Film Unit.

British cinema during the Second World War and after is well represented in the May 2015 update. (Frederick) Penrose [Pen] Tennyson (1912-1941) left university without a degree to work in film, and was promoted by Michael Balcon in 1930s. Tennyson (a descendant of the Victorian poet laureate) made indigenously British films. These included The Proud Valley (1940) starring Paul Robeson, in a Welsh mining setting, and Convoy (1940) which became one of the most successful British films of that year. He was killed in an air crash returning from location work at Scapa Flow. The wartime melodrama Dangerous Moonlight (1941), won popular acclaim for its director Brian Desmond Hurst (1895-1986), who had been brought up in the political turbulence of protestant Belfast. Having survived service at Gallipoli, he studied art in Canada and worked in Los Angeles before establishing himself in British film-making in the 1930s, making his mark with Ourselves Alone (1936) set during the Irish war of independence. His career peaked in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and was characterized by his definitive Scrooge (1951). David Lean's adaptations of Dickens Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948) were the design master works of John Bryan (1911-1969) who had started out as a scenic artist for stage productions by his actor-manager father, and worked on government camouflage projects during the war. Bryan also designed and produced Becket (1964) for which Canterbury Cathedral was reproduced on the set of Shepperton studios. Joining the industry as an editor in the late 1930s, John Stuart Eldridge (1917-1962) established his reputation as a documentary film-maker with the Ministry of Information in the Second World War, working with Dylan Thomas on Our Country (1944), which portrayed the lives of the nation's people in wartime. Waverley Steps (1948), his portrayal of post-war Edinburgh, was followed by a move into features, and his direction of three successful films in the early 1950s, including Kenneth More in Brandy for the Parson (1952).

This latest release also includes three examples of transatlantic lives during the 1950s. The career of Ida Lupino (1918-1995), who came from a family of musical hall performers, began in childhood and continued into the television age. In 1934 she was taken to Hollywood where she appeared alongside the leading tough guys : John Garfield, Edward G. Robinson, and Gary Cooper, while convincingly taking on American roles. She went on to establish a successful directorial career both in film and later television in the USA, The Hitch-Hiker (1953) being considered her greatest directorial achievement. In 1945 the Sunderland-born actress Christine Norden (1924-1988) was signed up by Alexander Korda, who recognized her star potential. She enjoyed a six-year film career in Britain before leaving for the USA in 1952 where she appeared on Broadway before returning to Britain in 1978. The American screen writer Carl Foreman (1914-1984) came to England in 1952 after his former membership of the Communist Party made his position in Hollywood untenable. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), which he adapted from a novel, earned him production deals, including The Guns of Navarone (1961), a huge box-office success, The Victors (1963) a war film which he wrote and directed, and the Young Winston (1972). He returned to the USA in the late 1970s.

The set concludes with two lives from British cinema in the late-twentieth century. Intended by his family for a naval career, the director Terence Roland Fisher (1904-1980) was a relative late-starter in the industry, but went on to shape an entire genre. He learned the business as an editor in cutting rooms before making his directorial debut in 1947. From 1951 he made twenty-nine films for Hammer Productions, though it was not until The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Britain's first colour horror film, that he found his precise direction. An international hit, it established a successful formula of Gothic horror, though critical responses were at first unfavourable and only later was Fisher recognized as a significant British director. Hammer Films gave the actor (Robert) Oliver Reed (1938-1999) his break in the early 1960s. After a disrupted family life and schooling, and a period of riotous living in early manhood, he emerged as an eye-catching screen presence. He was taken up by Michael Winner in swinging sixties roles, but his most memorable and significant screen appearances came via his partnership with the director Ken Russell. Despite his reputation as hell-raiser, Reed was a consummate professional before the camera.

As a postscript to this second selection of cinema biographies, the May 2015 update also includes four examples of lives best remembered for their achievements in television. The scriptwriter and producer John Herbert Elliot (1918-1997) worked briefly for a film company before joining BBC television at Alexandra Palace in 1949. On the death of George VI in 1952, Elliot produced the first television obituary of a British monarch, a format he repeated for the life of Winston Churchill in 1965. Elliot also made the first major British television series about the Second World War, War in the Air (1954), followed by a landmark drama documentary A Man from the Sun (1956) on Britain's West Indian communities. A Yorkshire miner's son, the comedian Harry Worth (1917-1989), whose real name was Harry Bourlon Illingworth, perfected a ventriloquist act while himself working down the mines, and honed his craft in workingmen's clubs and in camp concerts during military service in the Second World War. Worth made his first television appearance in 1955, and was given his first comedy series in 1960, which gained a place in popular memory chiefly for its opening sequence in which he used a shop window reflection to appear to defy gravity. For the future television actor Harry H. Corbett (1925-1982), film-going was, as Joan Littlewood remarked, his acting school. Littlewood gave him classical and leading roles in her Theatre Workshop productions, and Corbett established himself as a versatile stage and film actor before taking the part of Harold Steptoe in the television comedy series Steptoe and Son, which made him a household name. A final addition is a biography of the television director Alan John Clarke (1935-1990) who enrolled on a university course in television and radio arts while working in Canada, and then returned to Britain to direct television drama. Clarke's plays addressed politically-engaged and sometimes contentious topics, ranging from the Derek Bentley murder trial (To Encourage the Others, 1952) to Borstall (Scum, 1977), and football hooliganism (The Firm, 1989). Such works arguably made Clarke the greatest exponent of the television play as a radical tradition within British post-war culture.

Shapers of Britain's Jewish community

With the conclusion of our British cinema project, we begin a new survey to be continued in future updates of the men and women who shaped Britain's Jewish community, from the mid-eighteenth to the late-twentieth century. Of the thirteen new biographies included in May 2015, three chart the lives of prominent religious leaders. In 1765 David Schiff (d. 1791) was appointed rabbi of the Ashkenazi synagogue in Duke's Place, London, known later as the Great Synagogue. From 1780 he was the sole Jewish legal authority in the country, though the circumscribed nature of his influence reflects the limited scope of rabbinic duties in the eighteenth century. In 1786 Schiff refused to convert Lord George Gordon, notorious for leading violent anti-Catholic riots in London six years earlier. In 1948 Leslie Edgar (1905-1984) became senior minister of the Liberal Jewish Synagogue and thereafter he was prominent in promoting interfaith dialogue; he also set himself apart from other Liberal Jewish leaders by becoming a supporter of the State of Israel. Kopul Rosen (1913-1962) was a popular communal rabbi in Manchester and Glasgow, and a committed advocate for the Zionist cause. He is now best known as the founder, in 1947, of Carmel College a Jewish-faith boarding school, dubbed the Jewish Eton of which he was principal for fifteen years.

Education was also a central concern of the linguist Tobias Theodores (1808-1886) who was a founding member of Owens College, Manchester. Theodores linguistic abilities were remarkable it was said he could speak as many as fifty-two languages but it was for his contribution to liberal causes in Manchester that he was most highly regarded. As a proud liberal and pious Jew , Theodores life reveals the possibility of combining a firm commitment to the Jewish faith with the liberal ideals prevalent in nineteenth-century Britain. His close contemporary, Charlotte Montefiore (1818-1854), was engaged in the development of Jewish schools in London one of several outlets for a philanthropy underpinned by her belief that the privileged had a duty to nurture the lives of others. Her Cheap Jewish Library, Dedicated to the Working Classes offered improving tales written by a network of Jewish women and was anonymously funded by Montefiore and sold for pennies. Her namesake Judith Montefiore (1784-1862) wrote travel journals of her five journeys to Palestine, as well as visits to Damascus and Russia in 1842 to protest against the conscription and expulsion of Jews. Resident in Ramsgate, Kent, she strictly observed Jewish dietary laws and in 1846 published, anonymously, the first Jewish cookery book written in English.

Twentieth-century writers who feature in this selection include two newspapermen closely involved with the Jewish Chronicle. David Kessler (1906-1999) was appointed managing director of the JC in the late 1930s; post-war, he struggled to revive the title's fortunes at a time of stringent newspaper restrictions, and to prevent the paper's editor from championing extreme right-wing Zionists in Palestine. In the early 1960s he supported the Chronicle s backing for Louis Jacobs during the latter's challenge to the chief rabbi on a central issue of faith, and later established the Kessler Foundation which effectively assumed proprietorship of the paper.

Joseph Leftwich (1892-1983) was a journalist who worked for the JC under Kessler's management. As a young writer, active in East London, Leftwich had been one of the Whitechapel Boys whose number included Isaac Rosenberg and Jacob Epstein. Increasingly interested in Yiddish from the early 1920s, his many publications served to enhance the cause of Yiddish literature, making Leftwich (in the words of Immanuel Jakobovitz) the living exponent of a culture which is now all but dead following its martyrdom in the Holocaust. During the 1930s the editor Miron Grindea (1909-1995) had campaigned against antisemitism in Bucharest, the capital of his native country. In September 1939 Grindea and his wife, Carola (whose biography is also included in this update and is discussed below) were granted a three-day visa in London, where they remained for the remainder of their lives. Grindea brought his magazine, Adam, which he financed, sustained, and edited for nearly sixty years in a milieu more redolent of Paris or Vienna than London . Three more writers now added to the Dictionary are the poets Lazarus Aaronson (1895-1966), best known for his first collection, Christ in the Synagogue (1930), and Arthur Jacobs (1937-1994) whose work played on the tensions of a shared Jewishness and Scottishness, and the novelist Edna Lipson [pseud. Gerda Charles] (1915-1996) whose fifth novel, The Destiny Waltz (1971), won the inaugural Whitbread prize. Set in the East End of the recent past, Lipson's novel is a corrective to some popular, more homely images of Jewish life in this part of London. One final biography now added that of the wedding portrait photographer Boris Bennett (1900-1995) offers an alternative perspective on Whitechapel where his studio became synonymous with glamour. At the height of his fame Bennett took and developed photographs for up to sixty married couples every Sunday, and is estimated to have taken over 150,000 studio photographs in his career. His camera and other artefacts are now on permanent display at the Jewish Museum, London.

The Poplar Councillors

The East End of London was also the location for a new group of lives now added to the Dictionary, the Poplar Councillors (act. 1919-1922), many of them commemorated by memorials in the area. The group comprised thirty members of the borough council of Poplar, who were imprisoned in 1921 for refusing to levy a rate in protest at the inequitable distribution of local taxation in the capital. In addition to Susan Lawrence, George Lansbury, and John Scurr (who already have entries in the Dictionary), this group article records the lives of other leading councillors: Minnie Lansbury (n e Glassman) (1889-1922), a suffragette from a family of Jewish migrants from Poland; her husband Edgar Isaac Lansbury (1887-1935), mayor of Poplar, who was at the centre of disputes between the Poplar board of guardians and the Ministry of Health over the scale of poor relief; and Julia Scurr (n e Sullivan) (1871-1927), a suffragette and campaigner to improve conditions for working women, who also served as mayor of the borough. The group also included successive Labour MPs for the Poplar South constituency, Samuel March (1861-1935), a trade union organizer, and David Morgan Adams (1875-1942), a dock worker and trade union official; and the last survivor of the councillors Nellie Frances Cressall (n e Wilson) (1882-1973), who was arrested six times for suffragette activity, organized the feeding of local children during the dock strike of 1912, and served for forty-six years on Poplar council from 1919 to its abolition and the creation of Tower Hamlets in 1965. While not among the imprisoned borough councillors, another person included in the May update Ishbel Allan MacDonald (1903-1982) represented South Poplar on the London County Council. In this capacity she took a particular interest in child welfare and education, though was better known nationally as the official hostess and companion to her widower father, the prime minister Ramsay MacDonald.

British civil wars and early modern lives

May's update adds a further selection of biographies covering the British civil wars, and the decades immediately before and after these conflicts. The new biographies which continue our research project to extend the Dictionary's seventeenth-century coverage include Nehemiah Wharton (fl. 1641-1649?) and Hans Behr (fl. 1641-1646), whose lives offer rare insight into the world of parliamentarian soldiers. Wharton, an apprentice to a London painter-stainer, is known through a series of letters written to his master, George Willingham. In July 1642 he volunteered to join parliamentarian forces under the earl of Essex and marched north to intercept the royalists. Wharton's letters describe the daily life on campaign, highlighting both his and his fellow volunteers religious zeal and their many episodes of privation and military incompetence. Wharton clearly relished the opportunity to travel and provided his master with a colourful account of the landscape and inhabitants of the regions he visited: Worcestershire was pleasant fruitfull and rich , though Worcester was so papisticall and Atheisticall that it resembles Sodom and is the very Emblem of Gomorah ; the residents of Hereford faired little better, being prone to such drunkenness and foul language that the city's children doe universally sweare stoutly . While Wharton was a volunteer, Hans Behr was a professional soldier who had previously served with Swedish forces and took up a commission in the parliamentarian army on the outbreak of the war. Essex, the army's commander, favoured European professionals among his field officers, and Behr's ensuing activities fit the stereotype of the hardened foreign soldier motivated more by martial honour and profit than the defeat of royalism.

Another who joined the parliamentarian cause in the early stages of the first civil war was Thomas Sanders (bap. 1610-1695) who served as a parliamentarian soldier in Derbyshire and Cheshire before being elected to the first protectoral parliament in 1654. Thereafter he became an opponent of Cromwell whom he accused of a king-like control of the standing army. Unlike Sanders, Sir Tobias Bridge (d. after 1672) had no difficulty accommodating himself to the protectorate and was regarded as a very honest sober man by Secretary Thurloe. Bridge, who had previously served as a captain in the New Model Army, played a prominent role in the second protectorate parliament and as a major-general for Staffordshire, Cheshire, and Lancashire. Sir Gilbert Gerard, first baronet (1587-1670) was another who was evidently well-regarded by the Cromwellian regime, though he did not seek election in any of the protectoral parliaments. First elected to the parliament of 1614 Gerard later emerged as a leading critic of Charles I's personal rule and, in the 1640s, was a prominent advocate of the parliamentarian case for war. Sir John Hippisley (d. 1655), by contrast, was a member of the peace party who took part in the parliamentary delegation which presented an offer to Charles in November 1642. A one-time servant of the king's favourite, the duke of Buckingham, Hippisley had no role in the regicide though this act did not deter him from seeking admission to the Rump Parliament. The capacity of the civil war to divide families is seen with the biography of a fifth MP, Francis Pierrepont (b. after 1607, d.1658), who (with one of his brothers) sided with parliament while his father and a second brother joined the king's party. This, some claimed, was a tactic to protect family lands whichever side won, though it was also acknowledged that Pierrepont was well affected to honest men and righteous liberty. Away from national politics, the biography of John Nixon (bap. 1589-1662) highlights the impact of the civil wars on a civic leader, prominent in the affairs of the City of Oxford from the 1620s. A critic of the personal rule, Nixon fled the city with the arrival of the royalists who established Oxford as their headquarters. With the garrison's fall in 1646, Nixon returned and came to dominate the city corporation for the next decade. This included founding a school for the sons of freemen which continued until the 1890s.

While John Nixon fled Oxford with the royalists arrival, William Beaw (1616-1706), then a recent graduate, joined the king's forces and subsequently became a mercenary who served as an overseas agent for Charles II during the 1650s. At the Restoration Beaw took holy orders, becoming bishop of Llandaff in 1679. What followed was a fruitless pursuit of further preferment as Beaw sought to secure a more prosperous bishopric a failure outlined in several outspoken letters and statements, sent to Thomas Tenison, the archbishop of Canterbury. In contrast to Beaw, whose career was a failed search for social and professional advance, C sar de Missy (1703-1775), minister of the French chapel of the Savoy, was an impressive biblical scholar. His overriding passion was the Greek New Testament on which he wrote much, though published little. De Missy was also a notable collector, specializing in early editions and manuscripts his outstanding item being a twelfth-century illuminated gospels from Mount Athos, now in the British Library. The Dictionary's coverage of the early modern church is further extended with the publication of a group essay on the Feoffees for impropriations (act. 1625-1633), a London-based committee charged with buying up and dispensing patronage of parish livings to create new preaching appointments in the Church of England.

Several of the biographies in this selection notably those of Nehemiah Wharton and William Beaw highlight the value of personal papers, and their chance survival, for the writing of early modern (and medieval) lives. May's update offers two further examples: the Suffolk landowner Alice Bryene (c. 1360-1435) and the West Riding poet, John Kaye (b. before 1530, d. 1594). The survival of Bryene's household book for 1412-13, together with accounts relating to her estates, make it possible to recreate her life, examine her fortunes in unusual detail, and to extrapolate an exemplar of the activities and experiences of medieval women. Whereas Bryene was determined to maintain her status as an independent woman after her husband's death, John Kaye documented and celebrated a long married life and the couple's sixteen children. The rich details of Kaye's inner life are derived from surviving account books, as well as two painted panels that combine visual records of family and friends with verse setting out Kaye's views on being a good husband, father, and gentleman. The panels, which originally hung from a projecting crane at Kaye's home at Woodsome, near Huddersfield, are now on display at the town's Tolson Museum.

One final early modern biography that of Sir John Peyton (1579-1635) is notable in that its subject is not a new addition to the Dictionary, having appeared in the 2004 edition. However, recent research published in 2014 and 2015 has made possible a new, markedly different and much extended biography, which now replaces the earlier entry. Previously identified as a minor administrator, Peyton is now known to have worked on the continent as a spy, between 1599 and 1602, and to have written A Relation of the State of Polonia, the most celebrated early description of Poland in English, whose author was until recently a mystery. The replacement of Peyton's biography in the light of significant new research is an important step for the Dictionary, and one its editors will be pursuing in coming updates as we continue the work of keeping existing biographies in line with new scholarship either (as we do currently) through revisions and additions or (in the near future) through selected replacements, where advances in historical knowledge make this necessary. You ll find more on editors work to revise and supplement the Dictionary in a later section of this Introduction.

Modern linguists

In updates since 2012 we have periodically extended the Dictionary's coverage of men and women known for their contribution to the study and appreciation of modern European languages and culture. The biographies of the seven modern linguists added in May's update continue this project, with a particular focus on scholars of German studies. In 1831 Adolphus Bernays (1794-1864) was appointed professor of German at King's College, London, and may be regarded as the first person to have made his career as a university professor of German in Britain; for Bernays the study of German provided access to the treasury of the human mind. Sixty years after Bernays appointment, Walter Ripman (1869-1947) became professor of German at London University in which capacity he promoted new forms of language teaching; these focused on immersive conversational training, rather than an over-reliance on translation or what Ripman termed the dead method of grammar study. Nearly ninety years on, Peter Branscombe (1929-2008) was appointed to Britain's first chair of Austrian studies, at St Andrews, where he specialized in late-eighteenth and early nineteenth-century musical theatre. While Branscombe's research spanned German studies and musicology, that of Roy Pascal (1904-1980) who created a respected German department at Birmingham included studies of the Reformation, the revolutions of 1848, and a contemporary analysis of the early years of the Nazi regime published in 1934. Intersections of language and culture (notably in Flanders) also characterized the academic work of the Dutch scholar, Reinder Meijer (1926-1993), who was professor of Dutch studies at Bedford College, London from 1971 and later a translator of modern American fiction into Dutch. The Cambridge academic Odette Mourgues (1914-1988) is remembered for her studies of seventeenth-century French writers, while Desmond Slay (1927-2004) a specialist in Old Icelandic literature painstakingly traced a fourteenth-century Icelandic codex lost since the 1890s.

The medieval religious

Also in 2012 the Dictionary's editors began a project to amplify the coverage of the late-medieval religious, in the light of considerable new research in this field. The May update offers the penultimate set of thirteen new biographies of abbots, priors, and abbesses who led houses across England: from Sussex to Yorkshire, Malmesbury to Ely. Common to several is the theme of struggle and discord, either between religious and secular authorities, or within a religious community characterized by factionalism. Edith Wilton (d. 1430), prioress of Carrow, became locked in legal dispute with the monks of Norwich Cathedral priory, who held neighbouring properties in the suburbs of Norwich. Wilton's tenure is also notable for the presence in one of Carrow's ecclesiastical properties of the famed mystic Julian of Norwich; Julian entered her anchorhold in 1373, the same year that Wilton became cellarer at the priory. John Ripon (d. 1435), meanwhile, is remembered for his protracted and bitter struggle to become abbot of Fountains, following the death of Robert Burley in 1410. Ripon's election was fiercely disputed, prompting appeals to and interventions by parliament, the king, and the pope before his eventual confirmation in 1416. Thereafter Ripon's abbacy was not without its troubles and in 1425 he complained of being impeaded vexatiously in many courts . Robert Catton (1470s?-1552), abbot of St Albans from 1530, was another who suffered poor relations with his brethren, though Catton's difficulties owed much to his own maladministration and proximity to the crown. Though deposed in late 1537 or early 1538, Catton was later named among the St Albans pensioners with the substantial sum of £80 p.a.

Two more religious had careers that spanned the cataclysmic events of the 1530s, with generally favourable outcomes. As abbot of Burton upon Trent, William Edys (c. 1485-1544) initially resisted Thomas Cromwell in the interests of his monastery but was forced to surrender the abbey to the king's commissioners in November 1539. A scholarly and capable man, Edys was later appointed as dean of the newly created Burton College. By contrast, Philip Hawford (d. 1557), abbot of Evesham, was notable for his cultivation of Cromwell in a strategy clearly intended to secure his own future following Evesham's suppression. It was, moreover, successful, Hawford being the recipient of a pension of 240, together with substantial property and livings.

Less fortunate in shaping his career was Thomas Nevyle (c. 1345-1415/16), prior of Winchester, who was brought low by episcopal politics. Having enjoyed good relations with William Wykeham, Nevyle fared less well with his successor Henry Beaufort who regarded the prior as his rival for the bishopric Nevyle having been elected as the new bishop by his monks. Poor relations with Beaufort may explain why Nevyle spent his final years in gaol, though his imprisonment could also have been the result of his alleged involvement in the Southampton plot. John Sante (d. 1496), abbot of Abingdon from 1468, was another charged with political subversion. A committed Yorkist, previously in the service of Edward VI, Sante was accused of plotting against the new king, Henry VII. Attainted by parliament in 1489, he was later pardoned. The abbacy of John Greenwell (d. in or after 1471), head of the community at Fountains from 1442, was also characterized by conflict between Lancastrians and Yorkists. Following the Yorkists victory at the battle of Towton in 1461, Greenwell was charged with being a supporter of Henry VI. Taken to London, he regained his freedom only after giving a bond in 2000 for his loyalty to Edward IV. Of the more than nearly sixty religious added to the Dictionary since 2012, Greenwell was one of the few who chose to retire from his abbacy in this case on the grounds of infirmity rather than be forced from or die in office.

On his retirement Greenwell was praised by his monks, not least for having freed them from debt. It is for their secular affairs and sound administration, rather than spiritual guidance, that several other religious are now recorded in the Oxford DNB. The successful leadership of Nicholas Morice (d. 1389), abbot of Waltham, derived principally from his obtaining grants of property and hunting rights, while he also earned Richard II's approval for his involvement in national affairs. Also of national importance, at least to later observers, was Morice's contemporary Hamo Offynton (d. 1383), abbot of Battle, who led a successful military resistance to a French attack on Rye in summer 1377. To the seventeenth-century clergyman Thomas Fuller, Offynton was the saver, not only of Sussex but England. Conflict likewise shaped the abbacy of Thomas Prestbury (c. 1345-1426), of Shrewsbury, who, having fallen foul of Richard II, became a firm supporter of Richard's deposer, Henry Bolingbroke, later Henry IV. At the battle of Shrewsbury, Prestbury and a royal clerk, acted as envoys for the king and sought unsuccessfully to negotiate peace between the king and Henry Percy. A former student at Oxford, Prestbury is also noteworthy for serving as the university's chancellor for nearly two years from July 1409, in which time he became involved in attempts to suppress Wycliffism.

The organizational talents of another religious can be seen in a celebrated piece of church architecture and a lasting feature of the Cambridgeshire landscape. In 1322 the central tower of Ely Cathedral collapsed. In response, Ely's prior John Crauden (d. 1341) secured a deferral of payments to Edward II and procured subscriptions from both the convent and the city enabling the sacrist Alan Walsingham, who was in charge of building works, to raise the famous octagon and lantern over the cathedral's central crossing. Crauden was handsomely rewarded by Queen Philippa who presented him with robes of state, powdered with golden squirrels, which the prior made into vestments. Matters of building and estate management also shaped the priorate of John Luscote (d. 1398), the first prior of the London Charterhouse, which became under his leadership the nerve centre of English Carthusianism for the next 150 years. However, securing of the Charterhouse site and endowment, and the construction work that followed, evidently impinged on the search for solitude and anonymity that had first prompted Luscote to enter the order.

Theatre and musical performance

In addition to its focus on shapers of a century of British cinema, the May 2015 update adds a selection of individuals notable for their contribution to the theatre and to musical composition and performance. Stephen Joseph (1921-1967) was a prominent innovator in post-war English theatre, principally through his development of in the round productions which he ran from the 1950s at Scarborough's Library Theatre. There he met Alan Ayckbourn who later described Joseph as half genius, half madman a great leader . Joseph's theatrical experiments came to national attention with successful West End productions of Ayckbourn's work from the mid-1960s. Shortly before his death Joseph published on Theatre in the Round, and in 1996 the new theatre at Scarborough, now closely associated with Ayckbourn, was named after him. Also included is a life of the theatre scholar David Bradby (1942-2011), known for his studies of modern French drama and his identification of directors (rather than playwrights) as the principal creative figures in contemporary theatre. It was his talents as a performer that first brought the pianist and composer Noel Mewton-Wood (1922-1953) to public attention; Sir Thomas Beecham declared him the best talent I've discovered in the British Empire in years following his London debut in 1940. He subsequently championed modern British and European composers and was part of Benjamin Britten's circle during the creation of the Aldeburgh festival where he performed in the early 1950s. During the war, Mewton-Wood had taken part in Myra Hess's National Gallery concerts, as did Carola Grindea (1914-2009), wife of the editor Miron Grindea, who is mentioned above; post-war Grindea became a piano teacher and offered a pioneering lecture series on The techniques of piano teaching which did much to raise the instrument's status with young players. Classical music was also a life's work for Alec Robertson (1892-1982) who over fifty years brought music to the masses as a reviewer principally for Gramophone magazine and a BBC broadcaster of specialist music talks. In his Who's Who entry Robertson described himself an 'authority on early church music', a category represented in this update by the composer and psalmodist James Arnold (1720-1792) whose The Compleat Psalmodist provides over its numerous editions a guide to the practice and development of music in English country churches in the mid-eighteenth century. The organist Rayner Taylor (1747-1825) combined church music with compositions for the London stage, becoming musical director at Sadler's Wells in 1785. He later moved to America, settling in Philadelphia, where he achieved prominence as a songwriter and organist, and was judged the equal of C.P.E. Bach by one collaborator.

Performance for pleasure was central to the work of John Melville Pearse (1939-2008) who was dubbed the nation's guitar teacher for books and broadcasts in which he encouraged would-be players to pick up the instrument. Pearse later turned to the manufacture of strings and the design of new guitar models. These instruments also featured (somewhat infamously) in the career of the record producer, Dick Rowe (1921-1986) who is popularly known as the man who turned down the Beatles and is credited in Brian Epstein's autobiography as declaring that Groups of guitarists are on the way out. Rowe later acknowledged his misfortune in not forming a professional relationship with Epstein, though his popular image as the man who dismissed what became the dominant form of modern music is misleading. Working for Decca, Rowe was one of the first producers to look to the United States for innovations in music and record production; and despite missing the Beatles, he later signed the Rolling Stones and the Moody Blues. An older musical tradition is represented in the life of Robert James [Bob] Copper (1915-2004), a member of a dynasty of folk-singers from Rottingdean on the Sussex coast, the Copper family, who emerged into public view in the early 1950s over a half-a-century after their songs had first been noticed by collectors. Bob Copper outlived the terminal date (2000) for inclusion in the Oxford DNB when it first appeared in 2004. In the centenary year of his birth, he now joins other family members already included in the Dictionary, whose lives in turn can also be documented more precisely as a result of newly-accessible genealogical resources described later in this introductory statement.

Other lives: business, philanthropy, the military and intelligence

Following on from those associated with the Jewish Chronicle, described earlier, May's update includes the founders of several newspapers and journals. In 1855 James Henderson (1823-1906) began the Glasgow Daily News identified as Britain's first daily penny paper and later carried serializations of the stories of Robert Louis Stevenson, prior to their publication in book form as Treasure Island and Kidnapped. However, he is principally of note for his 1874 title, Funny Folks: the Comic Companion to the Newspaper, which has good claim to be the world's first modern 'comic'. In 1934 the former diplomatist Michael Huxley (1899-1979) founded the Geographical Magazine as a British alternative to the National Geographic. As editor Huxley dedicated himself to establishing a journal that would (in the words of his ODNB biographer) breathe life into the dry bones of geography and communicate the feel as well as the facts of the relationship between people and places. He was aided by Ivy Davison (1892-1977) who was the magazine's acting editor while Huxley took part in war work. Under Davison, the Geographical Magazine became a distinctly literary work, with contributions from Sylvia Townshend Warner, Laurie Lee, and L.P. Hartley, among others.

The Oxford DNB's business coverage is further extended with studies of Samuel Waring (1869-1940), promoter of domestic arts, and the financier, Angus Acworth (1898-1981). With the acquisition of the prestigious Gillow and Company in the late 1890s, Samuel Waring became one of the country's leading figures in the high-quality furnishings, with a particular focus on the smart hotel interior. His career peaked in 1904-6 with the creation of the Waring and Gillow department store in Oxford Street the epitome of improving middle-class taste, with well-designed furnishings at reasonable prices. Thereafter Waring's business experienced mixed fortunes as, following a controversial venture as a war supplier, he was brought down by over-rapid expansion and rash speculations in the 1920s. Angus Acworth's considerable wealth derived from a sizeable inheritance and a successful career as a merchant banker and financier. However, he is now remembered as a founder, in 1937, of the Georgian Group, which campaigns to conserve eighteenth-century buildings. Acworth also pioneered the concept of and legislation for listed building status in the immediate post-war era, and in 1952 he gave 33 Kensington Square, London (purchased with his £500,000 inheritance) to the National Trust.

Acworth's gift came fifty-seven years after the first donation of land to the newly created Trust, by Fanny Talbot (1824-1917). A friend and supporter of John Ruskin, Talbot was drawn to the aims of the emerging National Trust to which she gave Dinas Oleu four acres of land at Barmouth on the Gwynedd coast to coincide with the Trust's inaugural meeting in 1895. Property of a more modest kind was also an interest of the solicitor and consumer rights advocate David Tench (1929-2011) whose guides including The Law for Consumers (1962) and The Legal Side of Buying a House (1965) made legal matters more understandable for the lay person. Tench later gave consumer advice on BBC Radio's Jimmy Young Show and BBC television's That's Life, and has been described as having invented consumer law for the consumer age . Late twentieth-century social trends are also captured in the life of Robert [Robin] Jones (1909-2001) who pioneered social work training in the 1960s and later developed what's become known as sheltered housing with the Hartrigg Oaks retirement care community, near York. From the mid-1970s, Fred Edwards (1931-2008) was director of social work in Strathclyde in which capacity he emerged as the voice of Scottish social work. An advocate of his department as an instrument for social justice, Edwards reformed services for those with learning disabilities, and for older people who were encouraged to plan their own care; he was also one of the first people in social work to foresee and plan for the coming disaster of HIV/AIDs in the mid-1980s.

A final trio of biographies draws attention to military and intelligence service during the Second World War. In 1942 Jacqueline Nearne (1916-1982) joined the Special Operations Executive (SOE)'s French (F) section and was parachuted blind (with no reception) into the Auvergne. She served for fifteen months, building up one of the largest and most successful bands of resistance fighters in France, despite extensive efforts by the Gestapo to locate and destroy it. Nearne later starred in a documentary film on SOE training, Now It Can Be Told (1946). Film versions of wartime campaigns also feature in the life of John Howard (1912-1999) whose unit spearheaded the D-Day landings by capturing two vital bridges five miles inland from the Normandy coast. Howard's achievement is remembered at the sites of Pegasus Bridge (as one of the bridges was renamed, after the airborne winged horse badge) and the Esplanade Major John Howard. He later worked as a consultant for the 1962 war film, The Longest Day, in which he was played by Richard Todd, himself a paratrooper during the D-Day landings.

Creative accounts, this time of British intelligence, are likewise to the fore in the biography of John Bingham, seventh Baron Clanmorris of Newbrook (1908-1988), who joined MI5 in 1940. The details of Bingham's service have only recently emerged and show him to have been an important agent runner , controlling a network of spies who infiltrated the British Communist Party of Great Britain and other pro-Soviet organizations. Prior to these disclosures, Bingham was best known as the fictional alter ego for John le Carr's spy master, George Smiley. Finally, readers of spy fiction will be familiar with the concept of the end game , which at least in chess can be traced to Phillip Stamma (d. 1755). Born in Aleppo, Stamma came to Britain in the late 1730s where he established a reputation as one of the country's leading chess players. His Essai sur le jeu des checs, translated as The Noble Game of Chess (1745), introduced the Middle Eastern concept of the end game to Europe, as well as the game's first use of universal algebraic notation.

The biographical legacy of Magna Carta

Published a couple of weeks before the culmination of celebrations to mark the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, the ODNB's May 2015 update includes its own reflections on events at Runnymede. The Dictionary's collection of more than 300 essays on well-known historical networks already includes essays on John's evil counsellors and the twenty-five enforcers of the charter . In this update we add a third group essay on the Advisers of King John (act. 1215). These were the twenty-seven named men by whose counsel John acted when he granted the first issue of Magna Carta, dated 15 June 1215. While some of the advisers were committed to the king, the majority were moderate royalists anxious to avoid civil war and quickly deserted John when peace failed. Our second offering is a feature essay, Magna Carta through eight centuries, which traces the charter's extensive medieval revisions, as well as its value to critics of monarchical coercion, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and to champions of political and legal freedom in the following two centuries. As its author George Garnett concludes, though Magna Carta is now rarely invoked in the British courts, its core imperative that the monarch be bound by law remains at the heart of all debates about the liberty of the subject, in Britain, the United States, and elsewhere: in the view of a recent senior law lord, Tom Bingham, it can plausibly claim to be the most important secular document in the history of the world .

Revising the Oxford DNB

While the focus of this and previous Introductions is on newly commissioned articles, it's also the case that every Dictionary update since January 2005 has included new information and discoveries relating to existing, published biographies with new material submitted by contributors and readers, or as a result of research by the Dictionary's editors. Many of these discoveries have been made possible by a transformation in the availability of digitized sources including searchable parish records, indexes of birth, marriages, and deaths, and British census returns between 1841 and 1911, the latter being made available to researchers only in 2009. More than 1000 Dictionary entries now draw upon census returns, and this number increases with every update. So, too, do the number of birth, marriage, and death certificates cited as sources for Dictionary entries: currently we have located, ordered, and used 7538 birth, 7298 marriage, and 11,065 death certificates.

Among those death certificates newly added is that for the Fanny Cornforth (1835-1909), the artists model and intimate companion of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. When her life was first included in the Dictionary, in 2004, there was neither record of her death nor trace of her grave . However, both were recently discovered by the author of Cornforth's Oxford DNB entry, and confirmed by her death certificate (under her first married name) and by records in the West Sussex Record Office, as having taken place in the county asylum on 24 February 1909. Other discoveries incorporated in the May 2015 update include the birthplace (Poland) and parentage of the bandleader Bert Ambrose (1896-1971), notified by a reader of the Dictionary. Each new update adds hundreds of similar examples from the medieval to the modern period and now constitute a major element of the ODNB's editorial work, keeping the Dictionary in-step with new research.

New portraits for existing entries

Of the new biographies added to the Oxford DNB in May 2015, 22 are accompanied by a portrait likeness of a person or (in the case of the Poplar councillors) of members of a historical group. In addition, the May update offers a further 24 retrospective portraits of individuals already included in the Dictionary who were not previously illustrated. Among those to receive retrospective likenesses are Clementine Churchill, wife of the Sir Winston, the poet Isaac Rosenberg, novelist Radclyffe Hall, merchant Elihu Yale, who gave his name to the prestigious American university, and Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to graduate from a medical school and to appear on the General Medical Council's register. May's update also includes a set of early modern likenesses, following recent identifications of sitters by curators at the National Portrait Gallery, London. These include John Astley (1507-1596), master of the jewel house, Margaret Clifford, countess of Cumberland (1560-1616), and Sir John Harington (1560-1612), courtier and translator of Orlando Furioso. A full list of new portraits added in the May 2015 update is available here.

Our next update: September 2015

Our next online update will be published on Thursday 17 September 2015. September's update adds biographies of 100 men and women, with a focus on those who served, at home and on the battlefield, during the First World War with a special interest in the events of 1915. September's update also continues our project on black British and Asian lives and completes our survey of the late-medieval religious.

Back to top of May 2015 preface

 

September 2015

Introduction to the update by David Cannadine

Welcome to the thirty-third online update of the Oxford DNB, in which, as every May and September, we extend the dictionary's coverage of men and women from the earliest times to the modern period. The September 2015 update adds biographies of 112 individuals active between the thirteenth and the early twenty-first century, with a special focus on men and women who shaped the history of the First World War in conflict and on the home front in the year 1915. September's update also completes our research project on the pre-Reformation religious which, over three years, has added nearly 60 new biographies of prominent figures in the history of medieval English monasticism. There are also smaller sets of biographies relating to, among other subjects, the history of mining in the Durham coalfields, of mathematics and science teaching in the late-nineteenth and twentieth century, and pioneering developments in modern ophthalmology.

The range of these biographies, and the lived experiences they rediscover and record, are exceptionally varied and diverse, extending from a Dutch political cartoonist, (Robert) Louis Raemaekers (1869-1956), who depicted graphic images of Prussian militarism, and who lived in Britain for a time during the First World War, to Basil Hallam (1888-1916), a fashionable man-about-town sometimes thought to be the model for P.G. Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster who was killed over the Somme in August 1916. Among the most poignant lives and deaths are those of the composers Cecil Coles (1888-1918) and Ernest Farrar (1885-1918), both of whom were killed in the closing stages of the war. What might they have gone on to accomplish had they survived? Two women doctors, the physician Flora Murray (1869-1923) and the surgeon Louisa Garrett Anderson (1873-1943), proved to be as competent in treating military casualties as their male colleagues, and founded and administered the only British army hospital that was run entirely by women. And who would have guessed that three of the most important army chaplains appointed during the Great War had all served earlier in the Sudan: John Morrow Sims (1854-1934), Llewellyn Henry Gwynne (1863-1967), and Owen Spencer Watkins (1873-1957)?

Many of the lives that were changed or challenged or ended by the First World War were as much global as they were national. Harold Chapin (1886-1915) was an American actor and playwright who enlisted as a private and was killed at Loos in 1915. The inventor of the steel helmet worn by hundreds of thousands of British troops, John Leopold Brodie (1873-1954), was born in Riga, lived for a time in South Africa, and spent his later years in the United States. But such globalized biographies have been a constant feature of British history across the centuries, as exemplified by Roger Barlow (c.1483-1553), the merchant and explorer, who was the first Englishman to write an eyewitness account of America in English, and by Sarah Forbes Bonetta (c.1843-1880), who was brought from Nigeria to England, was taken up by Queen Victoria, and later returned to Africa as a missionary in Sierra Leone. In more recent times, the neurologist Derek Ernest Denny-Brown (1901-1981) was born in New Zealand, studied at Oxford, worked for a decade in London hospitals, and eventually moved to Harvard University; while the community activist Constance [Connie] Mark (1923-2007) was born in Jamaica, arrived in Britain in 1954, and later founded the Friends of Mary Seacole Memorial Association.

David Cannadine, General Editor

New online contents, September 2015

From September 2015, the ODNB offers biographies of 59,655 men and women who have shaped the British past in 54,505 articles. Twenty-five of the new biographies are illustrated with a portrait likeness, bringing to 11,363 the number of portraits in the Dictionary researched in partnership with the National Portrait Gallery, London.

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 (59,655 biographies and 527 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.

Great War lives

The September 2015 update takes as its principal theme a selection of thirty-one biographies connected with the Great War; these are added to the many hundreds of war lives already included in the Oxford DNB. This latest set of biographies pays close attention to those involved in the events of 1915, but is not exclusively confined to them.

Inevitably, this selection both adds to the roll of Dictionary subjects who died in the conflict, and illuminates the ways in which the dead were commemorated by their contemporaries. The young actor and playwright, Harold Chapin (1886-1915), recently married with an infant son, enlisted as a private on the outbreak of war. He was killed on 26 September 1915 at the battle of Loos while volunteering as a stretcher-bearer. Born in the United States, Chapin never became a British subject despite residence in this country from the age of three; following his death, he was remembered as the American citizen who died for Britain . Tributes from the theatrical world recalled the success of his pre-war plays, which underwent revivals, while his letters home were posthumously published and anthologized. Yet his divorced American mother, Alice Chapin (1857-1934) an actress herself who had brought him to Britain, was largely removed from these accounts of her son. She had been imprisoned in Holloway in 1909 for suffragette activity, and returned to the USA after her son's death. In the early summer of 1914 the public school-educated actor Basil Hallam (1888-1916), whose stage name was Basil Radford, enjoyed huge success in review as Gilbert the Filbert , a fashionable man-about-town and embodiment of the 'knut'. He continued to perform during the first months of the war, and was criticized for doing so. Hallam enlisted in June 1915 and was commissioned in the Royal Flying Corps balloon section in September. He was killed over the Somme in August 1916 when a balloon broke loose and he plummeted to his death in sight of the brigade headquarters of the Irish Guards, whose historian, Rudyard Kipling, recorded the event. Hallam was recalled on a memorial to members of the theatrical profession, unveiled at the Old Vic in 1918, and in a 1919 selection of biographies of men who fell in the war. A third victim of the war included in this update, Horace Iles (1900-1916), had not reached manhood at the time of his death. A former choirboy in Leeds, Iles had taken up an apprenticeship and then enlisted, under-age, in the Leeds Pals early in 1915. He died along with over 200 others from his regiment on the morning of the first day of the battle of the Somme. A letter survives from his sister written after his death but before news reached the family, pleading with him to declare his age and return home. For decades Iles's death remained a matter of private grief. In the early twenty-first century his story was selected by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission to personalize the conflict for school Remembrance Day assemblies. His life is also an instance of the large number of under-age soldiers who volunteered in the early months of the war.

The suffragettes Flora Murray (1869-1923), a physician, and her close friend and collaborator Louisa Garrett Anderson (1873-1943), a surgeon, treated military casualties during the war. By demonstrating that they were as competent as their male colleagues they advanced the suffrage cause. Both had studied at the London School of Medicine for Women and frustrated at the apparent failure of the constitutional campaigning of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies made the transition to the more militant Women's Social and Political Union, with Anderson being imprisoned in Holloway in 1912 for window-breaking. Together Murray and Garrett Anderson founded the Women's Hospital for Children in north London, and on the outbreak of war they established the Women's Hospital Corps and ran a hospital in France. They were invited by the director-general of Army Medical Services to take charge of a military hospital in London. In May 1915 they opened the Endell Street Military Hospital in London, the only British army hospital founded and run by women. During the war 7000 surgical operations were carried out there, most of them performed by Anderson. Murray, with the equivalent rank of lieutenant-colonel, had overall charge for the 573-bed hospital. Both women were created CBE in the first honours list of the new Order of the British Empire in 1917.

September's update also includes entries on several military commanders whose actions and reputations have been subject to historical debate and re-evaluation. Cavalry tactics were the specialism of Sir Charles Toler Macmorrough Kavanagh (1864-1950), an Irish-born officer whose career had been enhanced in South Africa, a conflict fought largely by mounted troops, and where he had won the high opinions of Generals French and Haig. In the first months of the war Kavanagh commanded a cavalry brigade, mainly used as a mobile reserve. He commanded the cavalry corps from 1916 to 1919 in a context of continuing optimism as to the potential for cavalry offensives. When the Hindenburg line was broken in November 1917 Kavanagh's forces were positioned too far behind the front line, and he failed to exploit the opportunity. However, the British cavalry did play an important role in the German spring offensive of 1918 and Kavanagh retained his command. Sir George Frederick Gorringe (1868-1945) had served under Kitchener in Egypt and South Africa where he gained a reputation for derring-do, and shared with Kitchener an element of fanaticism. He held a posting in India on the outbreak of the war and was given his first field command in mid-1915 as part of the reinforcement of the expeditionary force in Mesopotamia. His reputation was enhanced by the successful advance up the Euphrates basin in July 1915, fought in horrendous conditions, which heightened his unpopularity among his troops. Gorringe was given command of the third and final attempt to relieve the besieged Anglo-Indian force at Kut. The failure of this campaign which resulted in the surrender of the garrison set the seal on one of the biggest capitulations in British military history. Gorringe, who saw out the rest of the war in France, believed he had been made a scapegoat in the subsequent commission of enquiry into the Mesopotamian campaign.

An officer in the Royal Engineers Charles Howard Foulkes (1875-1969) led Britain's retaliation in response to the German use of poison gas at Ypres in April 1915. Born in India, the son of a missionary and scholar of Indian languages, Foulkes had a background in imperial service in Africa and Ceylon, interrupted by a posting as head of the Ordnance Survey of Scotland, in Edinburgh, where he played football and hockey and competed in the 1908 Olympic games. In May 1915 he was appointed to raise, train, and command the special companies which delivered cylinders of chlorine gas at the battle of Loos on 25 September 1915, with mixed results. Foulkes went on to become director of gas services and in the post-war era he remained a proponent of chemical warfare. At the start of the war Sir Reginald Godfrey Otway Tupper (1850-1945) was on half pay, having spent most of his naval career as a gunnery officer. He returned to sea in January 1915, based at Stornoway, where the patrols under his command secured the north-west approaches to the United Kingdom. From 1916 he commanded cruiser squadrons, enforcing the blockade of Germany and conducting anti-U-boat patrols between Scotland and Norway. His leadership qualities and professionalism were evident in his command of a force comprised mainly of reservists undertaking unglamorous, demanding, and dangerous missions vital to conduct of the war. Sir Charles John Cecil Grant (1877-1950) was a guards officer who held command throughout the war during many of the key battles on the western front. He had previously shown capable leadership in South Africa, where he had been severely wounded and his twin brother had been killed in action. In his correspondence with his father-in-law, the former prime minister Lord Rosebery, Grant advocated the westerner case, praising Haig and criticizing Churchill and the Dardanelles operation. Grant's wife, Lady Sybil Myra Caroline Grant (1879-1955), Rosebery's eldest child, was an airship enthusiast, who was appointed an official photographer to the Royal Naval Air Service in 1915. She also wrote fiction and verse, notably The Unseen Presence , published in 1918, evoking the sense of connection with the dead following the loss, in action in 1917, of her brother, the Liberal MP Neil Primrose.

At the start of 1915 Percy Holden Illingworth (1869-1915), Liberal party chief whip, died suddenly reportedly through the effects of eating an infected oyster. Illingworth's death was damaging for the Liberal prime minister H.H. Asquith, who relied heavily on him and struggled to find an effective replacement. Some even suggested that the subsequent split in the Liberal Party might have been averted had this former university oarsman, and son of a Bradford nonconformist textile manufacturer, survived. Two further biographies illustrate the critical parliamentary and public scrutiny to which figures associated with the military setbacks of 1915 were exposed. Sir Stanley Brenton von Donop (1868-1941), master-general of the ordnance and responsible for the army's military supplies was a target for public attacks in the press and in parliament during the so-called 'shells scandal' in May 1915, when it was alleged that allied offensives had failed through a shortage of shells. He was edged out following the creation of Lloyd George's Ministry of Munitions and, refusing to enter the public fray, watched as Lloyd George's department claimed credit for decisions that von Donop had himself had made at an earlier time. As a major in the Royal Army Medical Corps, Sir William Babtie (1859-1920) had won the Victoria Cross for bravery at the battle of Colenso, in 1899. As director of medical services in India (1914-15), and in the Mediterranean from 1915 to 1916, he was responsible for the medical arrangements in the Mesopotamian and Dardanelles campaigns, both of which were inadequate and were criticized in subsequent inquiries whose findings were published during and immediately after the war. Babtie's sudden death in 1920, though ascribed to natural causes, raised questions about his reaction to the published findings of those inquiries.

Among those who witnessed and sought to alert politicians to the unfolding disaster at Gallipoli, was the maverick war correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett (1881-1931). As a sixteen year-old, in 1897, he had observed the Graeco-Turkish war and first tried his hand as a war reporter in 1904, covering the Russo-Japan conflict. He later covered the Balkan wars, where he scooped with the first report of the Turkish defeat at Lule Burgas. At Gallipoli the toss of a coin resulted in him being given the coverage of the Australian and New Zealand forces at Gaba Tepe, where his report on 25 April 1915 helped to establish the Anzac legend. However, he soon came to doubt the Dardenelles venture and returned to London in October 1915 to make public his criticisms of the campaign this after Ashmead-Bartlett's warning letters to Asquith had been confiscated by the military censor. Propaganda in support of the allied war aims was produced by two cartoonists who exhibited in London in late 1915. Edmund Joseph Sullivan (1869-1933), who had worked as a staff artist for periodicals since 1889, contributing among others to The Yellow Book, produced a series of virulent anti-German cartoons, exhibited at the Leicester Galleries, London, in October 1915. They were published as The Kaiser's Garland. More effective, both artistically and because the artist was a citizen of a neutral state, were the war cartoons of the Dutch political cartoonist and painter (Robert) Louis Raemaekers (1869-1956). Since the start of the war he had produced gruesome images depicting Prussian militarism in Belgium, and he was hailed as 'the cartoonist of the war' when he came to London in November 1915. Raemaekers brought his family to live in London early in 1916, and his work was published in British periodicals. His value to the allies was recognized by the War Propaganda Bureau based at Wellington House, which circulated his work in the USA, where he went on tour to promote his cartoons. He left Britain for health reasons in 1918 but returned in 1919 to a luncheon in his honour at the Mansion House, London, in 1919, and to receive an honorary doctorate from Glasgow University in 1922.

The logistics of supply, and the demands of wartime munitions production, brought non-military figures to the forefront of the war effort. In 1913 Sir Francis Henry Dent (1866-1955), general manager of the South-Eastern and Chatham Railway, was co-opted onto the Railway Executive Committee, established to coordinate the railways in the event of war. His remit covered Folkestone, the main port of embarkation for troops heading for the western front from the spring of 1915, and he ran operations at Boulogne on behalf of the British army, using civilian working methods. In late 1914, an American chemical engineer and explosives technologist Kenneth Bingham Quinan (1878-1948) was seconded to the War Office by his employers, De Beers in South Africa, where had worked in the mining industry. With extraordinary speed, Quinan designed and constructed a plant to produce TNT at Oldbury, which opened in May 1915, followed by others at Queensferry in North Wales and Gretna on the Scottish border. He also built up notable teams of chemists and engineers, a legacy which contributed to the post-war British chemical industry. In 1917 tributes were paid in the House of Commons to his service to the British cause, as an American citizen and therefore a foreigner from, in the first three years of the war, a neutral country. In August 1915 another figure with American connections, Godfrey John Boyle Chetwynd, eighth Viscount Chetwynd (1863-1936) was recruited by Lloyd George's Ministry of Munitions to establish a factory to fill high explosive shells. Chetwynd had not expected to succeed to the family title, and in early adulthood he had lived and worked in Texas as a rancher and civil engineer, before returning to Britain where he was an executive in the Vickers engineering firm, for whom he oversaw an overhaul of the loss-making Wolseley Motor Car Company. Chetwynd was given a free hand to build and run the filling factory at Chilwell, Nottinghamshire, where work began in September 1915 and the first shell was filled in March 1916. By the end of the war Chilwell had produced over half of the large calibre shells made by the national filling factories, though at the cost of a massive explosion in July 1918 when more than 130 lives were lost. During a long career as an elementary schoolteacher, and then as a professor of engineering at successively Sheffield Technical School, Sheffield University College, and Sheffield University, William Ripper (1853-1937) emphasized the development of practical skills, and produced textbooks based on his evening classes to young mechanical engineers. He developed close links with local industrialists, and during the war he was a member of the local munitions committee, which met almost daily at the university and which George V attended in September 1915. His own department undertook work for the Admiralty. Quinan, Chetwynd, and Ripper were among the names in the first list of the new order of Companions of Honour, announced in August 1917.

On the outbreak of war in August 1914, a single principal chaplain was appointed for the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) with responsibility for the fifty-five chaplains of several denominations attached to the force. The appointee was an Ulster Presbyterian minister John Morrow Simms (1854-1934) who had accompanied Kitchener to the Sudan where he conducted the memorial service for General Gordon and served in the South African War and in Somaliland. Simms remained in post throughout the First World War, despite complaints that his standing had been undermined when, in July 1915, a separate organization was created for Anglican chaplains under Llewellyn Henry Gwynne (1863-1957) with the equivalent rank of major-general (senior to Simms brigadier-general). Gwynne had been inspired by stories of Gordon of Khartoum, and ministered to the military community in Sudan from 1899 to 1914 when he was commissioned in the chaplains department. His unpublished diaries record the work of Anglican chaplains in France during the war. A third chaplain to serve in Sudan was the Wesleyan minister Owen Spencer Watkins (1873-1957). Before the outbreak of war he had been stationed in Malta to assist with work among sailors and soldiers at a time when Wesleyan ministers were not part of the army chaplains department. This changed in 1914 when Watkins was commissioned; having previously published on the conflicts in Sudan and southern Africa, in 1915 he published an account of his experiences in France and Flanders. Among those who served under Gwynne was Benjamin Garniss O Rorke (1875-1918), who had been commissioned in the army chaplains' department during the second Anglo-Boer war and accompanied the BEF to France in 1914. Captured during the retreat from Mons, he was held as a POW until his release in a prisoner exchange in July 1915 an experience he recounted in a book, In the Hands of the Enemy. O'Rorke died from influenza weeks after the end of the war. He left a diary in which he had recorded discussions with chaplains in the winter of 1917-18 about post-war reconstruction and reform of the church.

Two notable musicians, both of whom had studied in Germany before 1914, were killed in the final year of the war. Brought up and educated in Edinburgh, Cecil Frederick Gottlieb Coles (1888-1918), won a scholarship at the London College of Music and continued his studies in Stuttgart, where he was exposed to a wealth of musical influences. His musical drama Fra Giacomo was premiered favourably in London in July 1914, two months before he enlisted (like Chapin, newly-married with an infant son). Coles continued to compose at the front and sent his scores to his friend, Gustav Holst. He was killed in April 1918 while volunteering as a stretcher-bearer. The rediscovery of his compositions in 1993 led to renewed interest in his work. Educated in Leeds, the son of an Anglican clergyman, Ernest Bristow Farrar (1885-1918) became organist at his father's church before winning a scholarship to the Royal College of Music from where he gained a temporary appointment in Dresden, an important musical centre. He was subsequently appointed organist and choirmaster at Christ Church, Harrogate, where he was active in the local music-making scene, and taught the young Gerald Finzi. Farrar enlisted in 1915 and conducted his Heroic Elegy ('For Soldiers') while on leave in July 1918. He was killed in action two months later. His papers are preserved in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

Another victim of the last year of the war was Theodore Percival Cameron [Jim] Wilson (1888-1918). Wilson had been a preparatory school teacher from 1910, with ambitions to be an author, and was taken up by the poet and bookseller Harold Monro before enlisting in 1914. He is now remembered for his poem 'Magpies in Picardy', published in August 1916, and for his angry letters written from the front in that year. They attacked Rupert Brooke's description of war as cleanness , and were posthumously published. Wilson became a largely forgotten figure for much of the twentieth century. James Churchill Dunn (1871-1955) was an army doctor who survived the war, despite being in the front trenches and invalided by gas. Like Wilson he too was driven to contradict popular literary depictions of the conflict. Seeking to correct what he regarded as the distortions of Robert Graves's Goodbye to all that (1929), Dunn gathered the recollections of all ranks of the Royal Welch Fusiliers. These insights into ordinary trench life were initially published as a limited edition book in 1938 and then reached a wider readership with its republication in 1987.

Three final lives included in the ODNB's September 2015 update were personally connected with material artefacts associated with the war. By 1917 20,000 portable signalling devices, known as Fullerphones, were in use by British army. An adapted version of the British army field telephone, the Fullerphone was devised by Algernon Clement Fuller (1885-1970), an officer in the Royal Engineers, who pre-war had developed experimental interests in telephony and wireless telegraphy. By summer 1915 it was clear that the Germans were able to intercept allied telephone communications at the front. While on leave, Fuller devised a method of secure communication, and developed the Fullerphone while posted at the Signals Experimental Establishment in Woolwich. After the war he received a financial settlement from the Royal Commission on awards to inventors in recognition of his device, which remained in use during the Second World War.

In March 1918 the Liverpool sculptor, Edward Carter Preston (1884-1965), won the competition to design a memorial plaque to be presented to the next-of-kin of every member of the British and empire forces who had died in the war. Some 1.3 million of these bronze medallions known colloquially as 'dead man's pennies' were struck and many survive, whether in private hands or in museums. Preston had studied art in Liverpool, where he exhibited and helped to found the Sandon Studios Society as an alternative to the city's existing art establishment. His career as a medallist dated from the war years when he was declared unfit for military service and he went on to design numerous commemorative medals and seals. From 1930 he turned increasingly to large-scale sculptures of which the most notable examples are forty-eight figures for Liverpool's Anglican cathedral.

Perhaps the most ubiquitous symbol of the First World War was the soldier's bowl-shaped steel helmet often known as the 'Brodie helmet' after its putative designer. The helmet was designed in response to the high incidence of head wounds sustained in trench warfare, which by mid-1915 had made effective protection an urgent necessity. Brodie's design was patented in August 1915, received official approval at the end of September, and went into production in the following month. It immediately reduced the losses to shrapnel wounds. By the end of the war more than seven million helmets had been produced, 1.5 million of them issued to US troops. The helmet was worn by royalty and other distinguished visitors to the front and was incorporated in memorial statuary after the war. Yet the inventor, who adopted the name John Leopold Brodie (1873-1945) remains an elusive figure; born in Riga, and known in early life as Leopold Janno Braude, he claimed to be a British subject on the basis of spending his early adulthood in South Africa. Pre-war, he lived a transatlantic existence and offered several versions of his nationality while pursuing business schemes. With the outbreak of war, Brodie moved to London and patented his invention. After the war he settled in the United States where he made financial claims to compensate him for his invention. While the superiority of the British army helmet was a source of national pride, the uncertain and fluctuating nationality of its inventor is an unexpected theme to emerge from the wartime biographies in this update.

Post-war politics

Two further individuals who served in the 1914-18 conflict are included in the Dictionary for their political service in the interwar period. Until now, both have been partially obscured on account of their deaths coming in the final months of the Second World War. Having served as an intelligence officer on the Italian front, Edward Leslie Burgin (1887-1945) developed a successful legal practice which he combined with Liberal Party politics and the League of Nations Union. After unsuccessful candidacies, he was elected to parliament in 1929, and as a Liberal National he ascended the ministerial ladder in the National coalition government from 1931. He entered Neville Chamberlain's cabinet as transport minister in 1937, and was minister of supply with responsibility for equipping the army in the months before the Second World War. However, he was replaced when Churchill took power in May 1940, and his reputation suffered from his association with the policy of appeasement. Harcourt Johnstone (1895-1945), the well-connected son of a diplomat, was an undergraduate when war broke out in 1914, and served as a staff officer on the western front. Living on inherited wealth and winnings from gambling, he too was active in Liberal Party politics. But unlike Burgin, Johnstone remained outside the National government, whose tariff policy he opposed, upon his election to parliament in 1931. An anti-appeaser, and through membership of the Other Club connected to Churchill, he was given office in Churchill's wartime coalition, where he promoted trade liberalization and the market system in the post-war settlement. At the time of his sudden death in March 1945 he was regarded as one of the last of the Asquithians.

Arts, literature, and the domestic interior

Elizabeth Mayhew Edmonds (bap. 1821, d. 1907) was a noted translator of modern Greek literature. She was educated at home by her eldest brother who introduced her to European literature, while a relative, Margaret Betham, encouraged her poetry writing. During a stay in Greece, undertaken for reasons of health in later life, she became immersed in Athenian literary culture and her translations brought the work of modern Greek writers to a British readership. The novelist of Anglo-Indian life Alice Perrin (1867-1934), daughter of an Indian army officer, was educated in England but spent her early married life in India. Boredom and isolation led her to take up writing. Her seventeen novels addressed the colonial experience of the British in India and their subsequent adjustment to life away from India on returning to Britain. The artist Georgina Agnes Brackenbury (1865-1949) whose portrait of Emmeline Pankhurst is in the National Portrait Gallery collection, came from a family with strong military connections and artistic and literary interests. She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and was encouraged to specialize in portraiture, but gave up painting for seven years to take part in the suffragette movement. She and her sister were imprisoned in Holloway and the family's homes in Kensington and Peaslake, Surrey, became refuges for suffragette prisoners released under the Cat and Mouse Act .

Two lives from the September update illustrate aspects of the history of the domestic interior in Britain, a theme that will be explored in future Dictionary updates. A newspaper advertisement manager (Thomas) Wareham Smith (1874-1938), who had joined the Daily Mail as a clerk in 1896, was responsible for instigating the Ideal Home Exhibition. Originally held at London's Olympia as a one-off event in 1908, it became the longest continuously-running commercial exhibition in the world. A contributor to the exhibitions in the late 1920s was the domestic advice writer Nancie Clifton Reynolds [real name Agnes Margaret Warden Hardie] (1903-1931). She had studied economics and history at Girton College, Cambridge, and married a businessman and efficiency expert Clifton George Reynolds (1891-1969) who had a factory manufacturing aluminium domestic products. Nancie Reynolds advocated scientific principles of household management and labour-saving devices for an age when the decline in domestic service forced many to undertake their own housework.

Mining: the Durham coalfield

Five new biographies, extending the coverage of Britain's mining industry, record lives connected with the Durham coalfields. The Bushblades colliery in co. Durham provided the formative experience for the coal viewer and engineer John Curr (1756-1823), whose father had worked for the landed Roman Catholic family who owned the mine. This denominational connection took Curr to the Sheffield collieries, in Yorkshire, of the earl of Surrey (later eleventh duke of Norfolk). Here he invented and installed a flanged cast-iron railway to speed the underground transportation of coal thus enabling significant productivity gains. His enthusiasm for innovation outran his capacity for financial management and, when the collieries ceased to be profitable, he was dismissed. Like Curr, the mining engineer and government inspector of mines Matthias Dunn (bap. 1788, d. 1869) was born in co. Durham into a Roman Catholic family whose involvement in coal mining went back several generations. Apprenticed at the age of sixteen, he became the resident coal viewer at Hebburn colliery, where he took part in the test of Sir Humphry Davy's safety lamp. Dunn held appointments as viewer in a number of collieries in north-east England and also undertook freelance contracts in Scotland and elsewhere. He later became one of the first government mines inspectors, with powers to investigate and report on safety in mines, appointed under legislation of 1850. His son Archibald Matthias Dunn (1832-1917) was a partner in the leading firm of Roman Catholic architects in the north of England.

Two brothers born in the Durham village of Usworth, William Pallister Richardson (1873-1930) and Thomas [Tom] Richardson (1868-1928) lost their father in a colliery explosion in 1885. Both brothers went on to be miners leaders. W.P. (as the younger man was known) started work in the Usworth pit months after his father's death, and worked there for thirty years until elected an official of the Durham Miners Association, of which he became general secretary. A socialist and founder of an Independent Labour Party branch, he broke away from the Liberalism of the previous generation though he retained both a commitment to Primitive Methodism and a deep attachment to his coalfield community. His elder brother Tom also worked at the Usworth colliery, and sat as a Labour MP. His maiden speech in 1911 called for an increase in the number of mines inspectors following the loss of life in the Lancashire coalfield. However, his anti-war stance meant that he was not returned to parliament after 1918. Also born at Hebburn, the musician Robert Saint (1905-1950) followed his father and grandfather down the pit, aged fourteen. He remained at the Hebburn colliery until its closure in 1932. His musical talent offered a new career and while serving as a trombonist in the army he composed Gresford his anthem for brass. The work was copyrighted for seventeen instruments in 1936 and given its first public airing at the Durham miners' gala two years later. Known as 'The Miners' Hymn', it was dedicated to the Welsh miners killed in the colliery explosion at Gresford in 1934. It was later played at the burials of victims of the Easington colliery disaster in 1951, and in 1993 and 2005 at the closure of the last collieries in co. Durham and Northumberland respectively, marking the end of 500 years of coalmining in the region.

Medieval lives, and the pre-Reformation religious

September's update brings to a close a three-year research project to extend the Dictionary's coverage of the abbots, abbesses, priors, and prioresses who made up the medieval religious. A final two entries are added in this update, bringing the total number of new biographies to fifty-six, covering almost five centuries of religious life from the post-Conquest decades to the Reformation. The final two additions are lives of William of Colerne (d.1296), abbot of Malmesbury, and Robert Peterson (c.1495-1555), prior of Lewes. The survival, and nineteenth-century publication, of Colerne's cartulary reveals a man committed to the detail of running a monastic house. Assiduous in maximizing the resources of the monastery, nothing escaped his attention down to yields of honey, butter, and cheese. Peterson's priorate offers a personal perspective on the Reformation (a theme of this research project) as the Lewes house fell under the control of Thomas Cromwell. Lewes was the first great house in the south of England to surrender, and Cromwell's desire for the process to pass uneventfully found support from the pragmatic Peterson. Thereafter the former prior was amply rewarded for his co-operation with successive governments and their differing approaches to religious practice. To mark the end of the religious project, this update also sees publication of a feature essay written by Professor Claire Cross of York University who has contributed a selection of these new biographies. In Lives of the medieval religious, Professor Cross reviews the lives of the 56 recent new additions to the ODNB and considers what they reveal about medieval monasticism. Her essay covers areas such as the social origins of the religious, their education, different styles of leadership, the experiences of women religious, and the various strategies (variously defiant, acquiescent, courageous or self-serving) for dealing with the Reformation.

Other new pre-1500 biographies include a life of Sir John Radcliffe (d.1441), soldier and administrator, who served in France with the armies of Henry V and VI, and defended Calais from attack by Burgundian forces in 1436. In the following decade Joan Greyndour (c.1400-1485) founded a grammar school and chantry at Newland, Gloucestershire, in memory of her husband. Greyndour's linking of a chantry with education was at this time unusual (though it soon became fashionable with the foundation of Eton College) and it earns her a place in the history of school endowments.

Early modern lives, 1500-1665

Of the Dictionary's latest selection of early modern biographies, a number are notable for journeys and expeditions voluntary or otherwise. When it was first published in 2004, the ODNB included a group essay on American Indians in England (act. c.1500-1615) which charted the lives of ten men, women, and children who were brought back with expeditions to North America. A decade on, new research by the essay's author, Professor Alden Vaughan of Columbia University, adds details of a further nine individuals who spent time in England during the sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Two further biographies also offer North Atlantic connections. The merchant and explorer, Roger Barlow (c.1483-1553), was the first Englishman to write an eyewitness account of America in English. Like the American Indian article, a biography of Barlow first appeared in the 2004 edition of the ODNB. However, new research by Dr Heather Dalton of the University of Melbourne has dramatically revised what is known of Barlow whose life is now published in a much-extended, freestanding entry. In 1541 Barlow presented to Henry VIII his cosmography, A brief somme of geographia , which combined existing accounts with his own descriptions of cannibalism and a proposed English trade route via the pole artike . From about 1615, the Buckinghamshire gentlewoman Joan Drake (1585/6-1625) was overcome by a profound depression, and a period of physical ill health, which she attributed to her betrayal of the Holy Ghost. Drake's family sought the help of twelve noted divines. One, Thomas Hooker, succeeded in bringing Drake out of her religious melancholy in an act that later helped to shape Hooker's reputation as a minister in America.

Other early modern travellers now added to the Oxford DNB include James Fraser (1634-1709) who in 1657 left his native Inverness to undertake a grand tour of a kind and scale unique to a Scottish highlander of the period. His tour took in much of continental Europe and extended as far east as Hungary. On his return he wrote up his experiences in an exceptionally detailed account of Trienniel Travels , and also took on the ministry of his late father at Kirkhill, west of Inverness. John Clerk (1611-1674) was another Scotsman with close ties to the continent and France in particular. From the 1640s he became a prominent art collector and one of the period's leading purchasers and suppliers of continental decorative arts to his Scottish patrons; he is thought to have imported the first Rembrandt to Scotland in 1647, and his fortune established the Clerks of Penicuik as one of Scotland's leading families during the eighteenth century. After the failure of the Northern Rising against Queen Elizabeth, in 1569, the prominent Catholic rebel Anne Percy, countess of Northumberland (1536-1591) sought refuge first in Scotland and then in Antwerp. From here she petitioned (unsuccessfully) for her husband to be spared execution; after the earl's death, Anne Percy took part in the publication of Catholic polemical texts and established her house at Mechelen as an important meeting place for English exiles.

September's update also continues one of our current early modern projects to add to the Dictionary's coverage of men and women active during the civil wars of the 1640s. Sir Thomas Essex, second baronet (bap. 1604-d. in or after 1651) was a prominent parliamentarian army officer who, like his brother Charles Essex (bap. 1600, d. 1642), served in the English regiments in Dutch service during the 1630s. In 1642 he took control of the strategically important city of Bristol for the parliamentarian cause, though his time as commander was characterized by numerous abuses in authority that led to his removal by more godly elements of the army. Like his sons Thomas and Charles, Sir William Essex, first baronet (1574/5-1643/4) served as a parliamentarian army officer; like his second son, Thomas, Sir William also gained a reputation for disruption, litigation, and indebtedness. Aspects of the complicated and fluid religious history of the 1640s and 1650s are captured in a quartet of biographies which include Ambrose Mostyn (c.1610-1663). Mostyn exemplified the ecumenical dimension of the Welsh puritan ministry of the mid-seventeenth century, combining itinerant preaching with work within the formal structure of the Cromwellian state church. The life of a second Welshman, Henry Nicholls (1612/13-1670), similarly indicates the most flexible aspect of religious loyalties in the 1640s and 1650s combining Anglicanism with Independence while Cardiganshire-born John Lewis (d.1672) was a noted religious polemicist who sought to propagate the gospel in Wales during the Interregnum. In 1647 John Rede (1614/15-1710) was appointed governor of Poole, Dorset, by the commander of the New Model Army, from where he pressed the Leveller cause. His radical sympathies provoked intense opposition and he was among those purged from civic posts along the south coast in 1649. On retiring to Wiltshire, Rede established a Baptist congregation which he oversaw as minister for nearly sixty years, and which remains in existence in the twenty-first century. At his death in 1710 Rede was still recalled as a violent Republican & independent . Less radical was Sir Edmund Wright (bap. 1573, d.1643) who was elected mayor of London in 1640. Despite having quarrelled with Charles I in the 1630s, Wright was a man of moderate opinions who grew increasingly alarmed by the momentum of political change and prioritized order and stability during his mayoralty.

The Dictionary's new sixteenth- and seventeenth-century coverage is completed by a pair of group essays, charting the membership and activity of two notable networks one musical, one scientific. The twenty-three composers of the Triumphes of Oriana (1601) were responsible for one of the finest collections of English madrigals, and a unique corporate act of homage to Queen Elizabeth. The members of the Society of Chemical Physicians (act. 1665-6) likewise had ties to royalty. With the backing of Charles II, the society sought to promote chemical over humoral medicine and to overcome the dominance of the London College of Physicians which many Chemical Physicians identified with the Cromwellian interest.

Technology, industry, and conservation, 1720-1840

Two more new biographies take scientific enquiry and practice into the early eighteenth century. Jane Squire (bap. 1686-d.1743) is the only woman known to have engaged with the celebrated longitude question in the 1730s and 1740s. Squire's scheme was rooted in her Roman Catholic faith about which she was unusually open. First circulated in 1731, her proposed solution was not taken up prompting Squire to engage in a lengthy correspondence with the longitude commissioners and to publish A Proposal for Discovering Our Longitude in 1742. Squire's contemporary, the London tradesman George Willdey (bap. 1676, d.1737), established his name as a maker of optical instruments including microscopes, telescopes, and burning glasses. Willdey later expanded his business to accommodate 'toys', or small fashionable decor; he sold to royalty and overseas, and was later remembered as 'the most noted Toyman in Europe'. Innovation was also a characteristic of the clergyman and educationist (Reynold) Gideon Bouyer (1741-1826) whose varied commitments included local economic production, the costs of maintaining the relief-dependent poor, and the promotion of children's work through the establishment of 'spinning schools' in Lincolnshire during the 1780s and 1790s. In the latter decade, the portrait painter John Hazlitt (1767-1837), younger brother of the essayist William, became increasingly involved with the radical cause in London. He was a close friend of William Godwin and John Thelwall, whose portrait (now in the National Portrait Gallery, London) he painted. One final long eighteenth-century life is John Clayton (1792-1890) who was a key figure in the rebuilding of central Newcastle in classical form in the 1820s and 1830s. Clayton was also a notable conservationist, having inherited the family estate of Chesters, near Hexham, which included the site of Chesters' Roman fort. From the 1830s Clayton bought land along Hadrian's Wall and began a programme of restoration and preservation which has been described as 'one of the first acts of deliberate archaeological conservation in the world'. Clayton was also an assiduous excavator of Roman sites and his collection of 11,000 items is now kept at Chesters Roman Fort and Museum under the care of English Heritage.

Black Britons, Britons in Africa and Asia

As in previous autumn updates, this September we also add to the ODNB's coverage of black and Asian Britons, as well as men and women born in Britain who made their name in Africa and Asia. Two of these new biographies are remarkable accounts of the intersection of slavery with elite English society. In 1730 Ayuba Suleiman Diallo (c.1701-1773) was captured in west Africa, sold into slavery, and transported to the North American colony of Maryland. There he impressed a local Anglican cleric with his learning and knowledge of Arabic and was sold to James Oglethorpe, deputy governor of the Royal African Company. Diallo was resident in England in 1733-4. Here his 'liberty' was purchased and he worked with a number of prominent scholars, including Sir Hans Sloane and other members of the Royal Society. His portrait (included with his new ODNB biography) was painted by William Hoare, and is the first known formal portrait of an African painted in Britain. In 1734 Diallo left London for west Africa and is one of only a small number of slaves who successfully returned from the Americas to Africa in the eighteenth century. A little more than a century later, a six-year old girl subsequently named Sarah Forbes Bonetta (c.1843-1880) was brought from Nigeria to England where she was presented to Queen Victoria at Windsor. The queen, taken by the child's intelligence, undertook to sponsor Bonetta's education and Sarah attended court on several occasions. At Victoria's instigation Bonetta later returned to west Africa, where she worked as a missionary in Sierra Leone. Following her marriage to a fellow missionary at a service in Brighton, Sussex (again under Victoria's guidance), Bonetta named her first daughter after the queen.

In 1882 the Oxford-educated George Hervey Swinny (1845-1887) joined a mission in Zululand and a year later he and his wife, Edith Mackenzie, were chosen to evangelize along the shores of Lake Nyasa. They undertook their mission on board the SS Charles Janson brought from Britain in 380 sections and transported along the Zambezi and Shire rivers, before being assembled and launched, in 1886. The journalist Robert Carr [Robin] Woods (1816-1875) left Britain for Bombay in 1840 and moved to Singapore five years later. As editor of the Straits Times, Woods led challenges to East India Company policy and campaigned against the raja of Sarawak over his suppression of Dayak pirates. In 1861 he co-founded Singapore's first legal firm. Another person with close ties to Singapore was the physician, Sarah Mary Josephine Winstedt (1886-1972), who having joined the colonial medical service served first in Malaya and then in Singapore from 1921. Here she became a specialist in paediatric medicine and one of Singapore's leading surgeons. A lifelong fighter for women's equality (she had worn her suffragette badge to the colonial service interview in 1913), Winstedt co-organized a memorial to Sylvia Pankhurst in London in 1961. A fourth Briton remembered for work overseas is the civil servant and diplomat Sir Geoffrey Granville Whiskard (1886-1957); in 1936 he was appointed high commissioner to Australia, where his dim views of politicians and of his newly-adopted country were all too apparent.

In 1920 the musician Lawrence Benjamin Brown (1893-1972) left the USA to study in London. By the middle of that decade Brown had become an authority on African-American folk music and his arrangements of Negro spirituals were broadcast on the BBC. In 1925 he was introduced to Paul Robeson, then in England, whose huge talent as a singer he was quick to appreciate and encourage. Brown was the piano accompanist for Robeson's professional concert debut in New York in April 1925, as he was for their performance at the Royal Albert Hall four years later, for concert tours across Britain in the 1930s, and an appearance on BBC television in 1939. Robeson frequently acknowledged Brown's importance as a musician and as a champion of African-American folk music. Jamaican-born Edward [Archie] Lewis (1918-1988) was another popular singer who made Britain his home, having settled in Manchester in 1942. A career with the celebrated dance bandleader Geraldo, and performances on the BBC, led to Lewis being dubbed the Bing Crosby of Britain . Also born in Jamaica was the community activist Constance [Connie] Mark (1923-2007) who came to Britain in 1954. She later founded the Friends of Mary Seacole Memorial Association and did much to raise awareness of black Caribbean women's contribution to the war effort. Mark herself had served in the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) in Kingston, Jamaica, from 1943.

September's update also adds a trio of notable black footballers who left their mark on the game between the 1920s and 1980s. John [Jack] Leslie (1901-1988) was born in Canning Town, London, the son of a Jamaican labourer. From the early 1920s he became a formidable striker for Plymouth Argyle. His performances led to what appeared to be a call-up to the England side in 1931-2 but after visits from the national coaching staff his name was dropped; as he later told a journalist, They must have forgot I was a coloured boy . (It was not until 1978 that a black man played for England in a peacetime international.) Albert Johanneson (1940-1995) signed for Leeds United in 1961 and became part of a successful team built by manager Don Revie. His speed and skill led to favourable comparisons with George Best and in 1965 Johanneson became the first black African footballer to play in an FA Cup final. Often the only black player on the field, Johanneson experienced considerable abuse on and off the pitch, leading him to drink and drugs with disastrous results. The last of our three footballers, Justin Fashanu (1961-1998), first made his name with Norwich City, winning Match of the Day's 'Goal of the Season' with a celebrated strike against Liverpool in 1980. In the following year he became the first black player to command a £1 million transfer fee when he moved to Nottingham Forest. However, his time at Forest, under the management of Brian Clough, was not a success and there followed spells with a number of less prestigious clubs in England and overseas. In 1990 Fashanu became the first openly gay male British professional footballer, following an announcement during a tabloid interview.

Surgery, medicine, and ophthalmology

New medical biographies now added to the Oxford DNB include two distinguished surgeons, Harold Clifford Edwards (1899-1989) and John Angell-James (1901-2002). Edwards had a long professional association with King's College Hospital, London, where he specialized in gastroenterology; during the war he served as consulting surgeon to allied forces in the Mediterranean, in which capacity he undertook medical examinations of the wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill. Like Harold Edwards, John Angell-James served during the war in the Royal Army Medical Corps and also included Churchill among his patients; Angell-James specialized in rhinology and is best known for refining the trans-nasal approach to the pituitary for hypophysectomy. Other new medical biographies include the neurologist Derek Ernest Denny-Brown (1901-1981). Born in New Zealand, Denny-Brown came to study at Oxford, where he gained a reputation as a brilliant experimentalist before working for a decade in London hospitals. After war service, he moved permanently to Harvard University, in the United States, where he specialized in (among other fields) head injury, nutritional deficiencies of the nervous system, and motor control, and where he cemented his reputation as one of the most influential neurologists of the twentieth century. Developments in post-war geriatric medicine are reflected in the careers of Trevor Henry Howell (1908-1988) and Lionel Cosin (1910-1994). Howell became a champion of elderly care, which he maintained should be equivalent in terms of quality and access to surgery to that for younger patients. A noted scholar and author, Howell was also a co-founder of what became the British Geriatrics Society. As a young physician Howell also studied the innovative practices of Lionel Cosin who pioneered proactive treatments of the elderly intended to return patients to their homes, and so reduce the numbers who became permanent inpatients following relatively minor complaints such as broken bones. Invited to establish a geriatric unit at Oxford in 1950, Cosin created the country's first day hospital , which aimed to maintain patient independence, and he successfully argued for the incorporation of geriatric wards as part of general hospitals. September's update also includes a biography of the mental health activist, Peter Shaughnessy (1962-2002). In the 1990s he became a prominent critic of the government's Care in the Community programme, which paid scant attention to the wishes of patients, and an activist keen to challenge the stigma surrounding mental health. Shaughnessy's campaigns included 'Reclaim Bedlam' and Mad Pride, which like Black and Gay Pride sought to challenge prejudice by embracing mad identities.

A quintet of biographies chart the development of the contact lens from the mid-twentieth century as well as highlighting the medical contributions of European exiles to Britain in the interwar period. In 1946 the British-born optometrists Frank Dickinson (1906-1978) and Keith Clifford Hall (1910-1964) published the first technical guide to the prescribing and fitting of contact lenses; in the 1960s Dickinson was responsible for the first micro-corneal lens, which made the fitting and wearing of lenses easier and increasingly popular. Pre-eminent among the continental European specialists who came to Britain to practice in the 1930s were the Hungarian ophthalmologists Jozsef Dallos (1905-1979) and George Nissel (1913-1982). In Budapest Dallos had considerably improved the accuracy of the moulds taken from the living eye making possible the modern contact lens. In 1937 Dallos came to London where he established a practice on Cavendish Square (now marked by a memorial plaque) and worked at Moorfields Eye Hospital with RAF pilots whose sight had been damaged in combat. George Nissel was Dallos's brother-in-law and accompanied his fellow Hungarian to Britain in 1937, co-founding the UK's first independent contact lens laboratory immediately after the Second World War. He was later employed by the film industry to make artificial eyes and special effects lenses, and by Madame Tussaud's in the manufacture of eyes for its waxwork exhibits. Norman Bier (1925-2009) left his native Munich in 1938 and was educated at schools in London, before joining an optician's practice. Specializing in the contact lens, Bier developed the idea of fenestration, whereby holes were drilled in the lens to enable tear-flow, so supplying more oxygen to the cornea and increasing wearing times.

Mathematics, botany, and physics

The teaching of mathematics was a preoccupation of five individuals, active from the late-nineteenth century onwards, whose biographies are now added to the Dictionary. William Charles Fletcher (1865-1959) was in the vanguard of new developments in mathematics education from about 1900, in which capacity he promoted mechanics teaching and urged teachers to combine analytical and experimental work. Charles Godfrey (1873-1924), mathematics master at Winchester College, was similarly critical of distinctions between theoretical and practical approaches, especially in the field of mechanics. With his former Cambridge contemporary, Arthur Warry Siddons (1876-1959), Godfrey lobbied for teaching reforms and co-wrote an extremely successful school text, Elementary Geometry (1903), which sold more than 1 million copies and remained in print until 2001. Among the achievements of George Carson (1873-1934) was his establishment of the first society for mathematics teachers (in 1911) and authorship of two celebrated textbooks on algebra and plane geometry. Sir Wilfred [Bill] Cockcroft (1923-1999) was a university teacher who, in the 1960s, became an advocate of the modern maths movement, with its commitment to abstraction and structure. Cockcroft was also a prominent university administrator who chaired the Callaghan government's review of maths education. Published as Mathematics Counts, Cockcroft's report proved a benchmark in mathematical education and his lasting legacy.

Educational standards in science were the professional concern of the school inspectors Francis Stead (1873-1954) and Frederick Westaway (1864-1946). Concern that science teaching was neglected, and that this was having an effect on Britain's war effort, led to the creation in 1916 of a government committee to investigate the natural sciences in British schools. Francis Stead served as the committee's secretary and played a key role in writing what became its influential report, Natural Science in Education (1916). Post-war, Stead became a schools inspector with a commitment to humanizing science teaching via a broader curriculum intended to offer 'science for all'. Stead's colleague and friend, Frederick Westaway who also taught school science championed practical investigation as a core part of the classroom experience; in the 1920s he argued for a broadening of school science to include biology, astronomy, and palaeontology as well as physics and chemistry. Education as a means to resolve social problems was a concern of the educationist and positivist Francis Marvin (1863-1943) whose historical writings were taken up by H.G. Wells. Marvin's Teaching of History (1923) explored how history could be used at the grass roots to ensure that science boys received a liberal education, and that no child left school without learning something of the history of scientific discovery.

Three practitioners conclude the Dictionary's latest selection of science-related lives. The geneticist and botanist Robert Lock (1879-1915) studied and wrote on rubber cultivation in Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka), and was charged with formulating policy on food preservation during the First World War. However, his lasting legacy is his 1905 book, Variation, Heredity, and Evolution, which shaped the careers of a later generation of geneticists in Britain and the United States. As a plant pathologist Mary Dilys Glynne (1895-1991) specialized in studies of disease, in the potato and in cereal crops. Based at the plant research station at Rothamsted, Glynne discovered that it was fungal diseases rather than wind and rain that flattened fields of crops before harvest. Her research had considerable impact on improving yields and came to national attention during wartime rationing. It was war service, not research, that took the physicist Thomas [Tom] Mulvey (1921-2009) to Ceylon in the mid-1940s; post war he made his name as a specialist in electron microscopy and electron optics, and as a historian of the electron microscope.

Revising the existing Dictionary: new biographical discoveries

As well as first-time biographies, the September 2015 update continues our work of revising and adding to the Dictionary's existing entries. This update makes changes to about 300 Oxford DNB biographies, adding new information and the findings from newly published research. One aspect of this revision programme is to clarify the identities of historical figures, and to distinguish previously conflated lives. The update of September 2014, for example, disentangled the two near-contemporary namesakes Georgiana Hill (the cookery writer, 1825-1903, and the historian and women's activist, 1858-1924), whose life stories are often woven together in books and library catalogues. In this latest update a new biography of the naval officer and marine artist, William Smyth (bap. 1800, d. 1877), is distinguished from that of the naval officer and surveyor William Henry Smyth (1788-1865), the subject of an existing ODNB entry, to whom the surviving work of the former has sometimes been misattributed. The former William Smyth produced illustrations for the published account of Frederick Beechey's voyage to the Pacific and Bering Strait from 1825 to 1828, an expedition from Lima to the mouth of the Amazon in 1834, and watercolour views reproduced in the published account of George Back's north-west passage expedition in 1836. Examples of his prolific output are scattered among collections, and it is now possible to identify and distinguish their creator.

The Dictionary continues to be updated to incorporate discoveries made about the lives of its subjects, whether by the authors of the entries, or notified by readers of the Dictionary, or by its editorial staff. September's update includes significant new information about, among others, from the early modern period: the printer and historian Richard Grafton (1506/7-1573), the Digger William Everard (bap.1602, d. in or after 1651), regicide Thomas Pride (d.1658), botanist and numismatist James Sutherland (c.1638-1719), and the diarist Mary Hardy (1733-1809). Later biographies, here revised, include the composer Frances Allitsen (1848-1912), the radical politician William Benbow (1787-1864), lawyer and politician Sir William Horne (1774-1860), composer Charles Edward Horsley (1822-1876), the antiquary Alfred John Kempe (bap. 1784, d. 1846), physician Adam Neale (1779-1832), naval surgeon and prison reformer Thomas Reid (1791-1825), and the bookseller and reformer Thomas Clio Rickman (1761-1834).

Our next update: January 2016

Our next online update will be published on Thursday 7 January 2016. It will further extend the ODNB's coverage of contemporary Britain, with biographies of 224 men and women who died in the year 2012.

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