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2016 updates: introductions

January 2016

Introduction to the update by David Cannadine

Welcome to the thirty-fourth online update of the Oxford DNB, in which, as every January, we extend the Dictionary's coverage of men and women who shaped the very recent British past. The January 2016 update adds biographies of 222 individuals who died in the year 2012. Of these, the earliest born is the New Testament scholar Christopher Evans (in 1909), one of four centenarians and among eleven individuals who were born before the outbreak of the First World War. The latest born person in the January 2016 update is the journalist and war correspondent Marie Colvin (in 1956), who was killed in Homs, Syria, while covering the Syrian civil war. Colvin is one of only eleven people in this update who was born after 1945. The majority of the subjects (152) now added to the Dictionary were born in the 1920s and 1930s, and were active between the 1940s and 1990s. Of the 222 people included in this update, forty-eight are women.

One figure who looms powerfully over several of these biographies, and who will be getting her own very substantial entry next year, is Margaret Thatcher. Conservative politicians such as Robert Carr and Norman St John-Stevas found their careers abruptly terminated because she was out of sympathy with their traditional 'One Nation' toryism. The senior Foreign Office mandarin, Sir Michael Palliser, was denied the customary peerage on his retirement as head of the diplomatic service, because Thatcher thought him partly responsible for the Falklands imbroglio. And the industrialist Sir William Barlow resigned as the head of the Post Office in 1980, because he felt he was getting little support from the new Conservative government, and he subsequently became a fierce critic of what seemed to him the prime minister's hostility to manufacturing. But Mrs Thatcher's friends are also represented here, among them Sir Lawrie Barratt, who was her favourite house builder, and George Ward, whose battle against his employees at his Grunwick photographic laboratory helped convince her that the power of the trades unions had to be broken.

There are also entries on two very different figures from the late phases of the British empire: Dom Mintoff, the controversial Maltese politician, who campaigned vigorously to gain independence for his island; and Sir Rex Hunt, the defiant British governor of the Falklands at the time of the Argentinean invasion. An even more contrasted pair are Eric Lomax, who was a Japanese prisoner of war in Malaya, and Charlie Richardson, a violent London criminal; but their very different lives both eventually became the subject of films movingly so in Lomax's case, while Richardson's glamourized 1960s gangland. Finally, there are three names which take me back to my own early years: Gerry Anderson, whose animated puppet adventure series were compulsive television viewing when I was a boy; John Madin, the architect responsible for designing much of the 'new Birmingham' where I grew up; and the hairdresser Vidal Sassoon, whose salons I once frequented when I had rather more hair than I do now. I never met any of them in person, but their lives are so vividly recorded and well evoked here that I very much wish I had.

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 (59,879 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.

David Cannadine, General Editor, Oxford DNB

New online contents, January 2016

Politicians and campaigners

Among the well-known politicians in this update are two of the twentieth century's leading parliamentary campaigners for disability rights. Jack Ashley, Baron Ashley of Stoke (1922-2012), found his own life changed utterly in 1967 when a botched operation to repair a perforated left ear drum resulted in total deafness; at one point he thought his political career would be over, but he returned to the Commons, and from that point on was an inveterate and persuasive campaigner for the rights of the disabled and other marginalized groups. He was joined in many of his campaigns by his close friend Alf Morris, Baron Morris of Manchester (1928-2012), whose own interest in disability rights grew out of his experience as the son of a First World War veteran who died young as a result of the injuries he had sustained in the war, but whose widow was denied a pension on the grounds that the official cause of death was heart failure. As a private member Morris steered through the first Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act in 1970, and went on to be the first minister for the disabled, in the 1974-9 Labour government. From a slightly later generation, Tony Newton, Baron Newton of Braintree (1937-2012), espoused a highly compassionate form of Conservatism, and was a notable reforming secretary of state for social security under Margaret Thatcher and John Major.

Another notable parliamentary campaigner, Peter Archer, Baron Archer of Sandwell (1926-2012), focused on human rights issues and miscarriages of justice; among his many achievements was the final abolition of the death penalty in the UK, with an amendment to the Crime and Disorder Bill 1998 which abolished the death penalty for treason and piracy. Robin Corbett, Baron Corbett of Castle Vale (1933-2012), was another prominent parliamentary campaigner who secured several parliamentary triumphs, most notably the passage of the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 1976, which for the first time ensured anonymity for the victims of rape. He and Archer are joined in this update by two further Labour politicians prominent in the Wilson and Callaghan eras. Ted Short, Baron Glenamara (1912-2012), enjoyed a long career in politics and eventually served as deputy leader of the Labour Party, but he was perhaps most successful as the chief whip who kept the Wilson government of 1964-6 in power. Walter Harrison (1921-2012) performed a similar role for Jim Callaghan in 1976-9, when his skill at realizing when and how to bully, cajole, make promises, turn a blind eye, or offer a deal ensured the government tottered on until May 1979.

From the Conservative benches, Robert Carr, Baron Carr of Hadley (1916-2012), was one of the leading One Nation Conservatives of the postwar era, who served at the Home Office under Edward Heath and as caretaker leader of the party in February 1975, but who found himself instantly frozen out by the new leader, Margaret Thatcher, though his somewhat dull and dutiful public persona made him relatively easy to move. By contrast there can be few politicians as flamboyant or talented as Norman St John-Stevas, Baron St John of Fawsley (1929-2012), a leading wet and the acclaimed editor of the works of Walter Bagehot, whose career also stalled under Margaret Thatcher, whom he memorably described as the blessed Margaret or the Leaderene . Another target of St John-Stevas's coruscating wit (and an equally memorable parliamentary character) was 'the Colossus', Sir Rhodes Boyson (1925-2012), a mutton-chopped former headteacher who opposed comprehensivization, defended caning, and could be counted on to take a rigorously socially conservative position in almost all questions. From a later generation John Maples, Baron Maples (1943-2012), was a self-made businessman and, like Carr and St John-Stevas, a One Nation Conservative the vicissitudes of whose career reflected the ideological convolutions of the post-Thatcher Conservative Party.

Welsh politics are reflected in two very different ways in the January 2016 update. Emlyn Hooson, Baron Hooson (1925-2012), was a leading Welsh Liberal barrister, politician, and judge an establishment figure who at one point was the sole Welsh Liberal MP, and who pursued policies generally to the right of the national leadership (though he supported Welsh devolution and was eventually reconciled to membership of the EEC). By contrast Eileen Beasley (1921-2012) was a teacher and Welsh-language campaigner who became an icon of the Welsh nationalist movement when she and her husband Trefor Beasley (1918 1994) embarked on an ultimately successful eight-year campaign of civil disobedience in order to force their local council to issue rate demands in the Welsh language.

Other notable extra-parliamentary campaigners in this update include Allan Horsfall (1927-2012), a pioneering gay rights campaigner and first secretary of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality, described by Peter Tatchell as 'one of the grandfathers of the gay rights movement in Britain'; Jim Mansell (1952-2012), a social scientist and leading campaigner for the rights of people with learning disabilities; Ann Dummett, Lady Dummett (1930-2012), a notable campaigner for racial justice and equality, expert on immigration and nationality law, and director of the influential Runnymede Trust; Mary Applebey (1916-2012), a former civil servant who transformed the National Association for Mental Health into an effective campaigning organization for the rights of those suffering mental health problems, and oversaw its name-change to MIND; and Mildred Nevile (1927-2012), an anti-poverty campaigner and human rights advocate whose leadership of the Catholic Institute for International Relations aligned the organization firmly with the international human rights, anti-colonial, and global justice movements.

It is difficult to imagine two more contrasting representatives of trade unionism than Vic Turner (1927-2012) and Sir Richard Butler (1929-2012). Turner was a dockers' shop steward and member of the Pentonville Five who was briefly jailed in 1972 for leading picketers of third parties during an unofficial strike in defiance of the previous year's Industrial Relations Act. The patrician Butler, son of R.A.B. Butler, and president of the National Farmers Union from 1979 to 1986, enjoyed good relations with Conservative ministers, and sought to promote the interests of his members within the increasingly complex context of policies set at the level of the EEC. Bill McCarthy, Baron McCarthy (1925-2012), a leading industrial relations scholar, also sought to effect policy change through close contact with politicians in power, this time in the Labour Party, though his continuing belief in pluralist industrial relations and the closed shop meant that he was left behind by Tony Blair's modernization of the Labour Party.

In line with the Dictionary's coverage of politicians who played major roles in their countries emergence from colonialism to independence, this update could not fail to include Dom Mintoff (1916-2012), the dominant figure in post-war Maltese politics, and several times prime minister of Malta. Mintoff was a former Rhodes Scholar who first campaigned for Malta to be integrated with Britain and then campaigned vigorously for independence; he later challenged British influence while espousing an anti-colonial 'third worldism', and his reliance on intimidation and confrontation as political tools cast a long shadow over Maltese politics.

In the service of the state

Britain's imperial legacy also formed the backdrop to the career of Sir Rex Hunt (1926-2012), who joined the colonial service in 1951, transferring to the Commonwealth Relations Office on its formation in 1963. After serving in Brunei, Jakarta, Saigon, and Kuala Lumpur, he was probably expecting a quiet end to his career in government service when appointed governor of the Falkland Islands in 1980, but it was not to be; and the image of Hunt, defiantly dressed in full gubernatorial regalia, being driven to the airport in his official red London taxi, came to symbolize British defiance in the face of the Argentine invasion in 1982.

More conventional diplomacy was the stock in trade of Sir Michael Palliser (1922-2012), one of Britain's leading post-war diplomats, who was a key influence in Britain's turn to Europe and a reforming head of the diplomatic service, but one whose strongly pro-European views (and the fact that his retirement coincided with the Argentine invasion of the Falklands, an episode which found the Foreign Office wanting in the eyes of the prime minister) ensured that he was denied the customary peerage on retirement from the service. Sir Richard Evans (1928-2012) was another leading diplomat, this time specializing in China; Evans ended his career as ambassador to Beijing and one of the key negotiators of the joint declaration which set out the terms for Hong Kong's reincorporation into China. Sir William Ryrie (1928-2012) also began his career in the Colonial Office, then transferred to the Treasury and headed the Overseas Development Administration before leading the World Bank's offshoot, the International Finance Corporation, which he restructured and repositioned as a major lender to the private sector in underdeveloped countries. Sir Andrew Crockett (1943-2012) was a distinguished economist and Bank of England official who also became a leading international public servant, first with the International Monetary Fund, and then with the Bank for International Settlements. Hilary La Fontaine (1937-2012) also spent key parts of her career as an intelligence officer abroad, including in Kinshasha, and later in Hanoi, where she was the only resident Western intelligence officer (an experience which turned her hair prematurely white). Dame Lesley Strathie (1955-2012) followed a more conventional but no less distinguished career in government service, leaving school at sixteen to work in the local DHSS office, and rising to become permanent secretary of HM Revenue and Customs.

The armed forces are represented by a number of new entrants in this update, several of whom served in the Second World War and went on to distinguished careers in the services afterwards: Sir Raymond Lygo (1924-2012), Sir David Williams (1921-2012), and Bill King (1910-2012) in the navy (Lygo subsequently becoming managing director of British Aerospace, Williams becoming governor of Gibraltar, and King exorcizing his demons by embarking on a solo circumnavigation of the world). From the air force the update adds Sir Freddie Ball (1921-2012) and Sir Robert Freer (1923-2012) and, from the army, Sir David Fraser (1920-2012) and Sir David House (1922-2012), Fraser subsequently enjoying a career as a prolific historian, biographer and historical novelist, and House becoming gentleman usher of the black rod and sergeant at arms in the House of Lords. Anne Spencer (1938-2012) is included as the last commandant and director of the Women's Royal Naval Service, who paved the way for the full incorporation of women into the Royal Navy. Eric Lomax (1919-2012), taken prisoner by the Japanese in Malaya in 1942, is included for his harrowing autobiography, The Railway Man (1995, subsequently filmed), which detailed his experiences on the Burma-Siam death railway but ended on a note of hope and reconciliation.

Crime and the law

Criminality and the law are reflected in this update through the contrasting lives of several individuals. Charlie Richardson (1934-2012) was a well-known, indeed notorious, London gangster, glamorized in the film Charlie (2004), but in reality a vicious criminal whose power rested partly on his intimidating violence, but more on his dealings with corrupt police officers . Sir John Woodcock (1932-2012) tackled that corruption head-on as a reforming chief inspector of constabulary, causing some consternation among his fellow former chief constables in the process, though he tended to attribute the police's failings more to good intentions to put criminals behind bars than to evil as such. Hugh Klare (1916-2012) was a notable penal reformer as general secretary of the Howard League for Penal Reform from 1950 to 1971, and a proponent of a liberal, reformist agenda which found many allies in the establishment. Gitta Sereny (1921-2012) was an author whose attempts to understand what made people evil notably the child murderer Mary Bell, and Fritz Stangl, kommandant of the Treblinka extermination camp proved too much for many readers and reviewers. Sir Frank White (1927-2012) was a senior circuit judge who did much to make the legal process more transparent, introduced the first court mediation service, and trained a generation of aspirant judges through his Bench Notes and Exercises for Assistant Recorders (1988). Finally, Bill Wedderburn, Baron Wedderburn of Charlton (1927-2012), was a leading legal scholar who made influential contributions to the study of labour law, tort, and company law, and as a Labour peer was involved in shaping as well as interpreting the law.

Scholarship, education and religion

Among the many other scholars included in this update is the sociologist, and Bill Wedderburn's second wife, Dorothy Wedderburn (1925-2012), author of a number of pioneering studies in industrial sociology, campaigner for the rights of women in prison, and first principal of the combined Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, University of London. Equally engaged with the real world were the economists Ian Little (1918-2012) and Ralph Turvey (1927-2012): Little was one of the world's leading development economists, a firm advocate of trade liberalization and export-led growth, who counted among his doctoral students the future prime minister of India and architect of India's economic growth, Manmohan Singh. Turvey's academic work ranged as widely as his public sector appointments were varied, but with particular impacts in the fields of labour market statistics and consumer price indices; it was said by a colleague that his career demonstrated that theory can be both clear in content and useful in hard-pressed practical situations.

The relationship between theory and practice was a constant theme in the life and works of the historian Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012), widely recognized as one of the twentieth century's most brilliant historians, whose commitment to Marxism and to the Communist Party baffled some, enraged others, but informed his understanding of history at every turn. As the Dictionary's entry on him makes clear, Hobsbawm's politics were shaped by his experiences in 1930s Vienna and Berlin, but he was never a dogmatist, and he was one of the first to recognize the sea-change in British and global politics which took place in the 1980s.

Less immediately controversial, if not to say esoteric, subjects preoccupied some of the other historians included in this update. Sir John Keegan (1934-2012) was regarded by many as the leading military historian of his generation, notable especially for his insights into the experiences of soldiers in battle. His brother-in-law, Maurice Keen (1933-2012), traced the evolution of medieval aristocratic culture, notably through his books on Chivalry (1984) and The Origins of the English Gentleman (2002). Marjorie Chibnall (1915-2012) brought to life other aspects of the medieval world view, especially through her biographical studies of Orderic Vitalis and the Empress Matilda. Yvonne Hackenbroch (1912-2012) was a pioneering historian of Renaissance jewellery, and of late medieval and Renaissance decorative arts more generally. The economic historian Phyllis Deane (1918-2012) trained as an economist and worked for some time on applying social accounting to Britain's African colonies before finding her true metier as a historian of British economic growth from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries.

The interests of the archaeologists Brian Shefton (1919-2012) and James Mellaart (1925-2012) went back much further. Shefton another refugee from Nazi Germany became an expert on ancient Greek pottery and vase painting; he also built up a renowned collection of artefacts from the ancient world, now housed in the Shefton Gallery of the Great North Museum. Mellaart was an expert on the Chalcolithic and Bronze Age archaeology of Anatolia. However, his claims of finding elaborate murals that turned to dust when touched, and being shown Egyptian gold artefacts from a Bronze Age site by a young woman he met on a train, were not widely accepted, and indeed caused a minor diplomatic row between Turkey and Britain. Also included in this update are the Old English scholar and runologist Raymond Page (1924-2012), who laid the foundations of the modern study of English runes, and Ursula Dronke (1920-2012), a scholar of Old Norse and Icelandic literature whose three-volume edition of the Poetic Edda was widely hailed as a masterpiece of philological scholarship and literary criticism.

Derick Thomson [Ruaraidh Mac Th'mais] (1921-2012) was a towering figure in the world of Gaelic scholarship and poetry, author of English-Gaelic dictionaries, a Gaelic Learner's Handbook, numerous acclaimed academic studies of Gaelic and Welsh texts, and eight volumes of his own poetry in Gaelic; all part of a strategic effort to treat Gaelic as an ordinary language, to encourage a readership, and to promote writers of every sort and on every topic. His fellow Scot, Sandy Fenton (1929-2012), son of a crofter, did a similar service for Scottish ethnology, as Edinburgh University's first professor of Scottish ethnology and author of some 400 papers, books, and editions, including a magisterial fourteen-volume compendium on Scottish Life and Society (2000-11); he also published his own stories in the north-east Scots vernacular. Among the other talented linguists in this update is Siegbert Prawer (1925-2012), brother of the novelist and scriptwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala; yet another refugee from Nazism, he was a particular authority on the life and works of Heinrich Heine, but his writings ranged from Karl Marx's literary influences to minor Yiddish poets. Sir Albert Sloman (1921-2012) was a Spanish scholar who became a leading commentator on Calderon but perhaps left his greatest mark as the founding vice-chancellor of the University of Essex, which he led for its first twenty-five years.

The academic study of philosophy is represented in this update by four very different entries. James Urmson (1915-2012) produced work which was paradigmatic of the Oxford tradition of Greats philosophy, using critical and analytical approaches to the work of ancient philosophers as a starting point to elucidate questions in epistemology and moral philosophy. Frank Cioffi (1928-2012) brought his training and interest in analytical philosophy to bear on the works of Sigmund Freud, exposing inconsistencies and flaws in his arguments, and eventually reaching the conclusion that Freud had at best subconsciously, and at worst consciously, distorted and manipulated the data on which he claimed to have based his theories. J. J. C. (Jack) Smart (1920-2012) was a resolutely materialist philosopher, who sought to interpret thoughts and feelings in terms of neurophysiological processes. John Hick (1922-2012) was by contrast one of the twentieth century's leading philosophers of religion, who initially trained as a Presbyterian minister, but who increasingly leaned towards a pluralist interpretation 'the notion that all religions are equally valid responses to the same transcendent reality' and caused controversy with, especially, his edited volume, The Myth of God Incarnate (1977).

Pluralism, or at least multiculturalism, was not something which appealed to Ray Honeyford (1934-2012), the Bradford headmaster who in 1984 caused a storm with an outspoken attack on the educational policies of the local council, which led to his being hounded from his job. Activists at the time portrayed him as a racist, but, as the Dictionary entry on him makes clear, he saw multiculturalism as an assault on the rights of children. By confining children to the language, culture, and heritage of their parents, he argued, multiculturalism deprived them of the means to share in the public culture of the country where they lived . A similar concern to open up education and culture to everyone regardless of class or background was the leitmotiv of the career of Sir Roy Shaw (1918-2012), one of the leading adult educationists of the postwar years and a notably successful director-general of the Arts Council, though he soon found his egalitarianism and advocacy of state funding for the arts out of favour in Margaret Thatcher's Britain.

Religion, specifically Christianity (though of several different denominations) is further reflected in half a dozen of the new entries in this update. Ruth Etchells (1931-2012) was a literary scholar and churchwoman who moved from Congregationalism to Anglicanism, in 1979 became the first female head of an Anglican theological training college, and was a close confidante of Archbishop Robert Runcie. Eric James (1925-2012) was a prominent Church of England clergyman who suggested to Runcie a commission on inner cities (the resultant Faith in the City drawing the ire of the Conservative government), and in 1990 came out as a gay priest. Christopher Evans (1909-2012) was a New Testament scholar who was a major influence on a generation of ministers and theologians, and reached a wide audience through radio and television broadcasts. The Church of Scotland minister Robert Davidson (1927-2012) was an Old Testament scholar who produced influential commentaries as well as popular books such as the Pelican Guide to the Bible (1970). Kenneth Cragg (1913-2012), a Church of England clergyman and theologian, was most notable as a scholar of Islam; his book The Call of the Minaret (1956) was still in print at his death. Finally, Ray Davey (1915-2012) was a Northern Irish Presbyterian minister who witnessed the bombing of Dresden, and put his ideas on reconciliation into practice as founder of the ecumenical Corrymeela Community, which by the time of his death welcomed over 10,000 participants each year and developed imaginative programmes aimed at bridging the gulf between Catholics and Protestants in the troubled province.

Science and mathematics

The eternal and the infinite were also what excited four astronomers included in this update. Apart from collaborating with H.P. Wilkins on an improved map of the lunar surface, Sir Patrick Moore (1923-2012) did little himself to push forward the boundaries of knowledge, but for more than fifty years he was the best known face of astronomy, especially through his television programme The Sky at Night, which introduced generations of children and amateurs to the joys of stargazing, and indeed of science more generally. The equally larger than life Sir Bernard Lovell (1913-2012) himself a frequent guest on Moore's programme was without doubt the best-known British professional astronomer of his generation, whose wartime work on radar provided him both with technical expertise and with a series of questions about atmospheric radar echoes which he then spent the rest of his life investigating, especially through the Jodrell Bank telescopes whose construction he drove through despite enormous technical and financial problems. Questions from the Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons about the escalating costs of the Jodrell Bank site were silenced overnight in 1957, when Lovell's radio telescope was able to track both the first artificial earth satellite, Sputnik 1, and its launching rocket; two years later it was Lovell's radio telescope which proved (against cold-war scepticism) that the USSR had indeed, as it claimed, landed the first space probe on the moon. Wallace Sargent (1935-2012) also led the development of a huge astronomical facility, the W. M. Keck Observatory (whose ten-metre diameter optical telescopes were until 2009 the largest in the world) and made contributions to a large number of previously unresolved topics in astronomy, especially concerning intergalactic gas in the early universe. David Dewhirst (1926-2012) worked with Martin Ryle on cosmic radio sources, and later on solar astronomy, though it was as an historian of astronomy that he left his greatest mark. The geologist and polar scientist Geoffrey Hattersley-Smith (1923-2012) performed a similar service for polar science, though the Daily Telegraph's obituarist later recorded a colleague's view that both Hattersley-Smith and his magnum opus, History of Place-Names in the British Antarctic Territory, were 'obviously fictitious'.

The British scientific community lost another of its brightest stars in 2012, in the form of the physiologist Sir Andrew Huxley (1917-2012), winner of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1963 with his collaborator Alan Hodgkin (whose entry for the Dictionary Huxley wrote), for their work on the operation of nerve impulses. Huxley continued this research over a long and distinguished career which saw him become president of the Royal Society, master of Trinity College, Cambridge (he liked to point out that Trinity had more Nobel prize- winners than France), and a member of the Order of Merit. He is joined in this release by the physiologist and developmental biologist Anne Warner (1940-2012), who made important contributions to knowledge about embryo development, and who 'had a penchant for academic (but not malicious) gossip, whisky, and cigarettes, probably in that order'. The neuroscientist Sir Gabriel Horn (1927-2012) elucidated the neural basis of memory and learning, and was the first to identify an anatomical region of the vertebrate brain that is unambiguously a site of long-term information storage, a place where memories are formed and held . Based in Edinburgh, the neurophysiologist and veterinary pathologist Ainsley Iggo (1924-2012) undertook pioneering studies of sensory receptors which helped to further understanding of sensation and pain. Pain, specifically headaches and migraines, were also the focus for much of the work of neurologist Frank Clifford Rose (1926-2012), though, 'something of a neurological polymath', his interests and research extended to motor neurone disease, stroke, neuro-ophthalmology, and Parkinson's disease.

The biophysicist and structural biologist Dame Louise Johnson (1940-2012) worked at the interface of several disciplines, and was particularly known for her work on the properties of lysozyme. She also wrote a classic textbook on protein crystallography, and as science director for life sciences at Diamond Light Source oversaw the construction of the UK's synchrotron facility at Harwell, at the time the largest peacetime investment by the UK government. The chemist and public servant Lewis Roberts (1922-2012) also worked at Harwell, where he eventually became director of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, playing a key role in its diversification from nuclear energy into other industries, as did the inorganic chemist Norman Greenwood (1925-2012), who later made important contributions to knowledge of the electrical conductivities of inorganic compounds, especially boron compounds, and the metallurgist Sir Alan Cottrell (1919-2012), whose work on 'irradiation creep' in the Magnox fuel clad led to a redesign of the elements. Cottrell went on to a highly distinguished career both in research and in public service, including as chief scientific adviser to the government.

Thermal explosion theory and oscillatory behaviour in combustion were the main research areas of Peter Gray (1926-2012). His fellow chemist Martin Fleischmann (1927-2012) made important contributions to the understanding of electrochemical processes at electrode surfaces, though he will always be better known for his startling claim in 1989, with Stanley Pons, to have achieved cold fusion using simple electrochemical processes. Other researchers were unable to verify Fleischmann's and Pons's claims or replicate their experiments, and while the pair continued to stick to their assertions, and continued research in this area, the scientific consensus was that Fleischmann's association with cold fusion was a tragic conclusion to a distinguished and exuberant career .

Cyril Domb (1920-2012) was a theoretical physicist best known for his work on the theory of phase transitions, but he also combined this with a profound Jewish faith, and spent much of his working life trying to reconcile scientific knowledge with orthodox Judaism. His fellow theoretical physicists David Olive (1937-2012) and John G. Taylor (1931-2012) made fundamental contributions to string theory; Taylor's wide-ranging interests extended to particle physics, astronomy, and, later, the developing field of brain dynamics and neural networks. Nicholas Handy (1941-2012) was a theoretical chemist and mathematician who developed new methods in quantum chemistry and theoretical spectroscopy. Fritz Ursell (1923-2012), was a German Jewish refugee whose wartime work on wave forecasts (for the anticipated Allied landings in Japan) sparked a lifelong interest in wave theory, in which he became the leading figure. The statistician James Durbin (1923-2012) also put his knowledge of mathematics and research on survey theory and time series to practical use, particularly in econometrics, while David Barron (1935-2012) was a trained physicist who became an early computer scientist, but 'viewed computer programming as a literary endeavour as well as a technical enterprise', and was a proselytizer for the programming language Pascal.

Real-world applications were always at the forefront of the work of Sir Colin Spedding (1925-2012), a biologist and agricultural scientist who made especially important contributions to animal welfare, including formulating the 'five freedoms' of welfare which were later widely adopted. The fishing tackle manufacturer and angler John Goddard (1923-2012) was led by his desire to understand the behaviour of trout to undertake a series of experiments which especially illustrated the effects of the reflection and refraction of light on the world as seen by fish; a fellow of the Royal Entomological Society, he 'did more than any other British angler in the twentieth century to persuade fly-fishermen that a knowledge of entomology was fundamental to their success'. Knowledge of the botanical world was central to the careers of three further entrants in the Dictionary. Edward Kemp (1910-2012) was a botanic garden curator, horticulturist, and arboriculturist, who founded the Dundee Botanic Garden and introduced a number of innovative and later widely imitated elements of landscape and glasshouse design. Mary Grierson (1912-2012) was an acclaimed botanical artist whose records of endangered plants had more than decorative significance. Robert Harkness (1951-2012) was a rose breeder whose innovations in marketing and breeding programmes expanded both the range of plants available to gardeners and the reach of his long-established family business.

Medicine

Medical politics features largely in several of the lives in this update. One of the most colourful figures in post-war British medicine was Sir Christopher Booth (1924-2012), director of medicine at the Postgraduate Medical School, Hammersmith, and later as director of the Clinical Research Centre, Northwick Park, who was liable to lock horns with his medical colleagues as frequently as with governments. Sir Sandy Macara (1932-2012) was a leading public health physician who as chairman of the BMA's ethics committee and then as BMA chairman clashed with successive governments over their plans to reform (or, as he saw it, dismantle) the NHS. Jean McFarlane, Baroness McFarlane of Llandaff (1926-2012) was the pre-eminent nurse and nursing educationist of her generation, who pioneered a patient-centred approach to care, and later brought her expertise to bear on ministers and civil servants as a leading cross-bench peer. Jane Leighton (1944-2012) was a journalist and broadcaster rather than a health professional, but through her campaigning investigations into such topics as the dangers of second-hand smoke and health care for prisoners, she helped set the agenda for many public health issues. John Horder (1919-2012) was one of the leading general practitioners of his generation, the author of numerous books and training manuals, but also a tireless advocate for his branch of the medical profession whose friendship with Labour minister Kenneth Robinson is credited as a major influence on the pivotal 1966 GPs contract . Wendy Greengross (1925-2012) was another general practitioner who became a well-known agony aunt, helped many people to become comfortable with their sexuality, and pioneered discussion of the sexual needs of the disabled and elderly.

Improving the care of the elderly was the lifelong mission of George Adams (1916-2012), a pioneering geriatrician whose work in Belfast was much imitated, and whose advice on the development of geriatric services elsewhere was keenly sought. The neurosurgeon Sid Watkins (1928-2012) focused on the health needs of Formula One racing drivers, and was the major figure in developments which contributed to making the sport safer for its practitioners and fans. The nephrologist Oliver Wrong (1925-2012) contributed enormously (including through self-experimentation) to understanding of how the kidneys handle acid, with very significant consequences for those suffering from diseases affecting the metabolism and kidneys. The clinical work of the psychiatrist Griffith Edwards (1928-2012) also informed his scientific research, in this case into addiction, in which field he made a number of significant conceptual advances, underpinned by multidisciplinary work.

Engineering and business

As with several other new subjects in the January 2016 update, it was his Second World War experience which determined the career of Francis Walley (1918-2012). Assigned to the Ministry of Home Security to research the design of bomb shelters and the effects of blast on reinforced concrete (and later to investigate the effects of allied bombings), Walley became a convert to pre-stressed concrete, and (in the context of post-war steel shortages) 'perhaps [its] most significant ambassador in the UK'. He went on to occupy a series of senior posts in the civil service, and was responsible for commissioning or designing a large number of government-funded facilities, ranging from the testing facilities for TSR2 and Concorde to the pre-stressed concrete footbridge at St James Park. Henry Chilver, Baron Chilver (1926-2012), another Bristol engineering graduate, undertook important research on buckling of thin-walled structures, contributing to the safer design of nuclear reactors and aerospace structures. There followed, for almost twenty years, his time as vice-chancellor of Cranfield Institute of Technology, where he was in the forefront of harnessing engineering research to commercial opportunities. Later, as the first chairman of the Universities Funding Council, he caused a storm by suggesting that universities should charge students the full tuition costs.

Sir George Jefferson (1921-2012) was one engineer who made a smooth transition from research to industry: having left school at sixteen to take up an apprenticeship in the Royal Arsenal, he moved via HQ anti-aircraft command (where he worked on measures to reduce the number of V1 rockets reaching London) into industry, initially in the guided weapons division of English Electric and its successor companies, and eventually as first chairman and chief executive of BT (following its separation from the Post Office), guiding it towards privatization. Two other engineers in this release were able to build up their own companies from scratch. After designing a revolutionary new spring which was incorporated into Alec Issigonis's Mini, and which helped to make it the success it was, Alex Moulton (1920-2012) went on to design a revolutionary new bicycle, rethinking the design from first concepts. He had an almost mystical view of the engineer's calling: 'We are Homo Faber. Man should make things. Make a profit, of course, but don't take the money gain as the prime judgement'. Whether Alan Reece (1927-2012) took a similar view is not recorded, but his invention of a new sub-sea trenching machine, and later other designs (ranging from specialist equipment for the safe removal of landmines to a novel technology for the rapid repair of potholes) ensured that by his death his companies on Tyneside provided 700 manufacturing jobs, and had a combined annual turnover in excess of £300 million.

Aircraft and airlines provided the livelihood for three of the new entrants in this update. During the war the aeronautical engineer Sir James Hamilton (1923-2012) worked on seaplane hydro- and aerodynamics as a prelude to a distinguished career which saw him rise to the highest ranks of the civil service, and included leadership of the British end of the Concorde project. Colin Marshall, Baron Marshall of Knightsbridge (1933-2012), began his career in the car rental business before ending as chief executive and later chairman of British Airways, where his remorseless attention to detail and commitment to customer service helped turn around the fortunes of a company once described as 'a classic transport bureaucracy'. Fred Newman (1916-2012) was a buccaneering businessman who diversified the family shipbroking company, Davies and Newman, into civil aviation initially with a single war-surplus Douglas DC-3. By the mid-1970s Dan-Air had become Britain's largest independent airline, but its vulnerability to rivals on the scheduled flight side of the business and lack of vertical integration with a tour operator led to its demise. In 1992 Marshall's BA paid a nominal 1 for the business, in return for taking on its debts.

Three contrasting entries illustrate different aspects of the post-war British property market. Jack Dellal (1923-2012) was a wheeler-dealer financier and property dealer who through luck or prescience survived several crashes in property values and built a fortune estimated in the Sunday Times rich list for 2012 at £445 million. Sir Lawrie Barratt (1927-2012) built his first house in 1953, after finding that he and his new wife could not afford to buy one. Impressed by the difference between the cost of building it and its market value, he constructed two more properties. By 1983 Barratt Developments was building 16,500 houses a year, and Barratt himself a hands-on manager who designed the houses, bought the land, dealt with the tradesmen, and appeared on television to sell the finished products was proud to be known as Mrs Thatcher's favourite house builder. How many of his houses were bought with mortgages from the Catholic Building Society is unknown, but in the January update he is joined by the society's founder and chairman, Nona Byrne (1922-2012), the first woman to be head of a building society, who created the lender originally to provide for single women and others who found it difficult to obtain mortgages elsewhere.

One of the most controversial subjects in this update is George Ward (1933-2012), the Anglo-Indian businessman who founded the photographic processing laboratory, Grunwick, and whose refusal to recognize the trade union APEX at the plant sparked one of the most bitter industrial disputes of the 1970s. The dispute 'was crucial in convincing Margaret Thatcher and her advisers that trade union militancy must be curbed', while 'Ward's success encouraged her in the belief that union power could be broken'. Ward, unsurprisingly, was a fervent supporter of the Conservative Party, though in 1998 the Hendon constituency party, which he chaired, was temporarily suspended after accusations that he had packed the annual general meeting with his own employees. Less of a fan of Margaret Thatcher was Sir William Barlow (1924-2012), an industrialist who turned around the ball-bearings company Ransome Hoffman Pollard and was brought in by Jim Callaghan's government to become chairman of the notoriously inefficient Post Office; he eventually resigned in 1980, finding that he was getting little support from the new Conservative government. He went on to become a trenchant critic of the industrial policies of Thatcher and her successors, which he saw as sounding the death-knell for British manufacturing. Ten years after Barlow left, the New Zealand-born accountant and businessman Neville Bain (1940-2012) also became chairman of the Post Office, but he too found his attempts at reform stymied, and the organization's re-branding as Consignia was a dismal failure, something that the advertising executive and writer Winston Fletcher (1937-2012) could probably have predicted.

Modernization was also the aim of Sir John Quinton (1929-2012), who first worked for Barclays Bank during summer vacations as a student and made his way up to become the first 'non-family' chairman for forty years. Declaring that Barclays should be 'the McDonald's of banking', a place where 'you're greeted with a smile and you're not kept waiting', he set out to reform the bank's outdated management structure and devolved regional fiefdoms, but was caught out by the ending of the 1980s house price boom; he was little more successful as the first chairman of the football Premier League. Another banker, Sir Derek Wanless (1947-2012), joined the National Westminster Bank in 1970 and served as its chief executive from 1992 to 1999, but was forced out after a series of trading losses and failed mergers, the year before NatWest was taken over by the Royal Bank of Scotland. In 2007 he was forced to resign again, this time as a non-executive director and chairman of the audit and risk committee of Northern Rock, following personal criticism by the House of Commons select committee investigating the near-collapse of the mortgage lender.

Journalists and broadcasters

2012 saw the deaths of three giants from the former Fleet Street. William Rees-Mogg, Baron Rees-Mogg (1928-2012), initially hoped for a career as a Conservative politician, but 'after recognizing his failure to light up the electorate at the polling booth, quickly formed further ambitions for his boldly argued views'. His leader in the Sunday Times in 1966, 'The right moment to change', was an acknowledged factor in persuading Sir Alec Douglas-Home to resign as Conservative party leader. Moving on to The Times, which he edited from 1967 to 1981, he succeeded in modernizing the paper and indeed at times aligning it with progressive opinion, but eventually resigned following a bitter year-long dispute with the print unions. Bob Edwards (1925-2012), from an altogether different background (the illegitimate son of a commercial clerk), once held the record for holding the most newspaper editorships (five: Tribune, Glasgow Evening Citizen, Daily Express twice, Sunday People, and Sunday Mirror), each characterized by editorial nous, brave decision-making, and eloquent, often compassionate, and always beautifully written editorials . Derek Jameson (1929-2012), another illegitimate child, forever carried the stigma of his birth and disadvantaged upbringing (a Radio 4 satirical sketch described him as 'the archetypal East End boy made bad'), but that did not prevent him from pursuing an equally successful career in journalism, as editor successively of the Daily Express, Daily Star, and News of the World, and later in broadcasting, as presenter of the weekday breakfast programme on BBC Radio 2.

Marie Colvin (1956-2012) was an exceptional, intrepid, and fearless foreign correspondent who lost an eye while covering the civil war in Sri Lanka, and eventually her life while covering the civil war in Syria. Her fellow American Eve Arnold (1912-2012) was widely acknowledged as one of the twentieth century's great photojournalists, whose subjects ranged from migratory potato pickers to Marilyn Monroe, and an Arabian harem to the steppes of Mongolia. Corinna Adam (1937-2012) was a less high-profile but shrewd and perceptive journalist whose articles covered among other topics, the plight of Kenyan immigrants, children's rights, gay rights campaigners and their encounters with Mary Whitehouse, far-left politics and its fissiparous nature 'the youth wing of the National Front [and] Europe's first male brothel for women'. The journalist and author Alexander Cockburn (1941-2012), son of the legendary Communist journalist Claud Cockburn, stayed true to his radical roots throughout his life, unlike his one-time friend and later bitter rival Christopher Hitchens, who made the same journey across the Atlantic to become a leading commentator on the American political scene. John Percival (1927-2012) eschewed politics to follow his own passion for ballet, communicated to readers for some thirty-two years as The Times's revered and sometimes feared chief dance critic, as well as through numerous well-received biographies.

Sir Alastair Burnet (1928-2012) began his career as a journalist on the Glasgow Herald and The Economist, which he edited from 1965 to 1974; he also, somewhat anomalously, edited the Daily Express from 1974 to 1976. But it was as a broadcaster and anchor for ITV's News at Ten from 1967 to 1972 and again from 1978 to 1991 that he achieved his greatest fame, and it was his calm authority as a broadcaster that gave the programme its distinction. Journalism (for the Enfield Gazette and Tottenham Herald) also provided Ron Onions (1929-2012) with his apprenticeship in news gathering, but it was in broadcasting that he really made his mark initially on the Tonight programme with Cliff Michelmore, then as the BBC's news organizer in New York, and finally and most successfully as the head of Independent Radio News, where his experience in America allowed him to re-shape the radio news programme with such innovations as voiced reports within bulletins, and snapshot bulletins which paved the way for rolling news.

For the small screen, Mira Hamermesh (1923-2012) produced a series of arresting and thought-provoking documentaries, including Maids and Madams (1986), about apartheid in South Africa; Caste at Birth (1990), about caste discrimination in India; and Loving the Dead (1991), which took her back to her birthplace in Poland to find her mother's grave and explore the traces of Jewish life in contemporary Poland. Another documentary film-maker, Vanya Kewley (1937-2012), made equally insightful short films, reporting from conflict zones including south Sudan, Biafra, Bangladesh, and Vietnam, and making several documentaries about the Dalai Lama, who became a personal friend. Entertainment was the stock in trade of Michael Hurll (1936-2012), a television director and producer whose credits ranged from The Billy Cotton Band Show, through Little and Large, Seaside Special, The Two Ronnies, and Top of the Pops, to Schofield's Quest and The British Comedy Awards. Entertainment was also the mission of Gerry Anderson (1929-2012), the doyen of televised puppet adventure series, whose credits, very much of their time, included Stingray, Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, and Joe 90.

Stage and screen

'Well, you've heard them all before, but it's the way I tell 'em!' was one of the catchphrases of the Northern Irish comedian Frank Carson (1926-2012), not without reason: he was once booed offstage for telling jokes the audience recognized from a recent television show, but this did not stop him becoming one of the most successful, and immediately recognizable, stand-ups of his generation. He is joined in this release by two comic actors best known for roles on screen. Clive Dunn (1920-2012) was most famous as Lance-Corporal Jack Jones in the BBC sitcom Dad's Army, though he had been playing sprightly old men since his late twenties. Eric Sykes (1923-2012) wrote scripts for the Goons but came into his own with the series Sykes and a , co-starring Hattie Jacques; a thoughtful and sharp-witted professional, at the age of eighty he fulfilled his ambition to act in a play by Shakespeare, 'the top banana'. The Czech-born Herbert Lom (1917-2012) was also a great deal more intelligent in real life than his screen persona would suggest: frequently typecast as a villain, he was best remembered as Inspector Dreyfus, driven mad by his colleague Inspector Clouseau in the hugely successful Pink Panther series.

Among straight actors and actresses, Daphne Oxenford (1919-2012) pursued a varied and successful career on stage and screen, but it was as the presenter of BBC Radio's Listen with Mother that she held a special place in her audience's affections: For the baby-boomer generation in Britain after the war, Oxenford's au revoir and the play-out music for Listen with Mother the Berceuse from Faur's Dolly suite for two pianos carried a Proustian connotation, the click of a garden gate, the promise of a new story on another day . The actress Joyce Redman (1915-2012) gave acclaimed performances in Shakespeare and French comedy, and was twice nominated for an Oscar, once for her portrayal of Emilia alongside Laurence Olivier in Othello (1965), and once for her role as the tavern servant Mrs Waters in Tom Jones (1963), suggestively tucking into a feast of oysters, chicken legs, and pears opposite Albert Finney. Dinah Sheridan (1920-2012) enjoyed a more than sixty-year career as an actress, and in her youth was frequently described as the archetypal English rose despite her exotic Russian, German and Jewish, background. From a later generation Simon Ward (1941-2012) shot to fame as Winston Churchill in Young Winston (1972), but refused to follow the well-worn trail to Hollywood ( I didn't look right for American movies. I would have ended up playing depressed gay marquesses. I was too young for the butler. I was not craggy enough for the conventional leading man ). Instead he contented himself with a series of intelligent and nuanced performances in less high-profile productions.

Theatre was the passion of Val May (1927-2012), one of Britain's leading post-war regional theatre directors, under whom first the Bristol Old Vic and then the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford, became launching pads for a string of successful West End productions. Alexander Schouvaloff (1934-2012) was an innovative and energetic assistant director of the Edinburgh Festival and then director of the North West Arts Association, before becoming the first curator and driving force of the Theatre Museum.

The cinematographer Christopher Challis (1919-2012) worked on over seventy films, including Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965) and Chitty, Chitty, Bang, Bang (1968), and in 2011 was the recipient of a BAFTA special award. The film editor and author David Vaughan Jones [Dai Vaughan] (1933-2012) left an important legacy of documentary films and experimental novels, though it was through his work as a film critic and essayist whose works were standard reading for students of film that he perhaps reached his widest audience. By contrast, the film director and producer Tony Scott (1944-2012) made a series of blockbusters, eight of his films (which included Top Gun [1986] and The A-Team [2010]) making more than $150 million each worldwide. The brother of Ridley Scott, he once described the difference between their approaches: 'Ridley makes films for posterity-my films are more rock 'n' roll'.

Literature and literary criticism

Popularity was never something the playwright and author John Arden (1930-2012) courted; though frequently mentioned in the same breath as John Osborne and Harold Pinter, few of his, mostly heavily didactic, plays achieved either critical or commercial success. An exception was Serjeant Musgrave's Dance (1959), now recognized as a masterpiece which regularly features in literature and drama course syllabi though at the time it played to houses only one-fifth full, and was described by the leading critic Harold Hobson as 'another frightful ordeal'. Eva Figes (1932-2012), yet another refugee from Nazism, reached a wide audience with her feminist tract, Patriarchal Attitudes (1970), but she was also the author of a series of experimental novels, such as Light (1983), based on one day in the life of Claude Monet. Influenced in part by the French avant-garde, Christine Brooke-Rose (1923-2012), the novelist and literary critic, also produced a series of daringly experimental novels, including Between (1968), which eschewed the verb to be .

More conventional (and conventionally successful) was the fiction of Barry Unsworth (1930-2012), whose early novels satirized the language schools in which he was then employed. Unsworth later turned to more serious subjects with works including Pascali's Island (1980) and Sacred Hunger (1992), the latter winning him the Booker Prize. Reginald Hill (1936-2012), the crime writer, was a prolific novelist, best known for his twenty-four novels featuring the contrasting but complementary Yorkshire detectives Andy Dalziel and Peter Pascoe. Dora Saint (1913-2012), writing under the pseudonym Miss Read, created an altogether more soothing genre of fiction, with her Fairacre and Thrush Green novels, celebrating the joys of country life and the natural world. The painter and writer Angelica Garnett (1918-2012) drew mainly on her own background as a child of the Bloomsbury Group, sometimes fictionalized. Nina Bawden (1925-2012) and Leila Berg (1917-2012) both wrote primarily for children, but tackled difficult subjects and rejected the saccharine sweet stories which at that time filled the shelves of children's libraries: Berg initiated the Nipper series for younger children which deliberately dispensed with the middle-class suburban settings so familiar to Ladybird readers in favour of terraced houses, blocks of flats, and gritty realism, while for an older cohort Bawden's Carrie's War (1973) dealt with evacuation, displacement, and family tensions.

Others from the world of letters included in this update are the publisher Tim Rix (1934-2012), who went on from a highly successful career commissioning English language teaching books to become a pivotal figure in the wider publishing world; Valerie Eliot (1926-2012), T.S. Eliot's second wife, literary executor, and editor, who devoted her own life to preserving her husband's legacy; and the literary scholars Emrys Lloyd Jones (1931-2012), a formidable Shakespeare scholar and editor of the New Oxford Book of Sixteenth-Century Verse (1991), and Dominic Hibberd (1941-2012), a leading authority on the First World War poets, especially Wilfred Owen.

Fashion, art, and architecture

There are not many hairdressers already included in the Dictionary, but this update could hardly fail to add a life of Vidal Sassoon (1928-2012), who revolutionized hairdressing techniques in the 1960s with the asymmetric Mary Quant bob, which, inspired by the modernist architecture of Mies van der Rohe and the Bauhaus, relied on precision cutting and dispensed with the need for the lacquer or hairspray which beehives and bouffants required. Sassoon a London-born Jew who in his youth fought Oswald Mosley's fascists and joined the Haganah fighting for Israeli independence subsequently opened salons in America and launched his own lines of hair products and styling tools, and was able to devote large sums to philanthropic activities, including the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism, in Jerusalem. Tommy Roberts (1942-2012), fashion designer and retailer, was also very much part of the Swinging Sixties culture, dressing the likes of Jimmy Hendrix, Pete Townshend, and Keith Moon in his Kleptomania outfits (and later Mick Jagger and Marc Bolan in his 'Mr Freedom' range). Daphne Brooker (1927-2012), model and fashion teacher, rode these and other fashions, and, during thirty years at Kingston College of Art, taught many of the most successful British designers.

The artist George Wyllie (1921-2012) holds a special place in the affections of his fellow Glaswegians, with his numerous quirky sculptures and installations, including Straw Locomotive (1987) and Paper Boat (1989), both inspired by the decline of heavy engineering on the Clyde, and Running Clock (2000), sited outside Glasgow's Buchanan Street bus station. His fellow Scot, William Turnbull (1922-2012), sculptor and painter, was a key figure with Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton in the 1950s 'Independent Group', forerunner of Pop Art, but later moved towards simpler, hieratic shapes, often with references to ancient stone monuments: 'Sculpture used to look modern', he once declared; 'now we make objects that might have been dug up at any time during the past forty thousand years'.

The Welsh artist Evelyn Williams (1929-2012) was harder to categorize, much of her work having an intense, personal, and introspective feel, though beguiling to the viewer and rewarding close study. The painter and printmaker Mary Fedden (1915-2012) also developed her own intensely personal style, often brightly coloured still lifes featuring seemingly arbitrary selections of objects decorated with abstract or symmetrical patterns; her paintings were much sought after, and she became the most widely and unsuccessfully imitated painter of her generation . The artist and educator Peter de Francia (1921-2012), by contrast, was a politically-committed artist who felt isolated from post-war artistic fashions, but whose powerful social realist paintings and drawings, as well as his teaching, formed a bridge between the 1930s and the present. The muralist and illustrator Leonard Rosoman (1913-2012) also developed an idiosyncratic and sometimes disconcerting style, but saw himself as an artisan artist, willing to take on most commissions, and among his works were complex portraits that 'situated his sitters within psychological and actual environments'.

Emmanuel Cooper (1938-2012) straddled the worlds of production, education, and criticism as an innovative potter and a leading writer on craft and the arts; he was also a fearless advocate of gay rights, and brought all his interests together in pioneering studies of homosexuality and art. John Golding (1929-2012) was another artist who combined his own practice as a painter with a distinguished career as an art historian and curator, and author of numerous acclaimed studies of Cezanne, Duchamp, Matisse, and Picasso. John House (1945-2012) also extended scholarship on the impressionist and post-impressionist painters (with articles on topics as diverse as Manet and censorship, japonisme, and women and impressionism), while also contributing enormously to public education on the subject, ranging from exhibition catalogues to sixth-form workshops to radio and television programmes. Judy Egerton (1928-2012) was an art historian and curator whose interests focused on an earlier age, with studies and exhibitions on Stubbs, Wright of Derby, and Turner. Turner was also the focus of much of the work of John Gage (1938-2012), who published several studies of Turner and his contemporaries, and was drawn, through Turner's association with colour, into writing several ground-breaking books on colour in art, including Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (1993).

Two architects whose work represents a particular moment in British culture (and has subsequently fallen into disrepair or even been subject to demolition) complete the artistic lives in this release. John Madin (1924-2012) was a prolific Birmingham architect whose work encompassed civic buildings, offices, factories, and private residences, many of which (such as the Pebble Mill Studios or Birmingham Central Library) were demolished or slated for demolition in his own lifetime. Isi Metzstein (1928-2012) was an architect with the Scottish firm Gillespie, Kidd and Coia, whose masterpiece, St Peter's Seminary, Cardross, awarded the Riba gold medal, lay abandoned since the 1980s (though plans have recently been announced to turn it into an arts venue).

Music

A wide range of musical styles are represented in this update, as indeed they were in the music of composer Sir Richard Rodney Bennett (1936-2012), who combined influences from jazz and folk song with Boulezian high modernism, and whose work ranged from twelve-note serialism, through cantatas on the poems of Kathleen Raine, to film scores such as those for John Schlesinger's Billy Liar (1963) and Mike Newell's Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994). Equally adventurous was Jonathan Harvey (1939-2012), who was an early experimenter with the use of electronics in music, and whose interest in Buddhism informed later works such as White as Jasmine (1999), which combined memorable musical statements (encompassing extremes of lyricism, sensuality, mysticism, and violence) with 'strong degrees of ambiguity'. Sacred music was also the real interest of Sir Philip Ledger (1937-2012), the conductor, pianist, and composer who from 1974 to 1982 was organist and director of music at King's College, Cambridge, before becoming a highly successful principal of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama; his own compositions included a Requiem (Thanksgiving for Life) (2007) and works for Christmas and Easter. Other exponents of classical music in this update include the opera singers Elizabeth Connell (1946-2012) and Derek Hammond Stroud (1926-2012); Lina Lalandi-Emery (1920-2012), the Greek-born harpsichordist and founder and director of the English Bach Festival; Michael Geliot (1933-2012), the opera director who worked with Scottish Opera, the Welsh National Opera, Sadler's Wells, and the Royal Opera; and Eta Cohen (1916-2012), a violin teacher and author, and deviser of the hugely successful Eta Cohen Violin Method.

From other genres, Ian Campbell (1933-2012) was a folk singer and songwriter whose Ian Campbell Folk Group was at the heart of the folk revival in 1960s Britain. Donald MacPherson (1922-2012) was a master of the piobaireachd, once described as 'without doubt the most successful piper ever to have lifted a bagpipe'. Andy Hamilton (1918-2012) was a jazz saxophonist and bandleader, who also served as an informal leader of the Caribbean community in Birmingham. Though his unchallenging music and novelty songs were not to everyone's taste, Max Bygraves (1922-2012) was one of the most successful post-war singers and entertainers, topping the bill at the royal variety performance nineteen times, earning thirty-one gold discs, and claiming to have owned fifty-three Rolls Royces during his career. Novelty songs were also a staple for The Monkees, the manufactured band of which Davy Jones (1945-2012) was a key and highly photogenic member. In contrast to The Monkees saccharine pop, the keyboard player and composer Jon Lord (1941-2012) helped establish Deep Purple as part of 'heavy rock's first division'. Classically trained, Lord 'always used to throw in a bit of Tchaikovsky during my solos. It used to perplex the audience'. Lord's performances would have lacked much of their power without his trademark combination of Hammond organ and Marshall amplifier; indeed it would be difficult to think of many individuals who have had as profound an effect on the shape of popular music as Jim Marshall (1923-2012), a 'larger than life individual who enjoyed the company of those his products had helped to make famous and the trappings that accompanied this'. Perhaps one person who rivalled Marshall was Bert Weedon (1920-2012), the guitarist and writer of hugely successful tutor books. Among those who avowedly taught themselves to play guitar with the help of Weedon's Play in a Day were Paul McCartney, Hank Marvin, Brian May, Keith Richards, Pete Townshend, Mike Oldfield, Mark Knopfler, and Eric Clapton.

Sporting lives

From the world of sport, this update includes Tony Greig (1946-2012), the South African-born England cricket captain (and later cricket commentator) whose decision to join Kerry Packer's World Series Cricket 'circus' sent shockwaves through the cricketing establishment; the 'circus' was short-lived, ending as soon as Packer won the rights to broadcast cricket in Australia, but, as the Dictionary's entry points out, its 'innovations would transform the game: rock music, floodlights, white balls, black sightscreens, and coloured kit'. Another sporting giant, the rugby player Mervyn Davies (1946-2012), known as 'Merve the Swerve' for his ability to outfox opponents, was described by one commentator as 'moving with quite startling speed and intelligence an instinctive reaction almost to trouble spots'. Although his playing career came to a premature end after he suffered a brain haemorrhage during a Welsh cup semi-final in 1976, in 2002 he was voted Wales's greatest ever captain. Dave Sexton (1930-2012), footballer, football coach, and football manager (of, successively, Leyton Orient, Chelsea, Queens Park Rangers, Manchester United, and Coventry City) was described as 'a nice, honest but totally private man', but also (by the writer of the Dictionary entry) as one of the most 'thoughtful, open-minded, [and] passionate students of football;, whose interests extended to Robert Frost's poetry and the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Another memorable figure from the world of football was the referee Jack Taylor (1930-2012), who will forever be associated with the 1974 World Cup final between Holland and West Germany, when he unprecedentedly awarded not one but two penalty kicks (one to each side) the first penalty kicks to be awarded in a World Cup final.

Three Olympians are included in this update. The boxer Terry Spinks (1938-2012) became Olympic flyweight champion in 1956, at the age of eighteen, but sadly his professional career was less distinguished, and in later life he was plagued by poor health, exacerbated by heavy drinking and brain injuries incurred during his boxing career. The athlete Don Anthony (1928-2012) finished twelfth in the hammer throwing at the same Olympics and retired from competition in 1959, but he left an important mark on British sport, as the key figure in establishing volleyball in Britain, and as a prominent shaper and historian of the Olympic movement. Liz Ferris (1940-2012), a doctor by profession, won a bronze medal in the three-metre springboard event at the 1960 Olympics, and again was very active in the Olympic movement, as a co-founder of the British Olympians Club, a member of the International Olympic Committee's medical commission, and a campaigner for gender equality in sport.

Mary Russell Vick (1922-2012) earned thirty caps representing England at hockey, but like Liz Ferris her greatest influence probably came after she retired from active participation in sport, becoming a key figure in and sometime president of the All England Women's Hockey Association. The world of horse racing lost two major figures in 2012: Josh Gifford (1941-2012) was a four-time champion jockey before becoming a successful racehorse trainer (notably as trainer of Aldaniti, the winner of the 1981 Grand National). John Lawrence, fourth Baron Trevethin and second Baron Oaksey (1929-2012), known as Lord Oaksey, was twice champion amateur jockey but far better known as a racing journalist and commentator, being described by one obituarist as 'quite possibly the outstanding racing figure of modern times'. Finally, the Dictionary does not neglect the importance of pub 'sports', and in this update we include the lives of two memorable figures from the world of darts. John Thomas (Jocky) Wilson (1950-2012) twice won the Embassy world championship, and was one of the sport's best-known personalities, though in later life he suffered major health problems and became something of a recluse. Sid Waddell (1940-2012) was a Cambridge-educated television producer and darts commentator who, among other things, ghost-wrote Wilson's autobiography, and enlivened the television coverage of the sport through his enthusiastic and entertaining commentaries, and his many aphorisms and malapropisms.

Our next online update, May 2016

Our next online update to be published on Thursday 26 May 2016 will continue to extend the Oxford DNB's coverage of men and women active from the middle ages to the late twentieth century. May's update will focus on nineteenth-century women entrepreneurs, English civil war lives, eighteenth-century religious prophets, and our next set of historical groups and networks, among them the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

Back to top of January 2016 preface

May 2016

Highlights from the May 2016 update

Introduction to the update by David Cannadine

Welcome to the thirty-sixth online update of the Oxford DNB, in which, as every May and September, we extend the Dictionary's coverage of men and women from the earliest times to the modern period. The May 2016 update adds biographies of 93 individuals active between the fourteenth and the late-twentieth century. This selection highlights new research in several historical fields, most notably in women's history with first-time biographies of individuals such as Anne Hooper, letter writer and wife of the post-Reformation bishop, John Hooper and in a selection of biographies charting women's involvement in business, invention, and industry from the eighteenth century onwards. Other themes include a set of Indian biographies, with a particular focus on the developers of late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century cultural nationalism, a selection of group biographies of which the best known is a survey of the work and legacy of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and our latest instalment of links to connect the ODNB to external resources offering interesting biographical content.

As with previous updates, these new biographies encompass many areas of activity and endeavour, from across the centuries and around the world. They also serve as a constant reminder that part of our task, made so much easier by the continuing IT revolution, is to keep working to recover hitherto 'lost' lives, which are often of women, but not exclusively so, and which can now be researched and reconstructd in ways that were impossible only twenty years ago. At the same time our continuing expansion of the ODNB's global range and reach is a further reminder that many Britons have made a great deal of history far beyond the confines of our own shores, just as large numbers of visitors or immigrants from overseas have constantly enlivened and reinvigorated life in these islands.

The new entries on such figures as Ellen Morewood, Barbara Ford, Rachel Prescott, and Sarah Guppy further reinforce the growing awareness that women as well as men were involved in business and industry during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The close and varied interconnections between South Asian and British lives are vividly revealed in entries on such cultural figures as Jyotirindranath Tagore and his younger sister, Swarnakumari Devi; in the biographies of two scientific researchers, Hugh Francis Clark Cleghorn and Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose; and also in the lives of Kipling's father, John Lockwood Kipling, who was principal of the Mayo School of Art in Lahore, and of the Punjab-born revolutionary, Kartar Singh Sarabha. And as a product of the West Midlands myself, it is an especial pleasure to read about a Stourbridge glass engraver, John Northwood, the Kidderminster carpet manufacturer, Henry Brinton, and two more members of the Birmingham-based Cadbury dynasty of chocolate manufacturers and social reformers. The ODNB may be a 'national' biographical dictionary, but as these entries make plain, that often means linking the local and the global as well.

Dr Anita McConnell (1936-2016)

All at the Oxford DNB were very sorry to learn of the death, in April 2016, of Dr Anita McConnell. Anita was a long-serving academic editor at the Dictionary, and a key figure in the making of the Oxford DNB as it was published in 2004. She joined the Dictionary in 1994 as the editor for the Science area (1500-2000), having previously worked as a curator and historian at the Science Museum. As the ODNB's science editor, Anita was responsible for overseeing the commissioning and editing of some 2500 biographies in this field. With the completion of this section, she remained in Oxford to work on the Dictionary's sixteenth and seventeenth-century coverage prior to her retirement in 2003.

Many contributors to the ODNB will have experience of Anita as a hugely knowledgeable and insightful editor. Many more of our readers will have encountered Anita as a historian in her own right, for she contributed or revised 600 entries for the Dictionary an extraordinary number matched only by that of the Dictionary's founding editor, Colin Matthew. Anita's specialism was the history of scientific instrumentation and meteorology, and her many articles for the ODNB include the meteorologist Robert Fitzroy (1805-1865), the shipping reformer Samuel Plimsoll (1824-1898), and a remarkable life of Edward Smith, captain of the RMS Titanic (1850-1912) as well as entries on lesser-known figures such as Sarah Hengler (c.1765-1845), artist in fireworks , and the street-lighting entrepreneur , Edmund Heming (fl. 1680-1694).

The Oxford DNB from May 2016

From May 2016, the ODNB offers biographies of 59,972 men and women who have shaped the British past, contained in 54,798 articles. Seventeen of the 93 new biographies added in May 2016 are illustrated with a portrait likeness, and eleven more portraits are now added to existing entries for the first time, bringing to 11,440 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 (59,972 biographies and 536 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 2016

Women's lives: Reformation, Industrial Revolution, and Welfare State

The May 2016 update adds biographies of 18 women, active from the early sixteenth to the mid-twentieth century, who have been the subjects of recent historical research. Anne Hooper (d. 1555) is notable as one of the earliest wives of an English bishop in the years immediately following the Reformation. Anne was probably born in Antwerp and met John Hooper, future bishop of Gloucester and Worcester and protestant martyr, during the latter's exile in Strasbourg in the mid-1540s. They married soon after and returned to England, following the accession of Edward VI with John consecrated as a bishop in 1551. During this period, Anne maintained a correspondence with the Swiss religious reformer, Heinrich Bullinger, which makes clear her role in the education of her children during John Hooper's absences from London. The Hoopers situation changed dramatically with the accession of Mary I in 1553 and Anne and her daughter went into exile in the following year. Her correspondence with Bullinger provides a vivid account of the hardships of exile in Frankfurt and of her grief following her husband's martyrdom in February 1555; Anne herself succumbed to plague in Frankfurt ten months later. A slightly earlier religious correspondence is that between the Benedictine abbess Margaret Vernon (d. in or after 1546) and the Henrician minister, Thomas Cromwell. Twenty-two surviving letters, the first sent no later than 1521, chart the development of a friendship between Vernon and Cromwell, and her own rise to become abbess of the prosperous nunnery of Malling in Kent prior to its surrender in 1538. A second religious biography added in this update is that of Elizabeth Woodford (c.1502?-1572) who served initially as the guardian of Margaret Clement, the future prioress of St Ursula's, Louvain (and whose biography was added to the Dictionary in 2014). Woodford and Clement both entered St Ursula's in the 1550s and it may have been on Woodford's advice that Clement introduced clausura (strict enclosure) when she became prioress at Louvain.

Of the Dictionary's extended coverage of women engaged in business and industry, the earliest is Ellen Morewood (1741-1824) an attorney's daughter who married into a Derbyshire gentry family. On her husband's death, she inherited his estates, including collieries and ironstone mines and surviving business correspondence reveals her active role in their management. This involved the construction of a railway linking her coal deposits with a canal, along with Morewood's pursuit of protracted litigation to defend her interests, of which she was careful to ensure control when she married again. Barbara Ford (1755-1840) was born into a family of tenant farmers on the duke of Devonshire's Derbyshire estates, and married into another farming family with interests in malting. In her widowhood Ford, like Morewood, secured control of her late husband's malting business which was a substantial enterprise; she was also active in the trade at Ashbourne, where she was a founder of the female friendly society. Again, like Morewood, Ford obtained a legal settlement on a second marriage protecting her own and her daughter's interests.

The daughter of a Manchester printer and newspaper proprietor, Rachel Prescott (1765/1766-1824) is thought to have assisted her father in running Prescott's Manchester Journal. She began writing poetry in the late 1790s, inspired by having read Wollstonecraft's Rights of Women, and her collected poems reveal strong progressive and humanitarian interests. Prescott owned freehold property and by her will she founded a charity for the aged in her parish. Sarah Guppy (1770-1852), the wife of a Bristol brass founder, helped in running her husband's business but also went into print, first with publications on domestic and educational themes; other tracts addressed the position of female servants and the accommodation of women of the upper classes who lacked family support. In addition, Guppy was a prolific inventor notably obtaining a patent in 1811 for a bridge suspended by chains, and advocating the proposed Clifton Suspension Bridge as a suitable investment for ladies.

On her mother's side, the family of Mary Ann Ashford (1787-1870) were licensed victuallers in London with her mother taking charge of the business. On her parents deaths, in rapid succession, Ashford faced the dilemma of finding an income and decided on domestic service as providing relative stability. Concerned to refute fictional depictions of servants lives, she later wrote an account of her seventeen years in service, from 1800 to 1817, which remains a revealing source. It is possible now to provide details of her later life, as the possessor of a small amount of capital, which enabled her to own a lodging house. The survival of three registers kept by the Coventry midwife Mary Eaves (1805/6-1875) between 1847 and 1875 record 5029 infant deliveries, mostly within half a mile of her home in Spon. These unusual records indicate both how her fees supplemented the family's income from silk weaving and also her standing as a skilled and trusted midwife. Widowed in her mid-thirties Louisa Mary [Louise] Cresswell (1830-1916) took on the tenancy of the large farm which her husband had leased on the Sandringham estate of the prince of Wales. She became the farm's full-time manager and cultivated it successfully until agricultural depression in the late 1870s brought her into rent arrears, and led to a notice to quit in 1880. Her Eighteen Years on the Sandringham Estate (1887) narrates her experience as a Victorian woman farmer and tenant of a royal landlord.

The entry of women into professional careers from the mid-Victorian period is represented by the lives of four artists. The sisters Florence Claxton (1838-1920) and Adelaide Claxton (1841-1927) were daughters of an artist whose lack of financial success made it imperative that both start earning a living. As artists they supplied material to the burgeoning illustrated press. Florence's early work tackled the themes of women artists and women's work, as well as a famous satire of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Adelaide settled in Bedford Park, an environ popular with artists, where she became a staff member of an illustrated periodical, and was involved in the rational dress movement. Mabel Dearmer (1872-1915) studied art before her marriage to the Anglican liturgist Percy Dearmer, whose Christian Socialist views she shared. She belonged to the Yellow Book circle in the 1890s before turning to picture books for children. Her Letters from a Field Hospital were published posthumously, following her death in Serbia where she had served as a hospital orderly. Joyce Dennys (1893-1991), from an Indian army family, also studied art and served in hospitals in south-west England as a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) member, producing a series of illustrations of and recruiting posters for wartime nurses. Having settled in Budleigh Salterton, she worked as a commercial artist and undertook a series of popular illustrated books about the tribulations of a doctor's wife. During the Second World War Dennys wrote a series of fictional letters to a friend serving overseas, conveying the experience of wartime civilian life in rural areas.

Four of the women included in this selection were at the centre of social networks in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The widow of an American Civil War veteran, Caroline Jebb, Lady Jebb (1840-1930), married Sir Richard Jebb, later regius professor of Greek at Cambridge, and became a leader of academic society in Cambridge in the generation when college fellows were permitted to marry and the first women's colleges were founded. She was at the centre of the Ladies Dining Society, a group of Cambridge women who met regularly for debate in the years up to 1914. Mary Jeune, Lady St Helier (1845-1931) became companion-secretary to her aunt, Lady Ashburton, was presented at court, and was introduced to the world of philanthropy by her formidable mother-in-law Lady Stanley of Alderley. She established a political salon at her London home, which broadened after her second marriage to the lawyer Francis Jeune to include literary figures and artists. It was Lady St Helier who introduced Winston Churchill to his future wife Clementine. She acquired a public voice as commentator on social life and on welfare, became a long-standing alderman on the London county council (LCC), and on account of her interest in garden suburbs the new LCC St Helier estate in South London took her name. Ada Wallas (1859-1934), originally from a staunchly nonconformist family of Plymouth drapers, was of the new woman generation. Educated at the newly opened Plymouth high school for girls, she entered Newnham College, Cambridge, a decade after its foundation, to read mathematics. She lived in lodgings in London before her marriage to the Fabian socialist Graham Wallas. A private income sustained her lifetime's involvement in progressive circles and writing, and her involvement in work to improve maternal and child welfare. Ada Anderson, Viscountess Waverley (1895-1974), daughter of the writer J.E.C. Bodley, grew up in France where she married Ralph Wigram, a diplomat at the British embassy. As a diplomatic wife she established an influential social circle in Paris, which she maintained in London after her husband's death, and during her second marriage to the wartime administrator Sir John Anderson, Viscount Waverley. Appreciated as a political confidante by Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan, she created a role for herself in the mid-twentieth century as a political and cultural hostess, deploying hospitality to achieve practical ends.

Body culture: tattoo artists, body builders, and the Bronze Age

Tattoos it would seem have never been more popular in British society, and have long since lost their traditional association with maritime life. But when, and with whom, did the modern practice of professional tattooing arise? A former soldier Sutherland Macdonald (1860-1942) began to tattoo in the garrison town of Aldershot, before establishing himself in London in the late 1880s at a time when moneyed travellers were returning from the Far East with tattoos. Macdonald coined the term tattooist in the 1890s and was for four years the only person of this employment listed as such in London guides to the professions. Working from Jermyn Street, Macdonald introduced high-end Japanese tattooing to a fashionable London clientele, to whom he offered high quality artistic designs. His fellow tattooist, George Burchett (1872-1953), had enlisted in the Royal Navy and visited Japan. On his return to London, in the early twentieth century, he established a parlour near Waterloo Station where he remained in business until 1949. As well as customers of both sexes from the armed forces, in both world wars, Burchett attracted a clientele from the royal houses of Europe and was reckoned the best-known practitioner of his art in the inter-war years.

Another form of body culture is represented in the life of (Horatio) William Albert Pullum (1887-1960), who survived a sickly childhood in Camberwell, south London, and took up regular weight training. Pullum went on to develop principles of scientific weightlifting, mentored future champions, and disseminated his methods through publications and correspondence courses. Oscar Frederick Jeffery Gore Heidenstam (1911-1991) deployed weightlifting to develop his own physique, winning a national competition for physical excellence (a forerunner of Mr Britain) in 1937. After the Second World War he joined the staff of Health and Strength magazine, which staged the Mr Universe competition for two decades from 1956, establishing it as the fairest and most prestigious such contest in the world.

One further example of physical pre-eminence predates Pullum and Heidenstam by roughly 4000 years. This is the figure of Racton Man (fl.c. 2000 BC), the name given to a skeleton discovered in the 1980s near the West Sussex village of Racton. Following analysis in the early twenty-first century, the skeleton was put on display at the Novium Museum, Chichester, in late 2014. The body is that of an early Bronze Age warrior, aged between 35 and 50 years, and remarkably tall at 6 feet. With him was discovered an extremely rare bronze dagger which indicates that this was a person of considerable importance. Racton Man may have been killed in hand-to-hand combat involving the weapon in what may have been a trial of strength between two competing tribal leaders.

Invention, business, arts and crafts, 1800-1950

Joseph Pitt (1759-1842) was a Gloucestershire yeoman's son who became a successful attorney. He established himself as a country gentleman and MP, and saw an opportunity to exploit the popularity of the fashionable spa town of Cheltenham, acquiring land to develop the suburb of what became Pittville. The foundation stone of the pump room was laid in 1825 just as the economy experienced a downturn, and a cooling of the property market caused him to lose money though Pittville survives. The American-born contractor and architect Daniel Robertson (c. 1770-1849) was ruined by a disastrous contract to build West India docks and warehouses on Thames. He continued to speculate in the London property market, without success, and thereafter turned to architecture. In Oxford he found several patrons, including the delegates of the University Press who appointed him to design the extensive new premises for the Press in Jericho in the late 1820s. Robertson, however, continued to be dogged by financial problems, and he was imprisoned for debt in Oxford gaol prior to his move to Ireland where he designed country houses.

The London timber merchant George Smart (1757/8-1834) patented a successful method to mass-produce casks used to supply British forces during the Napoleonic wars. In the early nineteenth century he also developed the scandiscope , a device that enabled a sweep to clean chimneys without using climbing boys. His inventions in several fields won prizes awarded by the Society of Arts. He subsequently turned his attention to the strength of timbers used in buildings and developed new trussing techniques that enabled the construction of roofs that were lighter and flatter. Isaac Johnson (1811-1911) was brought up in the London building industry, where he began work as an apprentice joiner, although he continued to study at night school. Using his knowledge of chemistry, he found a method of consistently producing Portland cement which he manufactured in north Kent, settling in Gravesend, where he was a prominent figure in the Baptist congregation, Liberal politics, and the temperance movement. Johnson lived to celebrate his 100th birthday, having helped to launch British cement-making as a global industry.

George Smart (1775/6-1846), namesake of the timber merchant (above), kept a tailor's shop in Tunbridge Wells which, like Cheltenham, was a fashionable spa town in the early nineteenth century. He became a celebrated textile artist, known for his collage portraits of local characters made from fabric scraps and is unusual for being a named individual, commented on in contemporary guides, among the otherwise anonymous makers of folk art. In Stourbridge, in the Black Country, John Northwood (bap. 1836, d. 1902), a former apprentice in the local glass trade, established an international reputation as an engraver and carver of glass. His first masterpiece, The Elgin Vase, carved in relief with scenes from the Parthenon frieze, was followed by his reproduction of the Portland vase, which he unveiled in 1876. This revived the Roman technique of cameo glass and established Stourbridge as a world centre for its manufacture. George Woodall (1850-1925) was an apprentice under Northwood, who went on to make cameo glass and was acknowledged as the greatest cameo carver of his time. His work was exhibited at international exhibitions and attracted collectors around the world, and especially in America, where many of his major works are now held.

Joseph Hanson (1774-1811), a prosperous Manchester cloth merchant, witnessed the economic plight of handloom weavers hit by the loss of overseas markets during the Napoleonic wars. Dubbed the weavers friend , he both organized a regional petition for peace, to revive commerce, and supported the weavers campaign for legislation to enact a minimum wage. When the House of Commons rejected the bill, in 1808, he addressed a protest meeting in Manchester, was arrested, and was imprisoned in the following year a series of events commemorated by a medal struck in 1810. The Kidderminster carpet manufacturer, Henry Brinton (1796-1857), began making handloom Brussels carpets in the mid 1820s; by the following decade his production had moved into factories and by the 1850s he was using power looms. Examples of the company's work won a gold medal at the Great Exhibition in 1851. His son John Brinton (1827-1914) maintained the company's leading place in the industry, and he played a prominent part in civic life, gifting Brinton Park to the town.

As a member of another West Midlands industrial dynasty, Edward Cadbury (1873-1948) developed distinctive welfare and employment practices in his family's business, especially for women workers. He was also a leading figure in the campaign against low pay (or sweating ) which resulted in the Trade Boards Act of 1909 to set minimum rates of pay in specified industries, and was commemorated for his part in the successful campaign for universal old age pensions (1908). In addition, he took part in early initiatives in what became personnel management. His brother, George Cadbury (1878-1954), was more involved in technical aspects of the business, introducing milk chocolate (Cadbury's Dairy Milk) and Bournville Cocoa to the firm's range, but also brought his family's Quaker principles to bear through his involvement in adult education, founding Fircroft and Avoncroft colleges. A Great War survivor, Robert William Foot (1889-1973) was company solicitor to the Gas Light and Coke Company, the largest gas supply company in the UK, run as a co-partnership that assigned a high priority to employee welfare. He gained a reputation for his work in reorganizing the industry, which led to his appointment as wartime director-general of the BBC, after which he headed the national organization of coal-owners. Foot drew up a plan for the coal industry in an attempt to stave off nationalization, but when that became inevitable he negotiated a package of what was reckoned generous compensation for the owners.

Scottish lives: golf, coal, and the crofters' cause

The May 2016 update also extends the Dictionary's coverage of Scottish figures active from the eighteenth century onwards. Two of these new additions—Scipio Kennedy (1693x7-1714) and Hugh Francis Clarke Cleghorn (1820-1895)—are discussed below (in the sections on Hanoverian travellers and Indian lives respectively). Of the other new figures, the Musselburgh farmworker and golf caddy, William Park (1833-1903), began playing for money on the Musselburgh course before taking on the leading golfers of the 1850s in individual challenge matches. Park was among the eight entrants for a new competition held at Prestwick on 17 October 1860 to determine the champion golfer. He won what became known as the open championship, going on to win the claret jug on three occasions; his brother and his sons were also winners of the tournament. Park is reckoned one of the first golfers to make his living from playing the game (as opposed to making clubs) in the period of transition from personal challenges to national tournaments. For thirty years the journalist Alexander MacKenzie (1838-1898), a crofter's son from Wester Ross, was a leading figure in the civic life of Inverness. From 1875 he published the Celtic Magazine, dedicated to the language and literature of the Scottish highlands. However, MacKenzie achieved greatest prominence as an advocate of the crofters cause in the 1880s, as well as the author of a history of the Clearances.

A coalowner's son, who had a liberal education in Edinburgh, Sir Adam Nimmo (1866-1939) became the managing director of a Lanarkshire colliery and, from 1916, the leading representative of the coal-owners in Britain. He saw himself as fighting socialism, and was notorious for his intransigence during the General Strike, castigated by both Stanley Baldwin and Churchill, though another aspect of his public work was dedication to the Baptist church. Also from a family involved in mine management, Charles Augustus Carlow (1878-1954) followed his father at the Fife Coal Company which established itself as an technically innovative company in the pre-nationalization era. Even so, Carlow's pursuit of authoritarian industrial relations strategies contributed in 1935 to the election of a Communist MP in the West Fife constituency, where most of the company's workers were resident. Joseph Forbes Duncan (1879-1954), a gardener's son from Banff, spent a lifetime in the Scottish labour movement founding the Scottish Farm Servants Union in 1912 and becoming an expert on Scottish agriculture. A major concern was the standard of housing for farmworkers. The literary scholar, George Gregory Smith (1865-1932), was born and educated in Edinburgh, where he received his first academic post, before his appointment to the chair of English at Queen's Belfast, which he held from 1905 to 1930. There he made his two major contributions to Scottish literature: a major edition of the poems of Robert Henryson as part of the movement recovering Scotland's literary history, and a collection of essays on Scottish literature, published in 1919, in which Smith attempted to define its distinctive character, and which in turn influenced Scottish writers and critics for much of the twentieth century.

Indian lives: nationalism and science

Since the Dictionary's publication in 2004, it has been a feature of successive online updates to add to the coverage of shapers of the British empire and the early Commonwealth. In May 2016 we continue this programme with a focus on nineteenth and twentieth-century India.

A key figure in this selection is Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) the first Asian Nobel laureate in literature, to whom four of our new subjects were related or closely associated. Jyotirindranath Tagore (1849-1925) was an elder brother of the poet and himself an accomplished playwright and musician. Like other members of this remarkable family, Jyotirindranath Tagore sought to encourage Indian political leadership through a programme of cultural nationalism. His approaches and talents were many: as a noted translator, he introduced Sanskrit, Marathi, and French works to Bengali readers; and, as a musician, he was involved nationally as an organizer for the advancement of the Hindustani classical tradition. An accomplished draughtsman, he was considered the finest living Indian artist by the British painter William Rothenstein, but is now perhaps best known for his own plays and satires. Jyotirindranath Tagore's younger sister, Swarnakumari Devi (1855-1932), was also an author of novels, short stories, plays, and the first opera libretto in Bengali. For thirty years she edited the renowned Bengali literary journal, Bharati, which published the work of many contemporary Bengali women. Women's rights and opportunities were also central to the Muslim author and publisher Sayyid Mumtaz Ali (1860-1935) who, from the 1890s, advocated more egalitarian relations between husbands and wives in Muslim marriages. In this he was supported by his second wife, the author and editor, Muhammadi Begam (c.1878-1908), with whom, in 1898, he established Tahzib un-Niswan, the first successful Urdu periodical for women which ran until the 1950s.

Others with ties to Rabindranath Tagore, and now included in the ODNB, are the Calcutta-born writer and illustrator, Sukumar Ray (1887-1923), and the Indian missionary William Winstanley Pearson (1881-1923), originally from Liverpool. As a young poet Sukumar Ray came to the attention of Tagore who was a close friend of Ray's father and soon became a champion of the younger man's writing. Ray specialized in nonsense verse and word play and this together with his talents as a photographer (he was the second Indian to be elected a fellow of the Royal Photographic Society) have led to comparisons with Lewis Carroll. On graduating from Cambridge University, William (or Willie) Pearson went to India in the service of the London Missionary Society and became an activist for Indian freedom. From 1912 he dedicated himself to the ideas of Rabindranath Tagore and to working at Tagore's school at Santiniketan. Committed to the Indian freedom movement, Pearson also accompanied Tagore to Japan and the USA in 1916-17. Following his premature death in a railway accident in Italy, Pearson was described in his Manchester Guardian obituary as 'the best loved Englishman in India', while Tagore praised his patriotism that was 'for the world of man'.

The cause of Indian freedom was also embraced albeit in a more violent manner by the Punjab-born revolutionary, Kartar Singh Sarabha (1896-1915). In 1912 Kartar Singh travelled to San Francisco to continue his studies where he joined the recently formed Ghadr Party which agitated for the violent overthrow of British rule in India. In August 1914 he and his fellow party members issued a declaration of war against Britain and, soon after, Kartar Singh returned to India with the intention of launching an armed revolt against the British. In the following year he was arrested for his part in a planned insurrection at Amritsar, and was executed in November 1915. The patriotic song he composed, and sang, before his execution later became famous among members of the Indian independence movement.

Two further individuals are remembered for their contribution to scientific research in India. Hugh Francis Clarke Cleghorn (1820-1895) was born in Madras but was brought up in Scotland where he studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh. He returned to Madras as a surgeon but gained prominence as the Presidency's first forest conservator charged with ensuring the continued supply of timber for Madras's expanding railway programme and as a writer on arboriculture. Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858-1937) was born near Dacca, Bengal, into a Hindu family with strong leanings to the Hindu reform movement of Brahmoism. After a semi-rustic upbringing, he studied in England at the universities of London and Cambridge where, under the tutorship of the future Nobel laureate Lord Rayleigh, he specialized in physics. In 1884 he became professor of physics at Presidency College, Calcutta. Here, despite rudimentary scientific equipment, he undertook pioneering studies of electromagnetic waves. As early as 1895, ahead of Marconi's work on radio, Bose demonstrated how waves could travel from a transmitter though solid objects to a receiver. In his later career Bose turned to biology and is considered the pioneer of the then controversial subject of plant neurobiology. Knighted in 1917, he was elected three years later to the fellowship of the Royal Society, becoming the first Indian scientist (though not the first Indian) to be so honoured.

Like Sir Jagadish Bose, Jehangir Ratanji Dadabhoy Tata (1904-1993) spent part of his early life in Europe this time in France on account of his French mother. Here, as a boy, he met the French aviator Louis Bl riot whose achievements encouraged him to become a pilot. In India in 1932 Tata began the country's first airmail service, initially working as both pilot and deliveryman with one other crew member. Post war, Tata expanded his business to establish India's first airliner, originally as Tata Air Lines and later as the country's first international carrier, Air India. As a prominent philanthropist, Tata adhered to Mahatma Gandhi's principle of trusteeship and, in later years, spoke of his wish for India to be a happy country ahead of its being a world superpower. Another Indian subject, the author Rasipuram Krishnaswami Iyer Nararyanswami (1906-2001), was similarly drawn to the teachings of Gandhi, though was himself little interested in the post-independence Indian politics. Publishing under the pseudonym R.K. Narayan, Nararyanswami gained a popular following in Britain from the 1930s inwards. His attachment to Gandhi gave rise to a 1955 novel, Waiting for the Mahatma, in which he sketched the political leader's charisma and complex personality. Narayan's first novel, Swami and Friends (1935), in which he sketched the political leader's charisma and complex personality. Narayan's first novel, John Lockwood Kipling (1837-1911), the father of Rudyard Kipling. Inspired to become an artist and craftsman by a visit to the Great Exhibition in 1851, John Lockwood went to India in 1865 to teach ceramics and architectural sculpture, becoming a champion of traditional Indian architecture, arts and crafts, and art teaching methods. From 1875 until 1893 he was principal of Mayo School of Art, Lahore, and was depicted by his son, in the novel Kim, as 'Keeper of the Images in the Wonder House'.

The fifteenth and sixteenth century: piracy and royal service

In addition to the lives of Anne Hooper, Margaret Vernon, and Elizabeth Woodford (mentioned above), the Dictionary's early modern coverage is now extended by a series of biographies across of range of professions, from piracy to royal service. Piracy comes in the form of the members of the Cornish Michelstow family (per. c.1350-c.1454), of whom the earliest member was Richard Michelstow (d. in or after 1390), and who-in the figure of his son, Mark Michelstow (d. in or after 1421)-combined piracy and government service, as the monarch drew on his experience of attacking French shipping.

Service of a more conventional kind may be seen in the career of Sir Hugh Conway (c.1440-1518). From the mid-1480s Conway pledged his allegiance to Henry Tudor and remained in royal service for the rest of his career. His steady rise through the ranks of the court culminated with his marriage to the daughter of the earl of Devon a remarkable social achievement for a Welsh gentleman's son. There followed new wealth and status and his appointment by Henry VII as treasurer of Calais, to which position he was returned by Henry VIII. The court service of Francis Segar, the younger (b. before 1564, d. 1615) took place in the German state of Hesse-Kassel where, between the mid-1590s and 1615, he was gentleman of the bedchamber and counsellor to the protestant prince, Landgrave Moritz. Segar travelled extensively on behalf of the landgrave and between 1599 and 1611 he kept an album amicorum, or friendship book, for which he is now best known. The book includes contributions from many English notables, including Ben Jonson, Inigo Jones, and James I. The album was later indexed by his great nephew Simon Segar, the elder (d.1684) for whom a much extended biography is now possible and also by his son, the genealogist Simon Segar, the younger (b. 1675, d. in or after 1715) whose biography is now added to the Dictionary for the first time.

One further sixteenth-century subject also combined an administrative with a literary career. Born in Warwickshire, Richard Stonley (1520/21-1600) was appointed a teller of the exchequer of receipt in 1554, his duties being to receive revenues and transfer them to the lord treasurer. In this capacity Stonley had colossal sums pass through his hands (some 1.17mn between 1558 and 1566) from which, in part, he drew in order to fund a series of personal land purchases. From 1580 he was required to pay back the arrears and his failure to do so, despite elaborate schemes for calling in debts and land sales, led in the 1590s to his detention in the Fleet prison, where he probably died in 1600.

However, Stonley's historical noteworthiness now owes more to his diary keeping and activities as a book collector. He is thought to have begun the diary in the late 1550s and to have continued it until his death, though only volumes for the years 1581-2, 1593-4, and 1597-8 now survive (in the Folger Library, Washington DC). The extant volumes provide a closely plotted account of Stonley's daily life, including his reading habits, acts of worship, and complex religious allegiances as well as listings of his dinner guests. His last diary for 1597-8, written while in the Fleet, also offers much about prison life. The seizure of Stonley's goods by the crown also led to an inventory of his possessions, and with it a list of his 413 books and pamphlets. These included William Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, bought in 1593, making Stonley the first known purchaser of a work by the playwright.

The seventeenth century: civil war and chemical science

As in recent updates, we also continue our coverage of seventeenth-century subjects with a special focus on the civil war years. Hercules Langrishe (bap. 1594, d.1659) was a noted parliamentary army officer who served in Queen Henrietta Maria's household during the 1630s and who, by 1642, may have been acting as a spy for the French ambassador. With the outbreak of war, Langrishe joined the parliamentary army and was prominent in the forces that took, held, and then lost the city of Bristol the chief city in the west. His eldest son, also Hercules Langrishe (bap. 1620, d. in or after 1664), likewise served as a parliamentary army officer, volunteering for the New Model Army and serving in Ireland. In contrast to those who took up arms against Charles I, another new addition to the Dictionary the Cambridge scholar Henry Butts (1575-1632)—indirectly came to grief due to a failure to please the monarch. Appointed master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, in 1626, Butts later served as the university's vice chancellor between 1629 and 1631. This was a period of considerable trouble for Butts. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he remained in Cambridge during the plague year of 1630 but wrote of the episode having left him alone a destitute and forsaken man. In March 1632 he planned a memorable entertainment for the court during Charles I's visit to Cambridge. Unfortunately for Butts the king sat silently through the entertainments which drew sharp criticism from other members of the audience. Butts was left broken and committed suicide within weeks. His unusual death was newsworthy and controversial. In the aftermath, his portrait was removed from public view at Corpus Christi, where it is said his ghost may still be seen.

Four further seventeenth-century lives came to maturity during the Restoration. Sampson Larke (bap. 1620-1685), a radical and republican soldier in the 1640s, joined a Baptist congregation in London early in the following decade. Unwilling to accept the Restoration, he spent much of the 1660s in prison and later served with Monmouth during the duke's rising against James II in 1685. Captured after the battle of Sedgemoor, Larke was executed for treason at Lyme Regis, where Monmouth had come ashore the end to a life marked out by its forty-year ideological continuity and resistance to monarchy and Anglicanism.

Three new additions came to light following the publication in the Dictionary (in 2015) of a group essay on the Society of Chemical Physicians (1665-6), who promoted chemical over Galenic humoural medicine in Restoration London. Sir Richard Barker (d.1686) was a committed enthusiast for chemistry and its medical applications. These interests were combined with an evangelical Protestantism, and expressed in publications that interwove scientific and religious progress. In the late 1670s Barker was also a leading champion of the Popish Plot, as proclaimed by the recipients of his financial support the plot's chief culprits, Titus Oates and Israel Tonge. Barker's unimpeachable credentials gave the plot continued credibility even when questions were raised over Oates's testimony. In the 1660s John Troutbeck (bap. 1612-1684) enjoyed a thriving medical practice based on chemical principles and, like Barker, was a member of the Chemical Physicians. Troutbeck was also a highly regarded experimenter who demonstrated before Prince Rupert, and is also remembered for sponsoring an English translation, in 1659, of The Nullity of Church Censure by Thomas Erastus (1524-1583). Sir Thomas Williams (c.1621-1712) was another to take a prominent role in the Society, and was appointed chemical physician to Charles II in 1669. A skilled networker at court, Williams's professional fortunes rose and by the mid-1670s he was receiving 1000 per annum for his laboratory equipment and expenses. His interest in court politics led to his election as an MP in 1675. However, his wealth and profile also brought detractors and (having converted to Roman Catholicism under James II) his fortunes declined rapidly with the accession of William of Orange.

Hanoverian travellers

Many of the eighteenth-century figures now added to the Oxford DNB are marked out as travellers and for journeys taken be these for political or professional reasons, or as the victim of North Atlantic slavery. 1702 saw the outbreak of the Camisard rising in the C venne district of southern France and the resistance of Calvinist peasants against Catholic rule. Elie Marion (1678-1713) was a Camisard religious leader who became a spokesman for his co-religionists and came to London in 1706. Here he gained a following among English millenarians as a Camisard prophet whose proclamations included the imminent destruction of London. Marion and his followers became known as the French Prophets and were prosecuted in London by Huguenot ministers for sedition and blasphemy. Armand de Bourbon, marquis de Miremont (1655-1732), was another protestant from Languedoc, southern France, whose refusal to abjure to the Catholics had promoted him to come to London, some two decades before Marion. After the revolution of 1688, when he declared for William III, Miremont toured Europe to raise funds for the Huguenots and later argued the protestant cause during the Camisard rising. From 1706 his apartments at Somerset House became a meeting place for the French Prophets and it was through Miremont that Elie Marion was assimilated into English millenarian circles.

The arrival in Britain of Scipio Kennedy (1693x7-1774) was at the hands of Captain Andrew Douglas, the senior naval officer in Jamaica. Scipio, who had been born in Guinea, west Africa, had been taken by slave to Jamaica in 1702. In Britain he was given to Sir John and Jean Kennedy, of Culzean, Ayrshire, on their wedding in 1705. Scipio remained in the service of the Kennedy family until his death, acting first as a butler, clerk, and helpmate to Sir John who dedicated himself to smuggling and to the cultivation of his extensive Ayrshire estate. Scipio Kennedy also established himself as a weaver of cotton and linen goods and was encouraged in this by his subsequent master, the ninth earl of Cassillis. In the early 1740s the earl built Kennedy a new home (known as 'Scipio's land') at the considerable expense of £90. Scipio is commemorated by an extant monument in Kirkoswald graveyard, erected by his son.

Hanoverians who travelled east, now added to the Dictionary, include Samuel Crawley (1705-1762), a noted collector of Sicilian antiquities and later British consul in Smyrna for the Levant Company, and the military engineer Jonas Moore (d. 1741) who became chief engineer at Gibraltar in 1720 and was present on the island during the Spanish siege of 1727. Moore's life has previously been included in the Dictionary and now receives a fresh account, as does that of the naval physician, Robert Robertson (1742-1829), about whom more can now be said concerning his naval voyages, medical writing on fevers, and his later career as physician in charge of the Royal Naval Hospital, Greenwich. By contrast, one further eighteenth-century subject the lawyer and political reformer, John Augustus Bonney (1763-1813)—remained in London throughout his career, and indeed spent six months imprisoned at the Tower of London and at Newgate charged with treason. A member of the London Corresponding Society, Bonney acted as the defence counsel for several writers charged with seditious libel, including (in absentia) Thomas Paine. While imprisoned in the Tower, Bonney (like Richard Stonley 200 years earlier) kept a detailed prison diary which brought him to public attention on his release. His later history of the Tower, told through the biographies of its inmates, remains in manuscript in the National Library of Scotland.

Other lives: London, Oxford, California, and Norfolk

Born in Southwark, James Redding Ware (1832-1909) had a lifelong fascination with London's underworld. He made a living by writing, notably detective fiction, drawing on real-life cases; his The Female Detective (1864), is credited as the first to be based on the investigations of a woman employed by the police. His major legacy, published shortly after his death, is his Passing English of the Victorian Era: a Dictionary of Heterodox English Slang and Phrase (1909), based on raw material collected over twenty years, with 4000 entries preserving the ephemeral vocabulary of his age and city. The Anglo-Saxon scholar and publisher Kenneth Sisam (1887-1971) was born and educated in New Zealand, from where a Rhodes scholarship brought him to Oxford. His Fourteenth Century English Verse and Prose (1921) became a standard work, and he narrowly failed to be elected to the Oxford Anglo-Saxon chair in 1925, when Tolkien was appointed. Sisam made a career at Oxford University Press, where he built up reference publishing of dictionaries, in particular, and secured financial backing for refugee scholars from Nazi Germany.

The film director and screenwriter Edmund George Goulding (1891-1959) is an addition to the Dictionary's coverage of transatlantic lives. After enjoying success with a patriotic play written and staged at the outbreak of the Great War, he emigrated to the United States in 1915, where he settled in California and directed for MGM. His Grand Hotel (1932) won the Academy award for best picture, though Goulding himself was never nominated for an Oscar. The coverage of the Second World War and naval lives is extended through Sir Manley Laurence Power (1904-1981), who joined the staff of Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, commander-in-chief Mediterranean, in 1939, taking part in the battle of Matapan and helping to plan Operation Torch the allied landings in north Africa and later (1944) advising Churchill on operation Shingle (the operation at Anzio). Commander of a destroyer at D-Day, in 1945 he led a flotilla which sank a Japanese heavy cruiser in the Malacca straits. During the Suez crisis Power commanded the Anglo-French carrier force. In contrast to the global lives included in this release, Edwin George Gooch (1889-1964) never left Wymondham in Norfolk, where he founded a branch of the Labour party in 1918. He gained national significance as president from 1930 of the National Union of Agricultural Workers, committed to securing prosperity for farm workers by working together with farmers and landowners. Unlike his Scottish counterpart, Joseph Forbes Duncan, Gooch had parliamentary ambitions, and sat as MP for North Norfolk from 1945 until his death.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and other group biographies

During his short life the artist Walter Howell Deverell (1827-1854) was closely involved in the early years of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He met Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Holman Hunt, and Millais when a student at the Royal Academy Schools in the mid 1840s, and collaborated with them, both by assisting in and modelling for their works, as well as exhibiting on his own account. Although regarded by some as a member of the Brotherhood, to which he was proposed, Deverell was never formally elected, and on his early death became best remembered for discovering the model Lizzie Siddal.

The May 2016 update further extends our coverage of historical groups and networks, defined as those assemblies in which members known to one another engaged collaboratively in a shared endeavour. The most celebrated of our new group articles details the membership, work, and legacy of Walter Deverell's mid-nineteenth-century art circle, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (act. 1848-1854). Though of considerable importance, the official Brotherhood was a small gathering of just seven artists, sculptors, and art historians who comprised the network for only six years from 1848. Youthful and provocative, the PRB drew much criticism (including from Charles Dickens) and was satirized by Florence Claxton (see above) but also found champions in John Ruskin and from a second generation of followers such as Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris. As our new article shows, the fortunes of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood have shifted markedly in the 150 years since its conclusion: subject to ridicule at the hands of Bloomsbury, it enjoyed renewed popularity during the 1960s when its aesthetic struck a chord with members of the flower power generation.

Other art-related networks now added to the Dictionary include the founding members of the Victorian Society (act. 1957-1963)—a gathering of architects, critics, and conservationists who came together to encourage the saving and restoration of the Victorian built environment then under threat from modernist planning designs. Twenty years earlier, the Group Theatre of London (act. 1932-1939) had established itself as the country's leading avant-garde theatre ensemble, dedicated to the reform of the English theatre. As a collective of poets, directors, actors, composers, and set and costume designers, Group Theatre drew in some of the brightest talents of the interwar period including W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and Benjamin Britten who collaborated on the group's best known work, The Ascent of F6, first performed in 1937. An earlier theatrical troupe now added to the Dictionary is Queen Henrietta's Men (act. 1626-1636), the first of two theatre companies to perform under the name of Charles I's queen, Henrietta Maria. Formed by the actor, manager, and entrepreneur Christopher Beeston, it became one of London's most important and influential professional playing companies, eventually rivalling the King's Men formerly the Lord Chamberlain's Men which had hitherto been the most prestigious of the English theatre companies.

Early modern groups now added to the Dictionary include the Erasmus Circle (act. 1499-1521), a network of English scholars and public men united in their shared appreciation of the great Dutch humanist, Desiderius Erasmus, who paid regular visits to London, Oxford, and Cambridge over a twenty-two year period from 1499. Among later sixteenth-century gatherings are the King's party (act. c.1567-1573), who were the supporters of the deposition of Mary, queen of Scots, and of the elevation of her son to reign in her place as King James VI; and the Assured Scots (act. c.1542-1549), a body of men and women who by the process known as assurance declared their allegiance to the English crown during the rough wooings whereby the armies of Henry VIII tried to force the Scots into an alliance with England and to the marriage of their infant queen, Mary, to his own young son, Prince Edward. Those who participated in the Northern Rising (act.1569-1570) launched the only major armed rebellion in Elizabethan England. Marching under the banners of the earls of Northumberland and Westmorland, in November and December 1569, members of the rising sought to secure the restoration of Catholicism and an older way of life. One final literary network, the University Wits (act. c.1590), was not a known group in late-sixteenth-century England but was first defined as such, and brought together as a discrete group, by the literary historian George Saintsbury in his History of Elizabethan Literature, published in 1887.

Revisiting lives: new biographical discoveries and portraits

Also included in the May 2016 update are lives which have been the subject of new research since their original entries were included in the Dictionary mainly in the first DNB or its supplements, published between 1885 and 1996 and which, as a result, now receive freshly-written accounts.

A member of a literary family, the Anglican clergyman Augustus William Hare (1792-1834) is now placed in a fresh perspective through his involvement in the Attic Society, a student debating society in early-nineteenth century Oxford, whose members explored themes beyond the restrictive formal university curriculum and formed a network of contributors to periodicals. The Bristol vinegar-maker Peregrine Phillips (1800-1888) has long been known as the patentee (in 1831) of the contact process for producing sulphuric acid, but neither his birth nor his life, after the sale of the vinegar works in 1832, were known. It is now established that he left Bristol for America in the year of his patent, where he eventually settled as a farmer in Kentucky. The Edinburgh chemistry teacher David Boswell Reid (1805-1863) is also known to have settled in the United States, having been involved in controversies for over a decade about the ventilation of Charles Barry's new Palace of Westminster, and the steamships used in the 1841 expedition along the river Niger. When her life first appeared in the DNB, in 1890, there was uncertainty about the exact name of the poet Eliza Craven Green (1803-1866), and little was known about her life and literary career. Both have now been recovered, and as the author of Ellan Vannin , the unofficial national song of the Isle of Man, her achievement is can be documented and assessed. Eliza Armstrong (b. 1872) was the London servant girl procured on behalf of the London journalist W.T. Stead in his successful campaign for the raising of the age of consent for which he was hailed as the hero, and through his imprisonment, a martyr. Armstrong's own story places Stead in a less favourable light. Although she lives on as the original for My Fair Lady, Armstrong disappears from the historical record in about 1890 and awaits further research.

The extent of the work of a colonial civil servant who spent nearly thirty years in Tanganyika, John Willoughby Tarleton Allen (1904-1979) in gathering manuscripts of literary, linguistic, and historical interest of the Swahili-speaking world, and its legacy, can now be more fully appreciated. Like Allen, Michael George Francis Ventris (1922-1956) undertook the linguistic research on which his reputation is based unofficially and, in Ventris's case, as a hobby. The decipherment of the Minoan script Linear B, in 1952, can now be seen in relation both to the work of American scholars a decade earlier, and Ventris's collaboration with the classical philologist John Chadwick who, writing on Ventris in the DNB Supplement, characteristically (as Chadwick's own ODNB entry points out), 'made no mention of himself either as collaborator in the decipherment or as joint author of Documents in Mycenaean Greek'.

These freshly-written accounts are in addition to the 250 additional Dictionary entries amended and added to in this update, in the light of new biographical discoveries. May's update also sees the re-publication of twelve biographies to which a portrait likeness has been added for the first time. These images range from the early sixteenth to the twentieth century and include: William Elphinstone (1431 1514), founder of the University of Aberdeen; the poet and biographer Lucy Hutchinson (1620-1681); Elizabeth Pepys (1640-1669), wife of Samuel Pepys; the poet and essayist Anna Barbauld (1743-1825); Richard Fitzwilliam (1745 1816), benefactor to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; the American-born pugilist, Bill Richmond (1763 1829); the men's outfitter, Thomas Burberry (1835-1926); Thomas Ferens (1847-1930), the Hull philanthropist after whom the city's art gallery is named; Margaret Watt (1868 1948), founder of the first Women's Institute; the restaurateur and writer on cookery, Marcel Boulestin (1878-1943); Michael Ventris (1922-1956), classical scholar and decipherer of Minoan script Linear B (discussed above); and the Hull rugby league player, Clive Sullivan (1943-1985).

Linking lives: English Heritage, Westminster Abbey, and others

In January 2016 we began a project to add new links from Dictionary entries to external websites that provide curated biographical information about that person. In this earlier update we focused on links to historical spoken word archives (held by the British Library and BBC) that enable Dictionary users to hear their subjects speak.

In the May update we continue this project with a further 4000 links from ODNB biographies to related content provided by other national records and institutions. The new connections include 850 links to details of individuals Blue Plaques, as listed on the English Heritage website; to 650 images and records of funeral monuments in Westminster Abbey (including those in Poets Corner); 70 links to the Poetry Archive website, allowing Dictionary users to listen to a historical recording of a poet reading his or her own work; and 200 links to Queen Victoria's Journals (held in the Royal Archive and digitized by the Bodleian Library, Oxford) which highlight references to an individual where they appear in the queen's journal. A further 2500 links now connect ODNB biographies to entries in Early Modern Letters Online a union catalogue of early modern correspondence created by the Cultures of Knowledge research project at Oxford University; finally, smaller sets of links connect Dictionary biographies with items from the BBC's radio and film archive, and with the British Library's 'Discovering Literature' collection for nineteenth-century authors.

Put together, these new links offer interesting alternative perspectives on a person's life. With them, Dictionary users can move from a biographical text to curated content revealing where a person lived (and who else with a Blue Plaque lived nearby); how a person was commemorated in a funeral monument or memorial; how they were regarded by Queen Victoria; the sound of their voice; or their place within networks of early modern correspondence either as a writer or recipient of letters, or as someone mentioned in the correspondence of others. One example of these new links is the ODNB biography for Alfred, Lord Tennyson which now links to his reading the Charge of the Light Brigade (via the Poetry Archive); his manuscripts held by the British Library (via Discovering Literature ); his Blue Plaque (via English Heritage); and 42 references to the poet and his work in Victoria's Journals between 1860 and 1899.

There is more on the latest set of links here , together with a full listing of ODNB subjects for whom we ve added new external content. Future Dictionary updates will continue this work with links to the Art UK website launched earlier this year (which will enable readers to view art works by ODNB subjects) and to the Legacies of British Slave-ownership research project at University College London.

Our next update: Autumn 2016

Our next online update will be published in autumn 2016. New biographies will include special focus on Hull and Yorkshire lives (ahead of that city's year as Capital of Culture, 2017) and on late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century slave-owners, following a collaboration with the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project at University College London.

Back to top of May 2016 preface

October 2016

Highlights from the October 2016 update

Introduction to the update by David Cannadine

Welcome to the thirty-seventh online update of the Oxford DNB, in which, as every spring and autumn, we extend the Dictionary’s coverage of men and women ‘from the earliest times’ to the modern period. The October 2016 update adds biographies of 89 individuals active between the sixteenth and the twenty-first centuries. One of these—the wood engraver Tirzah Garwood (1908-1951)—becomes the 60,000th person to be added to the ODNB. This is an important milestone in the Dictionary’s history: so far as we know, no other enterprise in collective biography, anywhere, anytime, has ever reached such a number of entries. But that is not the only reason why Garwood is a significant addition: for she also bears witness to our determined efforts to add more entries on women who had previously been overlooked on account of their better-known spouses—Garwood’s first husband was the artist Eric Ravilious—but who are now being studied, and given ODNB entries, in their own right.

The majority of individuals in this latest update relate to one activity (slavery) and one city (Hull), conveniently linked by the person of William Wilberforce, the pre-eminent abolitionist, who was born in Hull in 1759. Like its predecessor, the Oxford DNB is strong on abolitionists (and two more, William Dickson and George Donisthorpe Thompson are added here); but it has been much weaker on the slave-owners and their lobbyists and supporters in parliament. Thanks to the ‘Legacies of British Slave Ownership’ project, based at University College London, a mass of new material has become available about the compensation paid to slave-owners when slavery was abolished in the British empire in 1833; and this in turn has enabled us to commission new articles on owners (sometimes resident in the West Indies, but more usually absentee in the United Kingdom), among them Christopher Bethell Codrington of Dodington Park in Gloucestershire, John Bolton of Liverpool, and Thomas Daniel, the so called ‘king of Bristol’.

Soon after Wilberforce’s death in 1833, a monument was raised to him in the town of his birth; in recent times, the University of Hull has become a major centre for the study of slavery; and agreeable coincidence, Hull will be the UK city of culture for the year 2017. Accordingly, the second major group of new entries is concerned with notable historic figures connected with Hull and its region, among them the merchants and traders, ship-owners and seafarers who made the city the prosperous place it had become by the late nineteenth century. By then, it also boasted a rich cultural life, and many of its grandest buildings date from the Edwardian era, thanks to the combined endeavours of a long-serving lord mayor, Sir Alfred Gelder, and a local architect, Joseph Henry Hirst. Another Hull figure who is remembered here is Sir Brynmor Jones, who in 1956 became vice-chancellor of the recently-chartered University of Hull. I once encountered him, towards the end of his career, on an interview panel which I conspicuously failed to impress. But he was a significant figure in Hull and in higher education, and it is entirely right that he should be included in this latest update of the Oxford DNB.

The Oxford DNB from October 2016

From October 2016, the ODNB offers biographies of 60,061 men and women who have shaped the British past, contained in 54,872 articles. 14 of the 89 new biographies added in October 2016 are illustrated with a portrait likeness, bringing to 11, 452 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 (60,061 biographies and 536 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, October 2017

Hull: UK City of Culture 2017

To mark the forthcoming UK City of Culture year, the latest update adds 39 lives, in 30 new articles, to the coverage of notable historic figures connected with Hull and its region, covering the East Riding of Yorkshire and the river Humber. Named Kingston upon Hull under the charter granted by Edward I in 1299, Hull was designated a city to mark Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee in 1897. About 300 people whose lives are already included in the Dictionary had connections with Hull, whether by birth or baptism, education or residence, or death or burial. The newly-added lives provide new insights into the evolution of the city and its global connexions, as well as its local institutions and hinterland.

Hull overview: Baltic trade to Larkin and liquid crystals

Six of the new articles introduce some of the main themes of the update. The entry on the Maister family (per. 1597-1812) traces a Hull merchant dynasty down five generations over two centuries. Trading with Scandinavia and the Baltic by the 1630s, the Maisters matched the leading Baltic merchants in London by the 1680s, importing iron from Sweden. Surviving records from 1714 to 1725 document the extent of their trading in commodities around Europe. Family members meanwhile assumed civic positions in Hull—as mayors, sheriffs, and MPs for the borough—while expanding the business eastwards to Russia. By the third generation, the family was moving in Yorkshire landed society, and later generations embraced country pursuits, though they retained an interest in the trading business. With the death in 1812 of the representative of the fifth generation, the direct line ceased; the firm now passed to nephews who lacked commercial acumen and, in the face of heavy losses, the business folded in the 1830s. A legacy of the dynasty survives in the family’s home, Maister House, in the High Street, Hull, rebuilt after 1743 and now a National Trust property.

As the Maisters’ business faded, Hull’s shipping and international trade became subjects of the marine painter John Ward (1798-1849), who was born, apprenticed, married, and resident in the town. Originally a house and ship painter (literally applying paint to the timbers), he moved to artistic work, exhibiting at the town’s first public art exhibitions in 1827 and 1829 and at the Royal Academy in 1831. His Return of the ‘William Lee’ (1839), regarded as his masterpiece, depicts the arrival at the Humber Dock of the first cargo to be brought direct from India to Hull, and is now among the collection of his work in the Ferens Art Gallery, Hull.

A new large-scale maritime industry developed at Hull in the second-half of the nineteenth century as the railways enabled fresh sea fish to be transported to inland markets. Charles Hellyer (1846-1930) from a Brixham fishing family whose father settled at Hull in 1856, emerged as the leading figure in this development. He bought his first fishing smack in 1870 and by 1882 had eight vessels, operating the fleeting system whereby fleets at sea were serviced by steam cutters. During the 1880s he moved to steam trawlers, becoming the leading trawler owner in Hull and a combative representative of an industry in which he established a family dynasty.

No less entrepreneurial was the couturier Emily Maria Clapham (1857-1952) who, after serving apprenticeship in dressmaking in Scarborough, opened a salon with her husband in a premier location in Kingston Square, Hull. Adopting the title ‘Madame Clapham’, she had a gift for identifying what style would suit her clients, and by personal recommendation she attracted a clientele of high society ladies for whom she produced gowns of exquisite quality, of her own design but based on elements from London and Paris fashion houses. Employing about 150 women at the turn of the twentieth century, she designed dresses for debutantes to be presented at court, and notably attracted the patronage of Queen Maud of Norway. Her salon was continued by her niece until 1967. A selection of her gowns is now in the collection of the Hands on History Museum in Hull. A new Hull institution founded in the twentieth century is represented by the Welsh-born chemist Sir Brynmor Jones (1903-1989). Appointed to the chair of chemistry at the University College of Hull in 1947, Brynmor Jones became vice-chancellor in 1956 of what had become (in 1954) the University of Hull. During his sixteen-year tenure, the number of students quadrupled, thirteen new departments were added, and—most notably—a new library was opened in 1960. In recognition of his leadership of the project this was named the Brynmor Jones Library. His own research as a chemist included the field of liquid crystal technology, in which the university achieved an international reputation. A major redevelopment of the Brynmor Jones Library was completed in 2015.

Hull’s university librarian Philip Larkin was the first author to be published by the Marvell Press, the poetry publisher co-founded in Hull by Jean Hartley (1933-2011), who was born into a working-class family in the city. She left Thoresby High School, Hull, aged fifteen, and started work as a shorthand typist. Hartley later attended Workers’ Educational Association classes and, living in Hessle, established with her husband the poetry magazine Listen, which gained a national readership and attracted contributions from Larkin. She went on to study at Hull University as a mature student (during the years of Brynmor Jones’s vice-chancellorship), and taught at Hull College of Further Education. Hartley’s 1989 autobiography established her own literary reputation, as well as shedding light on Larkin, and in 2011, shortly before her death, her achievements were recognized by the award of an honorary DLitt by Hull University.

Hull: Methodism and nonconformity

Thomas Thompson (bap. 1754, d. 1828) was the son of an East Riding farmer who began attending Methodist meetings in Hull when working as a clerk in the Russian Baltic merchant house of Wilberforce and Smith. He duly became a partner, occupying the Wilberforces’ former home in High Street, Hull. Thompson managed William Wilberforce’s election campaign in Yorkshire in 1807, when he was also elected for a Sussex constituency becoming the first Methodist to sit in the House of Commons. He had a country home at Cottingham, outside Hull, where he helped to build the Methodist chapel, which opened in 1811.

Born in Owthorne on the East Yorkshire coast George Cookman (bap. 1774, d. 1856), moved to Hull to take up an apprenticeship in the leather finishing trade and set up a successful business. He embraced Wesleyan Methodism as a young man and along with his wife Mary Cookman, also a dedicated Methodist, he was a strong supporter of Wilberforce’s campaigns against the slave trade, and helped raise funds for the Wilberforce statue. He later became mayor of the town. His son George Grimston Cookman (1800-1841) entered the Methodist ministry after seeing slavery at first-hand in North America, where he settled, becoming chaplain to the United States senate; the latter’s son, Alfred Cookman, was brought up in the USA (visiting Hull to preach in chapels there in 1850) and founded the Cookman Institute in Jacksonville, Florida. James Sibree (1836-1929), son of the minister of the Cogan Street Congregationalist chapel, Hull, was educated at Hull Collegiate School, trained as a draughtsman, and studied architecture. Sibree also had a missionary vocation, strengthened by prayer meetings of the Hull and East Riding Auxiliary Missionary Society, and in 1863 he went to Madagascar as an architect to build churches. From 1870 he undertook mission work, and remained on the island (with an interval between 1877 and 1883) until 1915, during periods of uneasy relations with the authorities, especially after French annexation in 1896. As well as building churches and schools, he was notable for his published studies of the natural history of Madagascar.

Hull: seafarers and shipowners

The son of a Hull merchant, Zachariah Charles Pearson (1821-1891) attended Hull grammar school before being apprenticed on board a merchant ship. By twenty-five he was commanding his own vessel, sailing to North America, Hamburg, and the Baltic, before developing a business as a merchant trading with the Baltic and as a shipowner. Mayor of Hull in 1859-60 he donated land for a ‘people’s park’, opened in 1860 and known as Pearson’s Park. However, he was pushed to bankruptcy during his second term as mayor after acquiring a fleet of steamers which he used to run the federal blockade during the American Civil War, to obtain cotton for Hull’s mills. Most were captured or sunk, and this led to his financial ruin. Born in Hull, George Townley Fullam (1841-1879) was instructed in seafaring by his father and, aged twenty-one, was recruited as master’s mate on the Confederate commerce raider Alabama. Fullam took part in its seizures of federal merchant vessels. He was rescued from the Alabama after its sinking in the Channel in June 1864 and became a master mariner until he was lost at sea when the over-laden iron steamship, the Marlborough, went down in the Bay of Biscay in 1879. He had kept a journal of his experiences in the Alabama, which were acquired and publicized by a Hull Daily Mail journalist; it remains important for its testimony to the involvement of Britons in the American civil war. Another personal record of a Hull seafarer is the autobiography of William Barron (1835-1913) whose career at sea spanned the last years of whaling in the Arctic fishery. The son of a mariner, Barron was a pupil at Hull Trinity House Navigation School; after serving an apprenticeship, he took on a succession of roles before being made captain of a whaleship in 1861. Four years later he set out from Hull on his last whaling voyage, subsequently becoming a master for a Hull shipping company, making twenty-five voyages a year on the Hamburg run. As well as his memoir Old Whaling Days (1895), recounting his seventeen years on a sailing whaleship, Barron gave lantern slide lectures on his experiences at sea. Like Charles Hellyer, George Lowe Alward (1842-1933) belonged to a Devon fishing family that had settled on the Humber. He went to sea aged twelve and took command of his first trawling smack aged nineteen or twenty. Alward studied fish habits systematically in the northern North Sea grounds which were then being opened up, and by the 1870s had built up a fleet of smacks based at Grimsby. He and his brother built some of the first steam trawlers, and he became leading spokesmen of the national fishing industry, and funded studies of fish migration. His book The Sea Fisheries of Great Britain and Ireland (1932) became a standard work.

Hull: painters and sculptors

Like John Ward, Thomas Binks (bap. 1799, d.1852), born in Hull, was among a group of marine artists who were originally apprenticed in the town as ship painters, and progressed to portraits of local Hull vessels. Binks exhibited at the first major art exhibition in Hull, in 1827, and works by him—including his depiction of three Hull whaleships trapped in the Arctic pack ice during the 1835 season—are represented in the collections of the National Maritime Museum, Hull Maritime Museum, and the Ferens Art Gallery. His brothers were painters, and through his sister’s marriage Binks was related to the family of Hull sculptors William Day Keyworth, senior and junior.

The sculptor Thomas Earle (1810-1876) represented the third generation of a family of stonemasons and builders in Hull, his grandfather having moved there from York. With a talent for modelling evident from the age of twelve he attended the Mechanics’ Institute in Hull before moving to London where he established his studio and exhibited at the Royal Academy. His public sculpture commissions in Hull included a statue of the physician John Alderson, the statue of Queen Victoria placed in Pearson Park (1863), and the companion statue of Prince Albert (1868), and a statue of Edward I, who had granted the first charter to the town, for the new town hall (1867). Earle was succeeded as the sculptor for civic commissions in the town by William Day Keyworth, junior (1843-1902), the son of a Hull marble mason, William Day Keyworth, senior (1817-1897). Keyworth senior had a talent for portraiture, executing a bust of Thomas Dykes, vicar of Holy Trinity, Hull. Keyworth junior, like Earle, attended art classes at the town’s Mechanic’s Institute before moving to London to continue his education. His commissions included portrait busts for Hull’s new town hall, and statues of Andrew Marvell (1867), and Hull’s first mayor William de la Pole (1870). His final commission for the town hall was a statue of William Wilberforce (1884). Towards the end of the century his work had come to be seen as stylistically outmoded, and in 1901 he failed to make the shortlist when the city’s corporation sought to commission a monument to Queen Victoria. The Beverley artist Frederick William [Fred] Elwell (1870-1958), son of a noted ecclesiastical craftsman in wood and mayor of the town, won a scholarship to Lincoln School of Art. He continued his art education in Antwerp and Paris before returning to his native town where he was prolific painter, exhibiting 210 works at the Royal Academy over his lifetime. He had a gift for intuitive portrayals, and the genre subject of people absorbed in their work was a theme of his canvasses. As well as European subjects and royal commissions, undertaken in his London studio, Elwell chronicled the town of Beverley during the Second World War. He was a founder in 1943 of the Hull Art Society. His wife Mary Dawson Elwell (1874-1952) exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1904 to 1949 and was best known for interiors and townscapes, many set in Beverley.

Hull: music and performance

The daughter of a Hull builder and architect, the pianist, composer, and conductor Ethel Leginska [real name Ethel Annie Liggins] (1886-1970) was home-schooled by her mother and had piano lessons from infancy. After further tuition from a Hull music teacher (Mrs Russell Starr), she made her debut in Hull at St George’s Hall in April 1895. Leginska was taken up by Mary Wilson, wife of a member of the Wilson shipping line, and spent much of her musical life at the Wilson family home at Tranby Croft, near Hull. Under Wilson’s patronage she continued her musical education abroad, her change of name being part of a refashioning of her image as a concert pianist. Moving in 1913 to New York, where she performed and made recordings, she took up composition. During the 1920s Leginska also embraced conducting and went on to be the first woman to conduct many of the world’s leading orchestras. The survival of piano roll recordings, dating from 1914 onwards, are a legacy of her interest in the technology of musical reproduction.

The Hull-born film actress Dorothy Mackaill (1903-1990) also made her career in the United States. Having attended school in Hull, she left home aged fifteen and found work as a London chorus-girl, moved to Paris, and was taken to New York by a Broadway producer. She then found her way to Hollywood where she appeared in her first film in 1921. Mackaill appeared in 70 films over a fifteen-year Hollywood career, performing alongside established stars. Her own status was reflected by the crowds who mobbed her on her return to Hull in 1930. Successfully making the transition to sound, she also managed her finances well and, after her screen career was over, lived as a celebrity resident of a hotel in Honolulu. Bridlington on the East Yorkshire coast was established as a leading dance venue between the wars through the popularity of the Austrian-born band-leader Herman Edward Darewski (1883-1947). Classically-trained by his father, Darewski found a talent for composing popular melodies and was a prolific writer for music publishers before and during the First World War. In 1920 he set up his own band and in 1924, after performing in Hull, this was taken on to play the summer season at the Spa, Bridlington. He initiated dance nights, introducing Bridlington audiences of holidaymakers to the fashionable new dances, and became a fixture there in the years up to 1939.

Two singers who topped the popular musical charts in the 1950s were born within days of each other in Hull early in 1926. David Whitfield already has a Dictionary entry, and he is now joined by Ronnie Hilton [real name Adrian Hill] (1926-2001), who achieved his only UK number one hit with ‘No Other Love’ in 1956. The son of a former able seaman in the merchant navy, Hilton left Paisley Street School in the city aged fourteen to become an apprentice fitter in Leeds, where he sang in working men’s clubs in the postwar years. He was among the home-grown balladeers, including Whitfield, who were signed up by UK record companies in the early 1950s to challenge the dominance of American male signing stars.

Hull: architects and the built environment

The Yorkshire architect Henry Francis Lockwood (1811-1878), born into a Congregationalist family in Doncaster, established a practice in Hull in 1834. In his early career he was responsible for classical buildings, including Hull’s Trinity House and Congregationalist and Methodist chapels, and for engaging the young Hull architect Cuthbert Brodrick as a pupil. In partnership from about 1849 with the Leeds-born architect William Mawson (1828-1889), Lockwood worked on projects in the East Riding before leaving Hull and establishing an office in Bradford, where the partners won a succession of competitions to design public buildings, including St George’s Hall and the town hall. For twenty-five years, from 1851, they worked on Titus Salt’s project for a mill and new town on the outskirts of Bradford—the resulting Saltaire being designated a UNESCO world heritage site in 2001. In 1877 John Bilson (1856-1943) was articled to an architect in Hull, where he attended the School of Art and went on to become a partner in an architectural practice, establishing a network of local connexions. He designed schools for the Hull school board, came to national attention through his design for Hymers College, and produced large suburban houses for Hull businessmen. He was a founder member of the East Riding Antiquarian Society and highly regarded as an authority on English medieval architecture.

The transformation of the city centre of Hull in the early twentieth century was largely carried out by Joseph Henry Hirst (1863-1945), the son of a railway worker, who was born near Selby but brought up in Hull and articled to a Hull architect. Appointed Hull’s first city architect in 1900 he designed the new City Hall, and other Edwardian public buildings. Hirst also designed the city’s first local authority housing as well as schools. After the First World War he was responsible for the layout of local authority housing estates to the north and west of Hull. The Bridlington architect Francis Frederick Johnson (1911-1995), born into a Hull business family, campaigned against the destruction of Bridlington’s historic buildings. After the Second World War he worked mainly on commissions for country houses and churches, as well as at Durham University, through which he became an important champion of the classical form. Feeling unsuited to a position in the family firm of timber merchants, trading with Russia and Scandinavia, Rupert Alexander Alec-Smith (1913-1983) devoted himself to art, architecture, and politics at the family home, Wawne Lodge, near Hull. From 1947 he led the Conservative group on Hull city council, and held the offices of sheriff and lord mayor. In 1937 he had promoted the foundation of the Georgian group of the East Riding Antiquarian Society, and through that group fought to save the surviving built heritage of Hull from postwar redevelopment, ensuring the preservation of Maister House and Blaydes House in the High Street.

Hull: civic institutions and government

The first museum in Hull open to the public was the private initiative of George Wallis (1731-1803) a gun-maker in the town. Wallis amassed a collection of arms and armour, as well as coins, medals, and curios, which became so popular by the 1790s that he imposed a considerable charge for admission. A blacksmith’s son from Lockington in the East Riding of Yorkshire, Wallis established a gun-making business in Hull which was carried on by his sons. From 1906 the physician Frank Cecil Eve (1871-1952) held appointments at Hull Royal Infirmary and was a regular contributor to the medical press. His most important contribution was the development of the rocking method of artificial respiration, which he reported in 1932 as a mechanical method of resuscitation. The Royal Navy adopted it in 1943, though by 1956 such mechanical practices were being superseded by mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

Finally, the autumn 2016 update includes the lives of two figures who, as councillors, helped to shape the modern city. A Methodist, born at North Cave in the East Riding, Sir (William) Alfred Gelder (1855-1941), set up in practice as an architect in Hull where his friendship with a fellow Wesleyan Methodist, Thomas Robinson Ferens (later benefactor of the art gallery), led to commissions from the flour miller Joseph Rank, for whom Gelder’s firm designed flour mills (including at Gateshead, now the Baltic Centre). Gelder also designed forty nonconformist chapels as well as shopping arcades in the city. Elected to the town council in 1895, he served five terms as lord mayor of Hull in the years after city status, and his vision for the reordering of the city centre, carried out by Joseph Hirst (see above), was acknowledged with a knighthood. Gelder sat as Liberal MP for Brigg from 1910 to 1918. A successor as lord mayor (1942-3), Sir Joseph Leopold [Leo] Schultz (1900-1991) was born in Hull the son of a Jewish pawnbroker of Polish origin. He joined the Labour Party in 1919 and was elected to the council in 1926, where he drove through a programme of air raid shelter construction to prepare Hull for the likelihood of aerial bombardment. Schultz led the council from 1945 to 1979, in which capacity he developed new housing estates, and persuaded the council to purchase the New Theatre and the town centre docks. A 10-foot bronze statue of him was commissioned by the city in 2011, and stands in a niche in the Guildhall.

Slave-ownership and its legacies

Since the Dictionary was first published in 2004, many newly-digitized sources have yielded significant new information on historic figures with entries in the ODNB. Searchable birth, marriage, and death indexes, the online census returns, and probate records along with digitized newspapers have filled in many gaps in lives. They have also revealed, or made possible to write, significant lives not already included in the Dictionary. This update draws upon one such source, the records of the Commissioners of Slave Compensation, who awarded compensation to owners of enslaved people after the passing of the Abolition Act in 1833. The awards are searchable on an online prosopographical database, created by the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project at University College London, identifying the slave owners who made claims after emancipation. Examples of those who had a wider significance in British life, including in politics, philanthropy, or commerce, are the subject of thirty new biographies in this update.

Many of those included in this selection were absentee owners who spent most of their lives in Britain. Born in Brechin, into a family of merchants and tenant farmers who acquired estates and enslaved people on Jamaica, David Lyon, senior (bap. 1754, d. 1827) spent a brief period on the island before settling in London where he set up as a financier for slave owners, and was involved in developing the West India Dock; at his death, he was one of the richest men in Britain. His third son, David Lyon, junior (1794-1872) received compensation for enslaved people inherited from his father; he sat as an MP in the unreformed parliament, bought estates in Sussex—where he built Goring Hall—and in Forfarshire, where he commissioned a sporting lodge, Balintore Castle. Another absentee was Christopher Bethell Codrington (1764-1843), the descendant of settlers in Barbados, who under the terms of his uncle’s will spent a brief period in the West Indies to gain experience of planting, but otherwise lived in England, where his seat was Dodington Park, Gloucestershire, where he spent heavily on the house and on expanding the estate. As an absentee owner he had few pretensions to ameliorating the condition of the enslaved people on his estates, and as an MP for fifteen years opposed abolition; outside parliament, Codrington was an active defender of slavery. He was awarded nearly £30,000 in compensation after emancipation. One of the largest mercantile awardees, Samuel Boddington (1766-1843), received more than £30,000 in compensation for enslaved people in Antigua, Jamaica, Nevis, St Kitts, and St Vincent. From a non-conformist family of West India merchants in London, he was involved in the slave economy through advances made by his form to plantation owners, secured by mortgages. Paradoxically, he supported parliamentary reform, espousing religious and political liberty in Britain and Europe, and was a member of the whig Holland House circle. His legacies included his art collections and library, auctioned later in the century.

From a co. Antrim farming family of Scottish presbyterian origin, Hugh McCalmont, senior (1765-1838), went to the Caribbean as a young man and acquired an estate in Berbice (in what became British Guiana) which he held as an absentee after returning to the United Kingdon where he purchased the Abbeylands estate near Belfast. He received over £14,000 compensation for nearly 300 enslaved people at emancipation. His first and third surviving sons, Robert McCalmont, (1808-1883) and Hugh McCalmont, junior (1810-1887), both born in co. Antrim, established themselves as merchants and financiers trading in central and South America, before becoming financiers to high-risk schemes in the USA. Robert married the half-sister of the politician Hugh McCalmont Cairns, later first Earl Cairns, the lord chancellor, whose early career he helped to finance. Neither of the brothers had children, and the family fortune passed to their great-nephew, the racehorse breeder Harry Leslie Blundell McCalmont. Also from co. Antrim, Charles McGarel (1787/8-1876) born in Larne, son of an innkeeper, went with his brothers to Demerara, then returned to London where he became a partner in a merchant firm focusing on British Guiana, extending credit to slave owners and holding mortgages on their estates. The firm received substantial compensation amounting to £100,000 on emancipation for estates in which it had a stake, which was invested in railways and other British industry, and in the purchase of an estate at Magheramorne near Larne. Through marriage into the Hogg family, he helped to promote the business career of his brother-in-law the philanthropist Quintin Hogg, whose son and grandson (the first and second Viscounts Hailsham) both held the office of lord chancellor.

Henry Dawkins (1728-1814), born in Jamaica, belonged to the third generation of a family settled there. The family accumulated 25,000 acres of plantations and 1400 enslaved people on the island, and in 1726 acquired an estate at Over Norton, Oxfordshire. On the deaths of his brothers, Dawkins inherited these estates. An absentee proprietor, he settled in Britain at Standlynch Manor, Wiltshire, sitting as an MP between 1760 and 1784, and was active in the pressure group that promoted the slave-owning plantocracy. One of the wealthiest people who died in Britain in 1814, his estates eventually passed to his third surviving son, also an MP and absentee owner, Henry Dawkins (1765-1852), who was an awardee of compensation for enslaved people on the family’s Jamaican estates, the last of which were sold two generations later, in 1928. The Malcolm family of Poltalloch (per. 1750-1857) were tenant farmers in Argyllshire who took a leading position in Jamaica. Dugald Malcolm (1724/5-1785) became a merchant in Jamaica and inherited a plantation in Jamaica through marriage, establishing a highly profitable enterprise on the island. He died unmarried and was succeeded by his cousin Neill [i] Malcolm (b.c. 1738, d. 1802), a merchant in Glasgow who had moved to Jamaica before returning to Britain, where he invested the family wealth in projects such as draining Crinan Moss in Argyll. His son Neill [ii] Malcolm (1769-1837) extended the family’s Scottish estate, while receiving over £35,000 in compensation for the emancipation of nearly 2000 enslaved people on the family’s Jamaican plantations. His eldest son, Neill [iii] Malcolm (1797-1857), became a member of the committee to represent West India planters in 1824 and was elected MP for Boston, Lincolnshire; an opponent of parliamentary reform, he demanded compensation for slave owners in the face of emancipation. He turned his attention to maximizing revenue from the Argyll estate, where he concentrated on sheep farming, and encouraged displaced tenants to emigrate to South Australia or Canada, though notoriously he enforced the eviction of tenant farmers and cottars at Arichonan in 1848. Another compensation awardee involved in clearances was George Rainy (1790-1863), a son of the manse, born in Creich, Sutherland, and educated at Marischal College, Aberdeen, and Glasgow University. For thirty years he was in Demerara running the family business, trading sugar and supplying credit to the plantation owners, many of whose estates were mortgaged to them. The firm received some £150,000 on emancipation, and Rainy himself £50,000. On his return to Britain, he bought the islands of Raasay and Rona off the west coast of the Scottish mainland, where he was responsible for clearances to make way for sheep farming.

One of the wealthiest Liverpool merchants in the early nineteenth century, John Bolton (1756-1837) was born in Ulverston, the son of an apothecary. Apprenticed into commerce, he was sent to St Lucia as a young man, and through trade with St Vincent became part owner of a sugar estate worked by enslaved people, and financed transatlantic slavery voyages before abolition of the slave trade in 1807, when he moved his focus to trade with Demerara. A prominent figure in Liverpool civic life, he established himself on an estate by lake Windermere, and received over £35,000 compensation after emancipation. Another Liverpool recipient of compensation, John Moss (1782-1858), inherited enslaved people from his uncle, who owned plantations on the Bahamas, and also inherited the shipping business of his father, who was associate with transatlantic slave trade voyages. In 1823 he purchased a plantation in Demerara where he moved the enslaved people with the assistance of Sir John Gladstone, and he represented Liverpool’s planters in negotiations with the government for compensation after abolition, when he and his brother received over £40,000. Moss was an early promoter of railways, and the first chairman of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. The dominance of Thomas Daniel (1762-1854) in the affairs of the unreformed corporation of Bristol, of which he was an alderman for nearly four decades, gained him the sobriquet ‘the king of Bristol’. Born in Barbados in the fourth generation of a settler family, he established the Bristol firm as leading providers of mortgages to Barbadian planters. He and his brother acquired an absentee stake in three dozen plantations, and shared compensation of £135,000 for more than 4300 enslaved people. Another Bristolian Philip John Miles (1774-1845) amassed one of the few non-landed millionaire fortunes in early nineteenth-century Britain, through the West India merchant business founded by his father. He was an absentee owner and mortgagee of West Indian estates, and a co-awardee of £36,000 compensation after emancipation, as well as a banker in Bristol with wide-ranging commercial interests in the city. Miles sat as an MP at intervals from 1820 to 1837, built a mansion at Abbots Leigh, and purchased the De Clifford estate at Kings Weston—also acquiring a significant art collection. The banker Alfred Latham (1801-1885) inherited a fortune from his father, a City of London wine merchant who also owned sugar plantations and enslaved people in the West Indies. On emancipation, Latham looked to East India, forming a partnership with a Scottish merchant in Madras, initially as commission merchants but later as a merchant bank, expanding their presence in Asia. Latham became a director and governor of the Bank of England.

Among the lobbyists of the West India plantation owners, Robert Milligan (1746-1809), born in Dumfries, the son of an innkeeper, spent over a decade in Jamaica, where he became a partner in a business involved in trading enslaved people. In London he became prominent in pressure groups of West India merchants opposing abolition of the slave trade. He promoted the building of the West India docks in the port of London, which opened in 1802, chaired the dock company, and was posthumously commemorated in a statue by Richard Westmacott unveiled in 1813. William Hardin Burnley (1780-1850) was born into a loyalist family in New York City but was brought up in London before going to Trinidad where, through his connexions, he made a fortune and acquired fourteen sugar estates. In 1833, representing the planters in Trinidad, Burnley journeyed to London to oppose emancipation, and went on to receive nearly £5000 in compensation. Also born in New York, Augustus Hardin Beaumont (1798-1838) was sent to Jamaica as a bookkeeper, but became a journalist and a spokesman for planter society, arguing that as slave-owning originated with the British nation, the owners were entitled to compensation from the nation as a whole. By 1833 Beaumont had come to advocate immediate emancipation and, back in Britain, he embraced radicalism, undertaking speaking tours in the north of England. Richard Barrett (1789-1839), a relation of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, spent his adult life in Jamaica where he managed his family’s slave-run sugar estates. As a member of the Jamaican assembly he travelled to London to promote the planters’ interest, securing both compensation and the period of apprenticeship before emancipation. One of the most vocal, and violent pro-slavery advocates was George Wilson Bridges (1788-1863), an ordained clergyman of the established church. He was appointed to a living on Jamaica where he was a passionate pro-slaver, and denounced emancipation and the activities of Baptist and Methodist missionaries. After emancipation he left the island, and developed a second career as a photographer, embarking in 1846 on a seven-year tour of the Mediterranean, later publishing prints of antiquities. His later years were spent as incumbent of a Gloucestershire parish.

The ‘West India interest’ in parliament is represented by several owners who sat in the House of Commons. MP for Stockbridge, Hampshire, from 1793 to 1822, Joseph Foster Barham (1759-1832) belonged to a family who owned sugar estates in Jamaica and spent two years there in early manhood to learn the business. On inheriting the estates as an absentee, he began a policy of seeking to improve the conditions of the enslaved people, but as his sugar profits declined and death rates rose, he began to favour a government buy-out of the owners. Compensation was paid to his son, who succeeded him as an MP. Similarly, two of the sons of Joseph Marryat (1757-1824), father of Frederick Marryat, the naval officer and novelist, received over £40,000 compensation after emancipation. Joseph Marryat had set up as a merchant in Grenada in the mid-1780s before selling up and returning to London where he invested in plantations and enslaved people in Trinidad, Grenada, Jamaica, and St Lucia. He was also a ship owner, a marine insurance underwriter, and partner in a bank, and sat as an MP from 1808 to 1812, and 1812 to 1824. As an absentee slave owner, in London he was a staunch lobbyist for the white planters and a defender of both slavery and the slave trade. Elected as the whig MP for Bristol in 1830, which his father had also represented, James Evan Baillie (1781?-1863) belonged to a Bristol merchant family of Scottish descent, and had interests in plantations in British Guiana, Trinidad, St Kitts, and St Vincent. He opposed immediate emancipation and insisted that owners should receive compensation for their ‘property’. He was co-awardee with his brother, also an MP, with a sum amounting to over £100,000. William Burge (1786-1849), a barrister and author on colonial law, represented the Suffolk pocket borough of Eye for little over a year (1831-2), acting as agent for Jamaica in London and a critic of abolition. The son of a Somerset clothier, Burge had gone to Jamaica in 1809 and through marriage acquired an interest in a coffee plantation and the enslaved people on it. He managed his own finances disastrously, and in his later years was imprisoned by his creditors. Marriage to the daughter of Lancashire banker brought Richard Godson (1797-1849) possession of a mortgage on a Jamaican estate. Born in Tenbury, Worcestershire, and as MP from 1832 for the newly-created seat of Kidderminster, Godson moved towards abandoning slavery, though with compensation for owners, of which he eventually received £5000. James Ewing (1775-1853) headed the poll at Glasgow in 1832 when the city was created a parliamentary constituency returning two MPs. A Glasgow-born West India merchant , educated at Glasgow University, he entered the West India trade, and became an absentee owner as well an energetic lobbyist for the city’s slave-owning interest, claiming over £9000 compensation after emancipation. He was also active in Glasgow affairs, as the founder of a savings bank, a prison reformer, and president of the Andersonian Institute, and his bequests to Glasgow institutions had few parallels at the time. One of the two MPs elected for the Hampshire seat of Lymington in 1832 was John Stewart (1789-1860), acknowledged in the will of his father, a slave owner in Berbice and also an MP, as among his ‘natural’ children with a woman resident in Demerara—probably of African descent. Stewart was awarded compensation for the enslaved people on the plantations inherited from his father, and in parliament he represented the concerns of the West India interest while establishing business interests in the City of London. Stewart, who represented Lymington until 1847, is thought to have been the first MP of black or mixed race.

Dorothy Thomas (c.1763-1846), a free woman of colour, was born enslaved but permitted by the will of a slave owner to buy her freedom. Later she purchased the freedom of her own mother. She had a child by a European merchant, and accumulated sufficient resources (possibly as a courtesan to the planter class) to acquire a hotel in Genada and a boarding house in Georgetown, Demerara. A successful entrepreneur, known as the ‘Queen of Demerara’, she owned enslaved people for whom she received compensation at emancipation, and sent her children and grandchildren for education in Britain, with descendants prominent on the London stage and holding commissioned rank in the army. The mother of Jane Harry (1775/6-1784) was described as a ‘free mulatto woman’, who owned enslaved people, while her father was a slave trader and plantation owner in Jamaica. She was sent to England for her education, studying art under Joshua Reynolds, and, in the face of disapproval by her family, converted to Quakerism and embraced anti-slavery. She came to prominence after her early death through reports of remarks made by Dr Johnson denouncing her decision to leave the Church of England. Her early abolitionist sentiments combined with her mixed-race heritage and position in elite society are other indicators of her wider significance. Born in Glasgow, the daughter of a West India merchant, Cecilia Douglas (1772-1862) married the owner of plantations and enslaved people in Demerara and St Vincent, which she inherited and for which she received compensation on emancipation. She invested in railways and canals, developed the Orbiston estate in Glasgow, and accumulated a significant art collection. The mother of Anna Eliza Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville, duchess of Buckingham and Chandos (1779-1836) had become possessor, through a previous marriage, of Jamaican property and had taken an active, if absentee, involvement its management. The duchess inherited from her mother a plantation in Jamaica and 350 enslaved men, women, and children, for whom she was an awardee of compensation after emancipation. Much of her own energies were directed to protecting her inheritance from her spendthrift husband, the first duke of Buckingham and Chandos, and their equally reckless son, the second duke. Margaret Gordon MacPherson Grant (1834-1877), born in Garbity, Banffshire, became sole heir of her uncle, Alexander Grant of Aberlour House on the River Spey, who had made a fortune in the West Indies as a sugar merchant, planter, and slave owner. She made large donations to philanthropic and ecclesiastical causes in the north-east Scotland. After her death, her wealth became the subject of a highly publicized legal action, known as the ‘Aberlour Succession Case’, involving her longstanding female companion, whom she had had made her main heir in her will, but which she had revoked shortly before her death.

The first recipient of a prize for proficiency in English law, awarded at University College, London, in 1839 was John Carr (1810-1880), born in Trinidad, the son of a slave owner. His mother was of at least partial African descent. He was the beneficiary of compensation awarded to his father and was enabled to have a university education in London, qualifying in law. Carr was chief justice of Sierra Leone for over twenty-five years before retiring to Britain. Another of the professional elite of Freetown who held judicial office, Francis Smith (1847-1912), belonged to two Creole families in Sierra Leone. Educated in Britain at Wakefield grammar school, he was the second Sierra Leonean to be called to the bar. He retired to Purley, Surrey, and died in Notting Hill. His elder brother, Robert Smith (1840-1885), studied medicine at Glasgow University and became assistant colonial surgeon in the colony, in the period before official appointments were limited by racial policies of the British Colonial Office. The grandfather of Allan Glaisyer Minns (1858-1930) had emigrated from Britain to the Caribbean where he became a planter and owner of enslaved people, with whom he had children, including Minns’ father. Born in the Bahamas, Minns followed his brother to London, studied medicine at Guy’s Hospital and set up in medical practice in Thetford, Norfolk. In 1904 he became mayor of Thetford, the first known black mayor of an English town.

As a postscript to the lives of owners are two figures connected with the anti-slavery movement. Thirteen years spent as secretary to the governor of Barbados exposed the Scottish slave trade abolitionist William Dickson (bap. 1751, d. 1823), born in the Dumfries spa town of Moffat, to the oppressive treatment of enslaved people in the West Indies. It drew him to the cause of abolishing the trade, emphasizing the common humanity of black Africans and white Europeans. An associate of William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, he embarked on a speaking tour of Scotland in 1792, prompting petitions to the House of Commons. An honorary doctorate was conferred on him by Marischal College, Aberdeen. George Donisthorpe Thompson (1804-1878), an effective lecturer for the Anti-Slavery Society during the run-up to emancipation in the early 1830s, is the subject of a new account, which traces his attempts to re-direct the British anti-slavery movement towards the Americas, visiting the USA on three occasions, while also visiting India twice, the second as Calcutta agent of the Aborigines’ Protection Society. He was enthusiastically welcomed on his final visit to the north, during the American civil war, when he was given a public reception in the House of Representatives in the presence of Abraham Lincoln, and received an honorary doctorate from the Wesleyan University, Middletown.

Global lives

Global interconnectedness is a theme running through many of the lives included in this update, both from Hull and—self-evidently—in the case of slave-ownership. Two further entries develop the theme. Knowledge of the connection between Britain and the Russian court in the later eighteenth century has been deepened by the discovery in the Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg of a series of views of Hampton Court and its gardens and parks, dateable to around 1778, by the topographical artist John Spyers (c.1731-1798), and purchased by a gardener employed by Catherine The Great. Spyers, the son of an Isleworth nurseryman, joined a family nursery business in Twickenham and specialized in surveying, before receiving commissions for surveys from Capability Brown. His drawings of Hampton Court are considered one of the most complete visual records of a historic landscape before photography. The civil servant Henry Gascoyen Maurice (1874-1950) had a lifelong interest in nature and conservation. As an official in the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries, from 1912 he headed the British delegation to the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea, sustained the organization during the war years through his contacts with Danish and Norwegian colleagues, and oversaw an expansion after 1920 to include Poland and Spain. His own interest was in marine biology and he promoted scientific studies of the marine environment. A draft by him was developed into the first international convention on overfishing in the North Sea.

Women’s writing, Anglo-Saxon scholarship, and art

The journal and letters of Susanna Elizabeth [Susan] Phillips [née Burney] (1755-1800) to her sister, the writer Frances [Fanny] Burney, document the musical life of London in 1779-80, when she attended Italian opera almost nightly, noting comments on the productions and performers. From 1787 to 1794 her journals record her family life at Mickleham, Surrey, where she occasionally entertained visiting musicians and became involved in a nearby community of French emigrés; and latterly, in 1795-9, her unhappy residence on the Irish estate of her estranged husband, at Belcotton, co. Louth, including the period of the rebellion of 1798. A new appraisal of the work of the Norfolk philologist, translator, and philanthropist Anna Gurney (1795-1857) illuminates both her wide-ranging intellectual interests, and the ways in which, as a female scholar, she disseminated her work among private networks. Born into a Quaker banking family, she was educated at home and became extremely proficient at languages and, anonymously, in 1819 published a literal translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, praised for its accuracy and clear, plain style. Through her companion, Sarah Buxton, she was part of the anti-slavery circle of Thomas Fowell Buxton, and undertook philanthropic work in Overstrand, on the Norfolk coast, where she was buried. A collection of Sonnets on Anglo-Saxon History (1854), by the poet Ann Hawkshaw (1812-1885), was part of an ambitious sequence tracing the history of Britain to the Norman conquest, often adopting the perspective of the more usually marginalized voices of women and servants. Brought up in a dissenting family in Yorkshire, she had belonged to a literary circle in Manchester, where she lived with her husband the civil engineer John Hawshaw, publishing her first collection of poems in 1842.

The opera and theatre designer Maria Elena Björnson (1949-2002), daughter of a Norwegian father and Romanian mother, was born in Paris but brought up in London by her exiled mother. Having studied theatre design at the Central School of Art and Design, she established her reputation at the Citizens’ Theatre in Glasgow, and went on to produce designs for the Welsh National Opera, the Scottish Opera, and English National Opera. Her design for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of The Tempest led to the commission to design Phantom of the Opera (1986) for Andrew Lloyd Webber, for which she supervised every production of the musical around the world.

The designer Margaret MacGregor [Peggy] Angus (1904-1993), the daughter of Scottish parents, spent her early years in Chile before settling in Muswell Hill, London, where she enrolled at the Royal College of Art, before becoming a teacher and eventually head of art at North London Collegiate School. Committed to the idea of art as a public activity, her early work was mural painting, but during the 1950s she produced designs for patterned tiling used widely in schools, but also Heathrow and Gatwick airports. During the 1930s Angus’s cottage at West Firle, Sussex, became an informal art colony whose members included the wood engraver Eileen Lucy [known as Tirzah] Garwood (1908-1951). Enrolled at Eastbourne School of Art, where she was instructed in wood engraving by Eric Ravilious, her future husband, Garwood exhibited her first engraving in 1926. Between then and 1930 her output displayed her ‘skill in composition and sophisticated use of pattern and contrast, together with her fascination for people and their quirks’. Diagnosed with cancer in 1942, she wrote a vivid autobiography for her grandchildren and descendants, which was published in 2012. Tirzah Garwood is the 60,000th life to be added to the Oxford DNB.

New links to external sources

In January 2016 we began a programme to add links from ODNB biographies to external online resources that provide further biographical information about the person. Examples for the January and May 2016 updates include links to the British Library’s voice recordings archive and their ‘Discovering Literature’ resources, as well as to the BBC’s Desert Island Discs archive, and English Heritage’s Blue Plaques online, plus many more, providing more than 8000 connections to curated online content.

In October 2016 we add a further 4000 links to a range of online resources. Principal among these are 2500 links to the new Art UK website which was formerly known as ‘Your Paintings’. Art UK is the online resource that makes available digital reproductions of more than 200,000 oil paintings held in public collections across Britain. The ODNB’s links (reciprocated from Art UK) now take readers of entries on artists in the Dictionary to an online gallery of his or her work in Art UK, allowing Dictionary users for the first time to see reproductions of art works discussed in the text; a next step will be to extend the links to provide portrait paintings of ODNB subjects to supplement the links we already have in place to the National Portrait Gallery’s online collection. A second set of links now connect more than 140 slave-owners to their records in the Legacies of British Slave-ownership compiled and hosted by University College London. This is an important complement to the new commissions in this field added in this update, and will provide ODNB users with an abundance of further reading and content.

As we mark the centenaries of the First World War, it seemed an appropriate time to link the entries on ODNB subjects killed in active service during the First, and Second, World Wars to details of their graves and cemeteries provided by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission; more than 150 individuals are now linked in this way. Further linking projects connect ODNB subjects to resources curated by the Institute of Historical Research, London; these include British History Online (for people whose diaries and letters have been digitized on BHO, and the IHR’s listing of modern historians (‘Making History’) which provides additional information on historical movements and schools to which ODNB readers can now connect. A final set of links, notably those to the BBC’s ‘In Our Time’ series, and to the British Library’s ‘Discovering Literature’ programme extend existing connections to new resources, including the BL’s materials relating to noted twentieth-century writers, including George Orwell, Angela Carter and J.G. Ballard.

Our next update: January 2017

Our next online update will be published in January 2017. As for every January, this update will extend the Dictionary’s coverage of the very recently deceased, with a set of 240 lives of men and women who shaped post-war British history and who died in the year 2013.

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