October 2006 newsletter

No. 12
October 2006

• New biographies published in October 2006

Our latest online update adds biographies of 144 men and women, active between the thirteenth and late-twentieth century. New lives focus on photographers and early film-makers, school founders and benefactors, and those remembered for lives in domestic service. Highlights include photographers Alexander Bassano and Walter Stoneman, whose portraits illustrate hundreds of existing ODNB entries; Margaret Powell, the cook whose memoirs led to ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’, and Byron's dashing servant, Tita Falcieri; plus the art patron Aletheia Howard, countess of Arundel, and Jack Crawford who ‘nailed the colours to the mast’ at the battle of Camperdown.

October's update also includes the third set of reference group articles, charting the history of clubs, gangs, and cliques which shaped Britain's past worldwide. New groups this month range from the Castalian Band and Pilgrim Fathers to the X Club and the Goons.

You can read a selection of new biographies in October's free reading room, and learn more in the Editor's preface to the update.




• Princess Margaret to Protein Man

Philip Carter looks at some of the new people added to the ODNB in the last 12 months.




• Groups in British history

Lawrence Goldman explains the ODNB's new research project: a series of reference group articles which connect existing dictionary subjects, and chart the history of the clubs, sets, and associations that shaped Britain's past.






• Recent writing on the Oxford DNB

• Henry Summerson: People, places, and shifting perspectives in the Dictionary of National Biography (first published in The Local Historian, May 2006)
• Lawrence Goldman: A monument to the Victorian Age? Continuity and Discontinuity in the Dictionaries of National Biography 1882–2004 (first published in the Journal of Victorian Culture), Spring 2006



• Online developments

As well as including new biographies and reference material, the online Oxford DNB now offers more ways into the dictionary, whether you are reading for pleasure, browsing, undertaking local and family history, teaching, or advising others in research.



• Learning resources
• Library resources
• Reading room
• Life of the Day
• RSS feed



Holbein and his sitters

There are 35 Holbein portraits in the Oxford DNB, illustrating leading figures from Henry VIII's court. To coincide with Tate Britain's ‘Holbein in England’ exhibition, we've made these biographies publicly availalable throughout the exhibition.




• Project news

• Public library access: following an agreement between OUP and the Museums, Libraries, and Archives Council, the Oxford DNB—together with other Oxford electronic resources—is now available online in nearly all public libraries in the UK and Ireland. You can link to local insitutions with our list of subscribing libraries and find out about remote access using your library card.
• Royal visit: on 5 May 2006 Her Majesty the Queen visited the offices of the Oxford DNB. > more



• Politics and Culture in Victorian Britain: in April the dictionary's editor, Lawrence Goldman and Peter Ghosh of St Anne's College, Oxford, published an edited collection of essays in memory of Colin Matthew, founding editor of the ODNB. Lawrence Goldman writes about this tribute to one of the most eminent recent historians of Victorian Britain.



• Archbishop of Canterbury and public history: listen to the Oxford DNB's seminar on ‘The Influence of History in Public Life’ at the British Academy.

From the dictionary: let us introduce you to some

Pioneering spirits

• Sicilian-born servant Pasqua Rosee opened London's first coffee-house in Cornhill in 1652
• Lucy Walker was the first woman to climb the Matterhorn (1871), fortified by a diet of sponge cake and champagne
• In 1908 Bob Crompton, of Blackburn Rovers, became the first British footballer to own a motor car

Mischief-makers

• ‘Alongside considerable academic endowments went an idiosyncratic personality. At Wells, he trained his little dog to leap up and snatch off the corner-cap of a bishop at table.’

William Turner (d. 1568), dean of Wells

• ‘When Bedford toured Blenheim incognito and wrote in the visitors' book, “You should come to Woburn. It is better”, the duke of Marlborough denounced him in the Daily Express as a cad.’

Ian Russell, thirteenth duke of Bedford (1917–2002)

• ‘He gave theatre tickets to a large number of bald men whose pates seen from the dress circle spelt out an expletive: characteristically he even remembered to dot the ‘i’.’

Horace De Vere Cole (1881–1936)

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