General twentieth century

The early twentieth century

Many of our twentieth-century subjects appeared in the DNB's supplements, which covered people who died after 1900 and before 1991; they include people born after 1860 but whose lives entered their most influential phase in the twentieth century. In this message I will not discuss people in the areas of art, science, literature, medicine, and business because these are gathered into all-period specialist sections. None the less, the twentieth-century supplements covered more than 9,200 people, and left a rich inheritance relating to many aspects of British life.

Several of the research editors have been active in organizing the twentieth-century articles--most notably Robert Brown, Mark Curthoys, Alex May, Kim Reynolds, Howard Spencer, and Roger Stearn. I will introduce Robert and Kim more fully in later messages, and both Roger and Howard (who made major contributions to the dictionary while working with us) have now come to the end of their contracts, so it is Mark Curthoys who now organizes the twentieth-century area for articles on people who died before 1991. His first degree was in history at the University of Leeds, but he came to Oxford for his doctorate, and then worked on the History of Oxford University. He has published extensively but has worked full-time for the dictionary since 1993, soon after the project began, and started work on the dictionary's twentieth-century articles in 1997. When writing this message I have depended heavily on the material that he has provided.

The supplement articles were often written by a friend or colleague of the subject, and at their best convey immediacy, insight and comprehension, elegant expression, and often affection for the subject. Some are mini-classics, and some reappear in the seven 'spin-off' volumes that the Oxford University Press has in the last two years published from the earlier DNB. There are problems, though, in writing history so close to the event: lack of perspective, narrowness of context, undue sensitivity to the feelings of living relatives and friends, and lack of access to official documents (the 30-year rule was not introduced until 1967). To these constraints I add the restrictions that the OUP applied to the numbers included in the early supplements.

So what is now often needed is 'historicizing': that is, providing fuller documentation, ampler context, greater objectivity, and in general a longer perspective which incorporates new sources and recent research. The familiar supplement phrases--'much loved by all who knew him', 'did not suffer fools gladly'--will not now suffice. Sometimes it is sufficient to revise lightly, but articles on the largest subjects and on the earlier personalities have often been rewritten.

We've had to do more than this, however, because--paradoxically in the century of the common man and political democracy--the supplements (like other twentieth-century biographical reference works) drew their lives from a narrower spectrum than did the dictionary's first two editors, Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee. In the supplements London gained over the provinces, the 'establishment' consolidated its grip, and a subject's inclusion became a sort of accolade. Furthermore, the enlarged twentieth-century role of the state, with its hierarchies and its ethos of public service, left its mark. So the new dictionary aims at the more inclusive approach of Stephen and Lee. The fact that they moved within the world of the gentleman of letters never led them to lose contact with the democratic provincial culture that was associated with (for example) the free public library movement. Their overall emphasis was upon subjects which held out 'interest' as much as 'worth', so that in the old DNB many unexpected and unusual subjects got included.

When our editors got to work on the twentieth century they found that 'worth' gained over 'interest', and that several important aspects of British life had been overlooked--often the unorthodox, the dissenters, or the unhonoured. Also neglected were many subjects whose enduring influence was not suspected at the time, not to mention the pioneers whose subsequent importance contemporaries could not have been expected to grasp: pioneers of the Welsh and Scottish Nationalist parties, for instance. We, in our turn, will be subject to the same blindnesses about our own contemporaries, but these blindnesses will be corrected more rapidly than in the past because regular updatings and revisions will be possible in the dictionary's on-line version after 2004.

We do not see ourselves as merely providing a pedigree for the present: we try to do fuller justice to movements which came to nothing or fell by the wayside: National Liberals and National Labour, and the extremes of left and right. Nor do we see ourselves as viewing the world only from London. Expanding coverage of twentieth-century sport has greatly helped to overcome a dominant metropolitan and establishment perspective. More gold medallists and professional sportsmen now find a place alongside the gentleman amateurs, whose coverage has also been increased. We also give minority sports more attention. We have done much to boost the coverage of women by paying special attention to the women's suffrage movement, voluntary service, humanitarian work, and teaching, as well as to the earliest women MPs. Youth has gained from the fact that only a small sample of the First World War's 'lost generation' got into the supplement for 1912-21, whereas we have felt the need to put in many more. By admitting to the dictionary more winners of the Victoria Cross we enable it occasionally to penetrate beneath the 'top brass', yet at the same time we also now include many important commanders who were previously omitted for lack of space. All this means that we have doubled the number of twentieth-century subjects included, and quadrupled the number of women, who now constitute nearly a fifth of our twentieth-century subjects dying before 1991. The process of broadening out the dictionary's coverage had already begun in the late-twentieth-century supplements, and we see ourselves as carrying that process further. If the editors and contributors to these supplements had been able to deploy the space, the funds, the perspective, and the extra knowledge that we can deploy, they would I am sure have done exactly as we have done.

A warning note in conclusion: the careers of most subjects dying before 1991 reached their peak before 1970, many before 1950, so that the new dictionary take some time before it fully reflects the impact of the welfare state or of secondary education for all, let alone the advancement of women. This is especially so now that people live longer. More than once we have alighted upon a person who would be a good candidate for an article, only to find them still very much alive.

The late twentieth century

The most recent section of the Oxford DNB covers people who have never been in the dictionary because they died between the end of the last DNB supplement (31 December 1990) and the end of the Oxford DNB (31 December 2000). This section differs in several respects in its administration from all the others, and I have drawn heavily on help in writing this from the section's research editor, Dr Alex May, whose publications lie mainly in twentieth-century British foreign policy. After completing his doctorate at St John's College, Oxford, he taught at London Guildhall and South Bank universities before coming to us in July 1998. He has organized the writing of about 1500 articles on people who died in the 1990s and who meet the same criteria as those included for earlier periods: that is, they significantly influenced British society, for good or ill, during their lifetime.

How do people get in? Like the DNB supplements, we begin by looking through obituaries in the English broadsheets and The Scotsman every day. To a preliminary selection of these we add suggestions received from all sorts of places, and work up occupational lists (actors, air force officers, archaeologists, and so on) and send them to panels of advisers, who grade the names from 'A' ('musts') to 'E' (no). They are also invited to comment on the names, and suggest possible contributors. Our advisers include historians, but typically comprise leading practitioners in each field. It's remarkable that so many busy and talented people are willing to give so much of their time to helping the dictionary in this way without reward or even promise of acknowledgement. They usually coincide in their advice, but the editor must still choose between people of similar standing in the same field, and between similarly commended candidates from different fields--we have, after all, only 150 slots to fill for each year in the decade. In a period where as yet there are few biographers and historians, we inevitably also seek many contributors for recent lives from practitioners rather than from historians or professional writers. Such people can typically combine personal knowledge of the individual with a deep contextual grasp: they know what challenges confronted the occupation in recent times and how far the individual helped to surmount them.

How much space should we allocate? This is peculiarly difficult in the most recent period when people's relative importance has yet to become manifest. There are further hazards--the temptation to whitewash, to exaggerate the person's importance, to aim at pleasing surviving colleagues and family. Such assessments will often eventually be replaced, and with the Oxford DNB's on-line version replacement will be much easier than for the DNB. None the less, the fascination of reading how the famous regarded the famous among their contemporaries will remain. Some of you will have seen that the Oxford University Press has in the last two years successfully published seven occupational volumes of selections from the old dictionary (on lives political, royal, literary, musical and military, as well as on spies and stage/screen personalities), and there will surely be a continuing demand for such volumes.

What sort of people feature among our subjects who died in the 1990s? 96% were born before 1939, so that even these latest arrivals reflect British society as it was half a century ago. Most were of working age between the 1930s and 1970s, and for the vast majority the two formative events were the Second World War and the end of empire. Many of our 1990s subjects were in Who's Who, and most were prominent in their own fields (though not necessarily in the public eye). Increasing specialization is noticeable within various professions and academic disciplines, and yet we can also see the start of an anti-specializing process whereby people aim to have not a single career but two or three consecutively. The war itself provided many with an excuse or opportunity to change careers.

Yet the DNB has never seen itself as a mere extension of Who's Who, and the Oxford DNB will include many people outside the 'establishment'--a term that gained revived currency in the 1950s. Relatively new professions such as broadcasting, advertising, and computing are well represented, whereas older professions have been waning by comparison: military officers, religious leaders, and civil servants, for example. Aristocrats get in more often as professionals or businesspeople than as landowners or philanthropists. Recreational activities have become steadily more prominent across the twentieth century as a whole. Our names include several pop stars, sportspeople, artists, and others whose lives were cut tragically short; but most lived into old age.

The twentieth century accounts for 51% of the women in the dictionary, and women feature most prominently of all among those who died in the 1990s. Yet even then they comprise only a fifth of 1990s subjects, and ethnic minorities are also under-represented by comparison with the population as a whole. Before being too concerned about this we should recall the long time-lag that inevitably elapses between the active period in a person's life and their inclusion in the Oxford DNB at death. Only now, for example, can the dictionary give mid-century refugees from tyrannies in central and eastern Europe their due; they have contributed a great many of our 1990s musicians, artists, scientists, businesspeople, and others.

Brian Harrison