October 2009 update

The October 2009 update of the Oxford DNB adds biographies of 96 men and women active between the thirteenth and late twentieth century. In addition to biographies, the update includes new Themes, offering lists and historical groups for quick reference.

A full list of subjects is also available, along with the editor’s introduction to the new update. Online access to all of the new biographies—together with the Oxford DNB’s 56,949 existing entries—is now freely available, at home or anywhere, via nearly all UK public libraries.

Scottish lives: Scotland and overseas

October’s update adds more than 40 men and women remembered for their contribution to Scottish history or to Scotland’s influence overseas.

250 years after Robert Burns’s birth, the update includes Jean Armour, the poet’s long-suffering wife. Armour endured Burns’s philandering and scorn, and was left with a family to raise after the poet’s early death. But to later generations she was also Burns’s true love and the subject of some of his most popular songs.

October’s update also includes an earlier national heroine, Christian Fletcher, who smuggled the honours of Scotland (the crown, sceptre, and sword of state) out of Dunnottar Castle, preventing them from falling into the hands of Cromwell’s English forces. Though it was she who removed the honours, Fletcher received scant recognition for her courage during her lifetime.

Scottish engineering prowess is revealed in the lives of James Blyth and Archibald Leitch. In the 1870s Blyth pioneered the generation of electricity from wind power, predating an American engineer often credited with this important technology. Archibald Leitch is remembered as the architect of Britain’s greatest 20th-century football stadiums (including Ibrox Park, Highbury, and Old Trafford), with designs that lasted until wholesale renovations in 1990s.

Sporting practitioners include the angler Peter Malloch who catered for the influx of sportsmen to the Scottish hills and lochs in pursuit of game, and James Guthrie who—in the newer sport of motorcycling— became a European champion and winner of six Manx TT races.

Entertainers of a different kind include the Glasgow music-hall artist Tommy Lorne and the opera singer Mary Garden who became a favourite of Claude Debussy. Garden spent many years in North America but later returned to her native Aberdeen. The theme of Scots overseas, and of ‘homecoming’, also features in other lives, including the Falkirk lathe operator Robert Dollar who, while becoming a Pacific shipping tycoon, remained a benefactor of his home town.

To complement these lives, and to mark ‘Homecoming’ year in 2009, October’s update also features an interactive gallery of Faces of Scotland, based on a mural at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. The mural, of Scottish historical figures, is by William Hole, another new addition in this update.

Britons in Latin America

October’s update also includes biographies of 30 men and women who shaped the history of Latin America between the early nineteenth and the late twentieth century. Some, including Peter (Pedro) Campbell were prominent in the military campaigns that secured independence for the new Latin American republics. Others are remembered for shaping the fortunes of these new states, among them Bernardo O’Higgins—‘the liberator of Chile’—who rose to become the country’s supreme director.

Later subjects went to South America as settlers, missionaries, businessmen, and archaeologists. During the 1860s the Caernarfon printer Lewis Jones was a principal figure in the creation of a Welsh settlement in Patagonia; the adventurer Frederick Mitchell-Hedges sought vanished Mayan cities in the 1920s (and claimed to have discovered a mysterious crystal skull), while William Gibbs mined guano as a fertilizer and used his new wealth to rebuild Tyntesfield Hall in Somerset.

Themes in history Themes in October continue the Scottish focus with group essays on the Kailyard School of novelists and the Lords of the Congregation. Other groups include the American Founding Fathers while new lists include holders of the Order of Merit.

There are now more than 450 groups, lists and features available in the Themes area of the Oxford DNB online.

> Sign up for a free Life of the Day or biography podcast

> Read the Oxford DNB, free and at home, using your library’s subscription

> More about the Oxford DNB