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PrefaceBy Lawrence Goldman
> New online contents, May 2006 The appearance of every update to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is, I hope, a noteworthy occasion. However, our May 2006 update is particularly noteworthy as it was 'published' by her majesty the queen during her visit to the dictionary's offices in St Giles, Oxford, on Friday 5 May. On that day the queen met in-house editors and external advisers who helped to prepare the 2004 edition of the dictionary and continue to research, commission, review, and publish the new content we have included in regular online updates since January 2005. The royal visit culminated in the 'making live' by the queen of this fifth update of the online edition, to which I welcome you now. Here we offer new biographies of 127 men and women who left their mark on British history between the twelfth and the
late twentieth century, and also 53 new theme articles (comprising 29 reference group articles, 15 reference lists, and 9
feature essays) for quick reference and ways into the dictionary. In this update we focus on three areas in which new
subjects shared a common interest or identity: modern social reformers; lawyers and litigants from the twelfth to the
eighteenth century; and men and women active in South Africa since Britain's permanent settlement of Cape Colony in 1806.
Our remaining biographies cover noteworthy people in fields ranging from policing, film-making, and medicine to science
fiction, exploration, and circus entertainment; chronologically our 127 lives range from the litigant Richard of Anstey
(c.1137–1194/5) to the psychiatrist Felix Post (1913–2001). Modern social reformersThere will be a cause dear to many readers among our new collection of reformers' lives: from dietary campaigners and champions of civic pride to advocates of health and lifestyle reform. Common to all was a determination to challenge perceived wisdom or practice. Some, like the campaigner for the blind Thomas Rhodes Armitage, had their work recognized in national institutions. In 1868 Armitage established the British and Foreign Blind Association and as its secretary worked to promote the Braille system and to improve working opportunities for blind men. After Armitage's death the association evolved to become the National Institute for the Blind. Similar institutional recognition was achieved by the architect John Dower, who campaigned for a network of national parks in England and Wales, which was established (after Dower's early death) following legislation in 1949. Other activists promoted causes that have since become established practice or from which we continue to benefit. In the field of dietary reform, for example, Mary Corkling formed the Bread Reform League in 1880 to promote the health benefits of brown bread, while Wilfred Buckley set up the National Clean Milk Society in 1915 to call for higher standards in dairy produce (then unpasteurized). In his Sanitary Ramblings (1848) the London physician Hector Gavin provided a street-by-street account to highlight the squalid conditions experienced by those living in the East End. In Leeds Gavin's contemporary John Heaton dedicated himself to improving the city's physical and moral condition; Heaton was also a leading advocate of a town hall for Leeds, which was opened by Queen Victoria in 1858. Viewed collectively lives such as these remind us both of the vibrancy of Victorian associational life and of the importance of voluntary reform movements in an age before mass party politics and the welfare state. By contrast later reformers included in this update tended to be found on the fringes of society, typically working
alone on causes for which they are now remembered (often affectionately) more as eccentrics than serious advocates of
change. Good examples include William Margrie, who, as the self-styled Sage of Peckham, established the London Explorers'
Club in 1930 and encouraged citizens to ramble across the capital. An enthusiastic Darwinian, Margrie also argued that
government ministers should be chosen for their sporting prowess, and identified himself as an example of a new stage in
human evolution, which he labelled Peckham Man. Another Londoner—whom you may have seen parading with his banner in
Oxford Street—was Stanley Green, the Protein Man. In a twenty-five year campaign Green urged passers-by to lead less
sexually oriented lives with his memorable slogan 'Less passion from less protein'. Legal livesLaw, in all its manifestations, was well covered by the original Dictionary of National Biography, the thematic and geographical range of which was further extended in the 2004 edition of the Oxford DNB. This process is continued in the current release, with a set of new articles on medieval and early modern legal lives. The earliest of these is that of Richard of Anstey, whose well-documented travels in pursuit of justice through England and France in the 1150s and 1160s have made him one of the best known of medieval litigants. Other new subjects are included primarily in the interests of completeness, with space now being given to nine of the eleven English medieval chief justices omitted from the DNB (the other two will appear in the autumn). This is not to say that their lives are only of value as items in a list. Those of Robert de Briwes and Sir Robert Charleton, for instance, illustrate the difficulties judges could face in times of political crisis. The same is true of early modern lawyers like Sir Bennet Hoskins, whose continuous tacking to the prevailing wind in the 1640s and 1650s earned him the reputation of a weathervane. As might be expected, occasional glimpses of idiosyncrasy add colour to sober records of professional success, literally so in the case of Philip Jermyn, who insisted on wearing his scarlet judge's robes at his daughter's wedding, to the intense embarrassment of his son-in-law, who recorded the event. The experience of eighteenth-century subjects in this area suggests a society in which growing numbers had recourse to
the legal system. Joseph Knight was a west African-born slave whose struggle in the courts with John Wedderburn
established the principle that slavery was not recognized in Scotland, building on the English ruling of Lord Mansfield in
the Somerset case of 1772. Edmund Tew was a co. Durham clergyman whose diary offers an insight into the administration of
justice by a magistrate in an area where agricultural, maritime, and manufacturing concerns intermingled. Important in the
demystification of the legal process in England and Wales was the parliamentary act of 1731 that replaced Latin with
English as the official language of the law; it was piloted through the Commons by Sir George Savile, a Yorkshire squire
representing the interests of his manufacturing constituents. Shapers of South Africa2006 marks the bicentenary of Britain's permanent settlement of Cape Colony. Our third set of new lives extends the dictionary's coverage of men and women active in South Africa before the country's departure from the Commonwealth in 1961. Entries include Du Pre Alexander, second earl of Caledon, one of the first governors of Cape Colony (1807–11), and the colonial administrator Sir Godfrey Lagden who, as chairman of the South African Native Affairs Commission (1903), recommended territorial and political segregation between Africans and whites—a policy that can be seen as a forerunner of apartheid. A particularly interesting feature of work on this subject is the opportunity it offers to look back from the perspective of a post-apartheid, democratic South Africa, and so record a national history evolving in the wake of late twentieth-century political change. This update consequently includes entries on leading black politicians who were early advocates of democracy—including Pixley ka Isaka Seme, a prominent force behind the South African Native National Congress (later the African National Congress), the educationist Davidson Jabavu, who founded the All-African Convention, and the convention's vice-president and later the leader of the ANC, Alfred Xuma. Seme and Jabavu remind us of the close ties that exist between native South Africans and Britain. Seme was educated at Oxford and Jabavu at the African Training Institute in Colwyn Bay, while Yusuf Dadoo—a leading representative of the Transvaal Indians and subsequently a communist politician—trained as a doctor at Edinburgh, later lived in exile in Muswell Hill, London, and was buried in Highgate cemetery. Others travelled from Britain to South Africa. The Scottish army officer John Graham, for example, took part in the
British defeat of the Dutch in January 1806; thereafter he remained in the colony to command British forces in the Cape
Frontier War 0f 1811–12 and to establish a settlement at what became Grahamstown. Other Scots now noted for their
contribution to South African life include the missionaries James Laing and Jane Waterston, the social reformer and
suffragette Georgiana Solomon, and the politician Margaret Ballinger, who, as parliamentary representative of the Eastern
Cape, became a critic of segregation and apartheid during the 1940s and 1950s. While politics is a necessarily important
theme in this new content, many first-time biographies also highlight the diversity of South African society, illustrating
for instance sporting life (the black cricketer Krom Hendricks), cultural life (the artist Irma Stern), and conservation
(Abel Chapman, the co. Durham-born naturalist and lobbyist for the Kruger National Park). An island's storyDiversity and internationalism are characteristics shared by many other subjects in the May 2006 update. New
overseas visitors to Britain include the Italian ropeslider Signor Violante, the Palau islander Lee Boo, who settled in
Rotherhithe in 1784, and Francisco de Miranda, the campaigner for Spanish American independence who promoted his cause in
British political circles in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. It is fitting that an update published 'by
royal approval' also includes the life of Henry IV's councillor John Doreward, as well as that of the children's writer
Henrietta Marshall, whose Our Island Story (1905) gained recent coverage in debates on schools history and modern
historical knowledge. And while Henrietta Marshall looked to the past, the science-fiction writer Olaf Stapledon made his
name by looking forward in works like First and Last Men (1930), a projection of the next two billion years of human
evolution. New themes: groups, lists, and featuresIn addition to new biographies May's update continues to supplement the Oxford DNB's 55,684 lives with a range of reference materials located in the 'themes' area of the online dictionary. Published and developed since September 2004, the themes pages now provide almost 300 essays and reference lists that show connections between individuals covered in the main dictionary, and collectively offer readers an online companion guide to British history. In this update we publish our second instalment of 'reference group' articles that explain well-known historical networks through which individuals came together to shape our past. The new groups, gangs, sets, and associations added in May 2006 cover 700 years of co-operation, and begin and end with science: from the Merton calculators—arly fourteenth-century Oxford mathematicians and natural philosophers—to the Tube Alloys directorate that developed the British atomic bomb. Along the way we encounter groups active in the arts (the composers of the Eton choirbook or founders of the Royal Academy), in literature (Dr Johnson's Ivy Lane and Literary clubs), politics (the ejected five members or the red Clydesiders), war ('the few' of Fighter Command), and business or settlement overseas (the South African Randlords or the Canterbury Association, which sent migrants to New Zealand). As we extend our group coverage it becomes clear how key historical events led to the formation of rival factions—a theme evident in a series of new essays covering the late 1930s through the actions, and perception, of the 'guilty men', the 'glamour boys', and the Cliveden set. Further links are established in themes with the addition of 16 new 'reference lists' and nine 'feature essays' in
which authors reflect on historical anniversaries or forthcoming events from a biographical (and personal) perspective.
Among the features in this update are commemorations of Scottish dynastic struggle in 1406, English opera in 1656, and a
look ahead to the 2006 world cup finals through the dictionary's existing coverage of British footballers and officials,
including the occasional referee. Website developments: public accessIn addition to our new academic content this update includes significant developments in the dictionary's availability and usefulness. Following an agreement between OUP and the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, the Oxford DNB (along with other Oxford reference works) can now be consulted by 48 million residents in England and by all residents of Northern Ireland through their public libraries; further extensive public library access is available to readers in other parts of the United Kingdom, and worldwide. (You can consult a full list of subscribing British public libraries here.) If you are a registered reader at a subscribing library you should be able to log on at home using your library's subscription. Ask your librarian about this. It's also easy to keep up with Oxford DNB news and features by signing up for our new RSS ('really simple syndication') web feed, which will send you our daily biography, and details of new and free content as it becomes available. More information on signing up to RSS is available here. Librarians may find that promoting this feed is a convenient way of reminding their patrons of their subscription. We have also added more links from Oxford DNB biographies to the Royal Historical Society's bibliographies—bringing the total number of deep links to partner websites to almost 40,000—and we continue to
improve the dictionary's indexes. Our next online updateOur next online update will be published in autumn 2006. This release will extend and develop the dictionary's coverage of photographers and early film-makers, school founders and benefactors, and men and women who are remembered for a life in service. In addition to new biographies the autumn update will offer topical features on the Suez crisis, and a third set of reference group articles that happily includes not just the Wise but also the Nonsense Club—along with their kindred spirits the Goons. Lawrence Goldman, editor |
