Preface

• Photographers and early film-makers
• School founders and benefactors
• Servants and lives in service
• Local heroes and ‘lives from below’
• New themes: groups and features
• Our next online update

> New online contents, October 2006

Welcome to the sixth online update of the Oxford DNB, which appears shortly after the second anniversary of the dictionary's publication in September 2004. In this update we continue to extend and develop the dictionary's coverage of men and women who shaped the British past worldwide, from the earliest times to the year 2002.

Our latest update adds biographies of 144 men and women who left their mark on British history between the thirteenth and the late twentieth century, as well as 26 new theme articles (comprising 20 reference group essays and 6 features) located in the ‘themes’ area of the online edition. In this update we focus on three areas in which new subjects shared a common interest or identity: photographers and early film-makers, school founders and benefactors, and those who are remembered for lives in royal and domestic service. Our remaining biographies record, among others, coffee-house keepers, merchants, poets, a river pilot, surgeons, and a tunnel-builder; chronologically our 144 new lives range from the abbot Richard of Ware (d.1283) to the servant Margaret Powell (1907–1984), whose memoirs prompted the popular television series Upstairs, Downstairs. Extracts from the new update are available in the ODNB reading room for October.

Photographers and early film-makers

If you use the online dictionary's ‘image’ search (to look through the dictionary's 10,300 portraits) you may already be familiar with the names of Bassano, Coster, Stoneman, and Vandyk. They appear in the captions of hundreds of nineteenth- and twentieth-century portrait photographs reproduced to illustrate subjects in the Oxford DNB. The work of the photographers Alexander Bassano, Howard Coster, Walter Stoneman, and the father and son partnership of Carl and Herbert Vandyk is now preserved in the National Portrait Gallery, London, whose curators were responsible for selecting the likenesses in the Oxford DNB. It is therefore fitting that, in the year of the NPG's 150th anniversary, the dictionary's latest update adds entries on the photographers whose work is central to the NPG's photographic collection (started in 1917) but about whose lives and careers relatively little has previously been written. Moreover, at a time when mobile phones and digital cameras make it ever easier to record people and places, these new biographies recall a time when photography enjoyed its first boom. In 1851 there were 12 commercial photographers in London; by 1857 there were 155. Among them was Alexander Bassano, who built up a fashionable firm with studios in London's Regent Street, Bond Street, and the King's Road where he photographed the leaders of late Victorian and Edwardian society. Fashionable figures from later generations were recorded by, among others, Horace Nicholls (1867–1941), famous for this studies of Edwardians at play, Howard Coster (1885–1959), the pre-eminent photographer of British literary figures in the interwar period, and Walter Stoneman (1876–1958), whose archive of 40,000 negatives forms the cornerstone of the NPG collection.

Others included in this update are remembered as pioneers of photography beyond the studio. The Scot William Carrick was brought up in St Petersburg and specialized in recording nineteenth-century Russian folk scenes; Cecilia Glaisher (1828–1892) is known for her beautiful prints of British ferns, while Francis Mortimer (1874–1944) developed an expertise in marine photography, securing himself by a lifeline to cliffs and boulders in order to capture crashing rocks. Between 1914 and 1918 Horace Nicholls set aside his society portraits and undertook an official record of female munitions workers. It was a similar combination of studio and documentary work that shaped the career of the Liverpool photographer Edward Chambré Hardman, whose day-to-day work was portraiture but who is best-known for his land- and cityscapes, including the image of the Ark Royal rising from the Birkenhead shipyard. Social documentary was also a favoured subject of such pioneer film-makers as Birt Acres (1854?–1918), whose film of the Oxford and Cambridge boat race of March 1895 is thought to be Britain's first news film, and the partnership of Sagar Mitchell (1866–1952) and James Kenyon (1850–1925), whose recently rediscovered films of industrial Lancashire, shown last year by the BBC, have introduced a modern audience to a previously lost world.

School founders and benefactors

Schools and charitable institutions affect countless lives, making it appropriate that their founders should always have been well represented in the dictionary. They are joined in this latest update by a number of men and women whose posthumous influence, local and national, even international in some cases, is given a personal quality by the attachment of their names to their benefactions. By the fifteenth century, as Nicholas Orme shows in his new schools feature article, such munificence was no longer confined to nobles and bishops, but was also the work of lawyers and knights, often acting together with their wives, and this trend continued in the sixteenth century and afterwards. John Cooke (d. 1528), who with his wife Joan (d. 1544/5) founded the Crypt School in Gloucester, was a mercer, while Agnes Mellers (d. 1513/14), honoured today as the effective founder of Nottingham high school, was the widow of a successful bell-founder. Religion was often the motivating spirit behind the endowment of schools. During the reformation the generous piety that created a school could be either backward-looking, like that of John Roysse (d. 1571) at Abingdon, concerned to maintain the standards of the Catholic past, or inspired by protestant ideology, promoting education to ensure that the young received an appropriately godly upbringing. Thomas Alleyne (c.1488–1558), a clergyman who founded no fewer than three schools, falls into this category.

Works of charity, whether strictly educational or not, could be established anywhere, and by women as well as by men. In some cases wives supported or completed projects initiated by their husbands, but others—Lady Dorothy Pelham (d. 1613) is a good example—acted independently. Radcliffe College at Harvard in New England bears the maiden name of Ann Moulson, Lady Moulson (1576–1661), whose gift of £100 created Harvard's first scholarship fund. Several of the new subjects, Ann Moulson among them, lived in or near London; others were active far from the capital, like Thomas Ellis (d. 1562) at Doncaster and Sir James Smith (c.1621–1681) at Camelford in Cornwall. Some passed quiet and useful lives, while others were men of the world, among them the London financier Francis Bancroft (1667–1728), who appears to have left a decidedly equivocal reputation as well as a fortune, while George Watson (1654–1723) of Edinburgh was both politically alert and a financial wizard, as one might expect of the first accountant to the Bank of Scotland.

Servants and lives in service

The popular image of the servant in history is of a life ‘below stairs’ in which the individuality required for biography was subordinated in the service of better-known masters. This is indeed the case for the great majority of servants, valets, and butlers whose lives go unrecorded. Others, however, are remembered and increasingly studied in histories of work, youth, and domestic life, and are known to us through several routes. In the middle ages and the early modern period—when traditional values based on lordship still carried much weight—service did not necessarily bring with it later associations of low social standing. As a result royal maids, including Katherine Knollys, Lady Knollys (d. 1569) and Katherine Howard, countess of Nottingham (d. 1603), were themselves prominent women of standing. Other royal servants—among them the saddler Thomas Cure and the tailors John Skut and Walter Fish—are studied for their contribution to the material culture of the Tudor court.

A second set of servants are known through their association with celebrated masters. As well as providing a record of the Restoration élite Samuel Pepys's diary gives a remarkable account of the lives of a group of predominantly young men and women who served (as well as taxed and exasperated) their master, and who are now brought together in an essay on the ‘Servants of Samuel Pepys’. The hazards and humour of master-servant relations are likewise evident in the life of Henry Moat, the spirited butler of Sir George Sitwell and a popular figure in the memoir of Sir George's son Osbert. Finally there are those servants we remember for their own words. The eighteenth-century accounts of John Harrower and William Moraley, for example, provide rare insight into the lives of indentured servants who sold themselves into service to gain work in the American colonies, while Margaret Powell gained prominence with Below Stairs (1968), her unsentimental account of a career from kitchen maid to cook. As with the school founders, these biographies are accompanied by a new feature essay, ‘Lives in service’, surveying the dictionary's coverage of historically significant servants.

Local heroes and ‘lives from below’

Memoirs and journals also feature in a number of new lives with strong regional associations, though they are also the subject of wider historical study. The Windsor police officer John Pearman (1819–1908) is today remembered for his remarkable account (posthumously published in 1988 as A Radical Soldier's Tale) of life in India during the Anglo-Sikh wars. Another rare commentary on life in the ranks came from the Dublin-born soldier Roger Lamb, whose journal of the American War of Independence was published in 1809 and later formed the basis of Robert Graves's two novels Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth and Proceed, Sergeant Lamb. In Glasgow William Cameron, popularly known as Hawkie, was celebrated as a beggar and pedlar of songs and is known to historians of Victorian street culture from his posthumous Autobiography of a Gangrel. It was also a memoir that brought Victoria Hughes (1897–1978) unexpected fame at the age of eighty. Between the 1930s and 1960s Hughes worked as a lavatory attendant in an area of Bristol frequented by prostitutes, to whom she gave support and whose lives she candidly described in her Ladies' Mile; in 1993 Hughes's contribution to Bristol civic life was commemorated with a blue plaque on the facilities she supervised for over thirty years.

Other local figures owe their fame to deeds rather than words. The Sunderland sailor Jack Crawford (1775–1831) was a man of action who climbed the broken mast of Admiral Duncan's flagship at the battle of Camperdown (1797) to restore the fallen blue squadronal standard. Crawford's bravery in ‘nailing the colours to the mast’ made him a popular hero on his return to Britain and more recently a prominent figure in Sunderland's heritage. Other lives defy easy categorization. In 1569 Agnes Bowker of Market Harborough, Leicestershire, was associated with a monstrous birth, bringing her to the attention of the bishop of London, and providing her with an appearance in a later medical treatise as ‘one Bowker ... which of late, God wot, is brought to bed of a cat’.

New themes: groups and features

In addition to new biographies October's update continues to supplement the Oxford DNB's 55,828 lives with a range of reference materials located in the themes area of the online dictionary. Here we publish our third instalment of reference group articles that explain well-known networks that brought together leading figures from the past. The new groups, gangs, and associations added in October 2006 cover 1500 years of human interaction—from the early Welsh poets known as the cynfeirdd to the Inklings of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkein. Along the way we encounter the Jacobean writers who met at London's Mermaid tavern and the X Club scientists; further afield are groups central to early American history, including the Pilgrim Fathers and the trustees for the colony of Georgia. Three more groups in this update are connected by the theme of knowledge, and its absence: the Aberdeen Philosophical Society or ‘Wise Club’ of enlightenment thinkers, their contemporaries in London's Nonsense Club, and those modern masters of idiocy and eccentricity, the Goons.

November 2006 sees the fiftieth anniversary of the Suez crisis, to which Michael Thornhill provides a guide in the first our new feature essays. In addition to our essays on school founders and servants this release includes features by Paul Addison on the shapers of the home front, 1939–45, and Stephen Porter on the impact of the great fire of London, 240 years on.

Our next online update

Our next online update will be published in January 2007 and, like previous January releases, will extend the dictionary's coverage of men and women who have died in the early twenty-first century. In January 2007 we will add some 200 biographies of people who died in the year 2003. January's update will also include new features on prominent anniversaries, including the Act of Union (1707) and the abolition of the slave trade (1807).

Lawrence Goldman, editor

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