Preface

• Poetry, art, and architecture
• History, politics, and public service
• Laboratories, courts, class- and boardrooms
• Screen, stage, and studio
• Our next online update

> New online contents, January 2007

Welcome to the seventh online update of the Oxford DNB, in which, as every January, we extend the dictionary's coverage further into the twenty-first century. Our latest update adds biographies of 202 men and women who died in 2003, along with three feature essays, two of which mark the forthcoming anniversaries of the abolition of the slave trade (March) and the Act of Union (May). Selected biographies from the new update are available in the Oxford DNB reading room for January.

Of the 202 new lives added here, some 59 (29%) were born before the outbreak of the First World War and 9 (4%) were born after the Second World War. The majority were, therefore, born between the wars and flourished from the 1950s until the 1990s, though the activities of some new additions, such as Diana, Lady Mosley, took place in earlier decades. The wife of Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, she attained her significance through marriage in the 1930s. The oldest of the group, the biochemist Walter Morgan, was born in 1900; the youngest, the opera singer Susan Chilcott, was born in 1963. In the case of the nutritionist Doris Grant, who lived to be 98 and advocated the consumption of organic vegetables and wholemeal flour, it might be said that she practised what she preached. The inventor of the ‘Grant loaf’, she advised British women that ‘if you love your husbands, keep them away from white bread ... If you don't love them, cyanide is quicker but bleached bread is just as certain, and no questions asked.’ Among other things, the mathematician Donald Coxeter attributed his longevity to an abiding fascination with his subject and standing on his head for fifteen minutes each morning. Of the new subjects added in this update 46 are women, while 29 were born outside the British Isles, fourteen of them in the then British empire and five in Germany. Among the latter, the life of Sir Bernard Katz, the Nobel prize-winning physiologist whose entry has been written by another Nobel prize-winner, Sir Andrew Huxley, reminds us of the great infusion of intellectual talent brought to Britain by refugees from central Europe during the 1930s.

Poetry, art, and architecture

Among the most notable additions in this update are the cluster of poets and their editors who died in 2003. Three poets—Charles Causley, Kathleen Raine, and Peter Redgrove—were winners of the queen's gold medal for poetry. Four others join them: F. T. Prince, C. H. Sisson, Peter Russell, and William Cookson, the editor for nearly forty years of the poetry journal Agenda. Taken together this group is nothing if not diverse. Contrast the life of Charles Sisson, a senior civil servant in the Ministry of Labour (who ‘did not reach the top after all / Because I had not the right sort of mind’) and who wrote a style of fiercely honest, simple, and direct verse, with that of Kathleen Raine, a famous undergraduate beauty who had several marriages and complex affairs, and whose poetry focused on the mythic, transcendental, and eternal. Raine's life was marked by several deeply unhappy and unfulfilled romantic attachments. Peter Redgrove, on the contrary, enjoyed a tremendous burst of creative energy after meeting his second wife, the novelist Penelope Shuttle. Charles Causley, who was born in Cornwall and who taught in a primary school there for thirty years, was inspired by his childhood and that of his pupils. Redgrove also celebrated ‘the numinous seascapes and landscapes of Cornwall’. But F. T. Prince, though he wrote poetry throughout his life, is usually remembered for one remarkable poem set in Italy in 1942, ‘Soldiers Bathing’, one of the most famous literary works of the Second World War. Several of the group—Causley, Sisson, Russell—saw active service overseas between 1939 and 1945, and Prince spent the war cracking codes at Bletchley Park. Peter Russell, meanwhile, found a vehicle for his verses in his creation of Quintilius, an invented Latin poet of the fifth century whose poetry Russell supposedly translated: ‘he particularly enjoyed one pompous review, which declared that the translations were not a patch on the originals’.

The visual arts and architecture are also well represented in the January 2007 update. The sculptors Lynn Chadwick and Daphne Hardy Henrion are joined by the painters Patrick Procktor and Sir Terry Frost, the potter Michael Casson, the wood-engraver Monica Poole, and by Terence Parkes, the cartoonist ‘Larry’. Two entrepreneurial arts administrators are also included: Jeremy Rees, who founded the Arnolfini arts centre in Bristol, and Joanna Drew, director of the Hayward Gallery on London's South Bank, who was for many years ‘unquestionably the most powerful individual in the British art scene’. Several eminent architects now join their former partners in the pages of the dictionary: Sir Philip Powell of Powell and Moya joins Hidalgo Moya; Neville Conder of Casson, Conder & Partners joins Sir Hugh Casson; and Peter Smithson joins his wife Alison. Another architect, the idiosyncratic Cedric Price, is now best known for his design of the Snowdon Aviary at the London Zoo but his remarkable unbuilt projects—a Fun Palace designed for the theatre director Joan Littlewood, the Potteries Thinkbelt, and an early proposal for ‘a great wheel-like structure of observation cars’ on the South Bank, prefiguring the London Eye—are also notable.

History, politics, and public service

Among the scholars who died in 2003 are some very notable historians whose influential work formed the historical consciousness of the post-war era. Christopher Hill made the study of England in the seventeenth century his life's work, adding not only to our knowledge of the politics and religion of the age but introducing a generation of readers to the radical groups which emerged during the civil war in a ‘world turned upside down’. Robert Blake's biography of Disraeli made him a doyen of modern political history, an expert on the constitution, and a Conservative grandee in his own right. John Roberts, trained as a historian of modern Europe, wrote a magisterial and very well-received History of the World. Hugh Trevor-Roper ranged freely across the ages, from the rise of Christian Europe to the last days of Hitler, lighting upon remarkable and interesting characters from Archbishop Laud to Sir Edmund Backhouse and entertaining readers with his wit, insight, and penetration. All four were educated and taught in Oxford. They are joined by two notable historians of the United States, Esmond Wright (who was also a Conservative MP) and Frank Thistlethwaite, later vice-chancellor of the new University of East Anglia. John Terraine took an unfashionable view of the Great War, contesting the prevalent view that brave British lions were led to their deaths by commanding donkeys; he lived to see his defence of the officers vindicated by more recent scholarship. Len Garrison was a pioneer black historian; John G. Hurst was a specialist in medieval archaeology; Marjorie Reeves wrote popular histories for children; and Alan Davidson and Elisabeth Lambert Ortiz were both pioneers of a historical sub-discipline that has now achieved its maturity, the history of food.

The January 2007 update also includes another historian, and one whose biographer, Tony Howard, believes will be remembered as much for his books and historical essays as for his place in national political life. Roy Jenkins, the subject of our longest new entry, may be said to characterize the post-war era. A Labour MP under Clement Attlee, home secretary and chancellor of the exchequer under Harold Wilson in the 1960s, president of the European Commission in the 1970s, and then a founder and leader of the breakaway Social Democratic Party in the 1980s, Jenkins probably had more influence over British public life than many post-war prime ministers. Though he did not reach the very apex of politics, to which he aspired, his legacy—including the liberal social legislation of the 1960s, the orientation of Britain towards the European Union, and the transformation of the old Labour Party—has shaped public and private life in the present. Jenkins embodied an older and now dying tradition of the scholar-politician, and his biographies of Gladstone, Asquith, Churchill, and Truman, among many other books he wrote, would have ensured his place in the Oxford DNB even had he not had a political career. He is joined in this release by another scholar who brought distinction to public life, the moral philosopher Sir Bernard Williams, whose writings on ethics brought him not only academic success and international repute but a role as a public intellectual in the 1960s and 1970s and an adviser to government.

In addition to Roy Jenkins this update adds three further politicians born in Wales: Aubrey Jones, a Conservative; the nationalist and member of the Welsh assembly Phil Williams; and Gareth Williams, Baron Williams of Mostyn, leader of the House of Lords in the Blair administration, whose memoir has been written by the current lord chancellor, Lord Falconer. The contrasting character and careers of two Labour MPs, Renee Short ‘the red-headed firebrand’ as the tabloid newspapers always described her, and Don Concannon, the unfortunate representative of the Nottinghamshire coalfields, provide evidence of the diverse political traditions within the Labour movement. George Younger, secretary of state for Scotland, and Sir Denis Thatcher provide two faces of Conservatism in the 1980s, with Thatcher's support and counsel instrumental in his wife's early career as an MP and her rise to political power. He also provided the nation with a stock of jokes for more than a decade; there are fewer higher accolades in British public life than to have a regular page about oneself in the magazine Private Eye.

This release also includes the lives of Sir Charles Kerruish, probably the leading Manx politician of the twentieth century, and Max Nicholson, a pioneer environmentalist. If these names are relatively unfamiliar, the name of another new entrant to the dictionary, that of David Kelly, weapons inspector, will resonate with readers. Kelly's death by suicide, which followed his exposure as the possible informant of a BBC journalist accused of misinformation, led to the Hutton inquiry into the corporation's reporting of the origins of the war in Iraq, and subsequent unprecedented resignations of senior executives of the BBC. Although he was made famous in this tragic manner, it is worth remarking on Kelly's significant achievements as a biochemist, toxicologist, and leading expert on chemical and biological weapons. These would have made him a candidate for inclusion in the Oxford DNB independent of the events of 2003.

Laboratories, courts, classrooms, and boardrooms

Among scientists and engineers now added to the dictionary the work of Sir Bernard Katz is pre-eminent. Born in Leipzig, where he took a medical degree, Katz came to Britain in the 1930s and spent much of his career at University College, London. There he investigated the functioning of nerves and muscles, especially at those points where a nerve impulse is transferred from nerve to muscle fibre, work recognized with the Nobel prize for physiology or medicine in 1970. In another field the aircraft designer and executive Sir George Edwards enjoyed a long and creative career which saw him involved in all types of project, from the manufacture of wartime minesweepers to the development of Concorde. He is justly described in his Oxford DNB article as ‘the most widely accomplished and highly regarded British aircraft designer and industrial leader after the original pioneers’. January's update also includes three pioneers in computing: Arthur Humphreys, the managing director of ICL, Britain's flagship computer manufacturer in the 1960s; Sir John Fairclough, head of development at IBM UK, who became chief scientific adviser to Margaret Thatcher and reorganized science funding in Britain; and Roger Needham, who designed cryptographic controls for authentication, and after a career at Cambridge University became the first managing director of Microsoft Research Ltd. They are joined by a number of important medical scientists: the epidemiologist Roy Acheson; the rheumatologist Eric Bywaters; Ross Taylor, the pioneering transplant surgeon based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne; and two biochemists who worked together on the blood system, Walter Morgan and Winifred Watkins.

In its new coverage of legal lives January's update highlights many different facets of the law through the lives of its practitioners. Lord Wilberforce is accounted, in an article by Lord Neill, one of the foremost judges of the twentieth century; Sir John Smith was one of its most eminent legal scholars. Sir Stephen Tumim became a nationally known figure for his stern criticisms of the prison system and the conditions in which prisoners were held during the 1990s. Peter Carter-Ruck was a celebrity libel lawyer, a flamboyant figure who made a career out of defamation and slander. And if Hartley Shawcross failed to achieve his full potential in either the law or politics, for a moment immediately after the Second World War, as one of the prosecutors at the Nuremburg trials of Nazi war criminals, he was a figure of international renown. Among educationists a very notable feature of this release is the number of founding vice-chancellors of new universities. Frank Thistlethwaite at the University of East Anglia is joined by Jack Butterworth, the controversial vice-chancellor of the new Warwick University, Bertrand Hallward, who presided over the transformation of University College, Nottingham, into Nottingham University, and Walter Perry, a pioneer of the Open University. Their collective presence is evidence of one of the most striking aspects of cultural and intellectual life in the late 1950s and 1960s, the first planned expansion of the university system. Staying with education, January's update also includes the leading comprehensive school headmistress Dame Helen Metcalf.

Those who made their careers in business, and who now appear in the dictionary, include the fashion designer Hardy Amies; Jennifer d'Abo, who revitalized the stationers Ryman; the property developer Max Rayne; and Sir Roland Smith, who was chairman of the House of Fraser and of Manchester United. Tony Cattaneo, the advertising executive, developed a distinctive, folksy style for television, and was responsible for both the Tetley tea men and the Homepride flour graders.

Screen, stage, and studio

The actresses added to the dictionary in this release are certainly diverse: Patricia Roc was a pin-up of the 1940s; Dame Wendy Hiller was a stage actress beloved by Shaw; while Dame Thora Hird—a familiar figure on television a generation ago, and an especial favourite of the playwright Alan Bennett—had by then enjoyed virtually a lifetime in films and theatre, having made her first stage appearance in 1911, aged eight weeks. Both Alan Bates and David Hemmings emerged in the 1960s. But if Hemmings, the star of Blow-Up, was always associated with this film's famous and controversial opening, Bates was a star in a host of films over forty years, though for many he will always be remembered as Rupert Birkin in Women in Love. They are joined by two men with quintessential 1960s reputations, John Schlesinger, the director of A Kind of Loving, Billy Liar, and Sunday Bloody Sunday, and Jeremy Sandford, the scriptwriter of Cathy Come Home, the 1966 docu-drama about the plight of the homeless, regularly voted the most influential of all television programmes. The theatre director Clare Venables, who worked at the Royal Court in London and the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield among other venues, is joined by the impresario Sir Peter Saunders, responsible for the famous production of Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, an ageless fixture of the London stage.

From the early days of television the Oxford DNB now includes Michaela Denis, who presented wildlife documentaries in a singular style with her husband Armand and was famed for putting on her lipstick before confronting an animal, and Barry Bucknell, the early TV DIY man. We also include the scriptwriter Peter Tinniswood and the entertainer and comic—indeed the comic's comic—Bob Monkhouse. Though his career occasionally plumbed such depths as Sunday afternoon's The Golden Shot, Monkhouse reinvented himself many times for new audiences, and his voluminous collection of jokes gave him plenty to work with.

Adam Faith, a star of the early 1960s, reminds us of a cheeky, home-grown variety of domesticated rock and roll then in vogue. Robert Palmer left his singing roots in white blues to become a successful 1980s crooner and lounge lizard. Maurice Gibb was a member, with his brothers, of one of the most successful and long-lasting bands of the age, the Bee Gees. And Mickie Most was a legendary producer of hit records from the 1960s to the 1980s who worked with many of the most memorable pop stars of that era, notching up thirty-seven ‘number one’ singles in either Britain or the USA. The dictionary also finds room for two jazz singers, Maxine Daniels and the great Elisabeth Welch, whose mellifluous voice made such songs as ‘Love for Sale’ and ‘Stormy Weather’ her own. Among sportsmen and sportswomen in this release are the motorcyclist Barry Sheene and the middle-distance runner Chris Brasher who, in a long career, was variously the pacemaker for Roger Bannister's four-minute mile, the co-founder of the London marathon, a sports journalist and administrator, and a businessman. The darts player Leighton Rees and the shot-putter Arthur Rowe are the first people recorded in the Oxford DNB for their contribution to these sports. Vernon Pugh oversaw major changes in the organization of rugby union; Peter West's voice was heard commentating on matters as varied as cricket, the BBC programme Come Dancing, and horseracing; while John Banks made money out of the latter as a successful and widely known bookmaker.

Finally, and as with all Oxford DNB updates, some contributions to British history are defined by their singularity. So here we publish too the lives of Alan Nunn May, the spy; of the man who introduced acupuncture to Britain, J. R. Worsley; of Sidney Bloom, the founder of the eponymous kosher restaurant in Whitechapel, the scene for a thousand Jewish jokes; and of the first female foreign legionnaire, Susan Travers. All human life is here, the eccentric alongside the respectable; the comic as a counterpoint to the highly serious. These two hundred biographies present a record of recent national life in all its features and we commend them to our readers.

Our next online update

Our next online update will be published in May 2007 and will focus on men and women active from the ‘earliest times’ to the later twentieth century. In May we begin two long-term projects, the first to extend the dictionary's coverage of people who shaped the British empire and early Commonwealth, and the second to provide a complete biographical record of the post-conquest medieval episcopate. May's update will also see a considerable expansion in our reference group project, which provides essays on well-known historical clubs, gangs, and sets—with new articles ranging chronologically from the companions of William the Conqueror to Labour's St Ermins group of the 1980s, and geographically from Lincolnshire's Spalding Gentleman's Society to the crew members of Australia's first fleet.

Lawrence Goldman, editor

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> New online update, January 2007