Preface

• Imperial and Commonwealth lives
• Bishops and the pre-Reformation church
• New groups in British history
• Our next online update

> New online contents, May 2007

Welcome to the eighth online update of the Oxford DNB, in which, as every May and October, we extend the dictionary's coverage of men and women active 'from the earliest times' to the twentieth century. In this update we publish the first sets of biographies from two new research projects we are running at the Oxford DNB. The first will extend the dictionary's coverage of people who shaped the government, politics, economy, society, and cultural life of the British empire and the early Commonwealth. Our second project adds biographies of bishops of English and Welsh sees between the Norman conquest and the Reformation, thus extending our coverage to provide a full record of every archbishop and bishop in this period. Work continues on both projects and we will publish the full list of new lives (approximately 150 imperial and Commonwealth subjects and 100 post-conquest bishops) in periodic updates over the next two years.

As well as 73 new biographies May's update adds a further 50 'reference group' articles—essays on well-known historical clubs, sets, gangs, and networks in which noteworthy individuals came together to shape aspects of national life in the British Isles and overseas. Publication of this latest set of group essays continues our project to write a history of associational life from the early middle ages to the late twentieth century, and so trace a series of connections between individuals covered separately in the Oxford DNB. In addition to these new groups May's update includes eight 8 'reference lists' for quick fact checking and two 'feature essays' that set our new imperial and episcopal lives in historical context.

As ever, full details of the update are available from the New online contents page. Extracts from the update are available through the June issue of the Oxford DNB's free monthly magazine. Free access to the complete Oxford DNB is available worldwide through college and university libraries and through nearly every public library in Britain, many of which provide their members with easy home access. Click here for details of your nearest public library in the UK.

Imperial and Commonwealth lives

Globalization is a relatively new term, but the processes and interconnections it is used to describe are of course far from new. Britain was a 'globalized' country from at least the sixteenth century, and it would be impossible to write a history of modern Britain without dwelling at length on the history of the British empire, both formal and informal, and on the interactions between Britain and other parts of the world that both underpinned and resulted from Britain's global role. The Victorian DNB, written at the height of empire, made little distinction between Britons at home and Britons overseas, especially in the various colonies of settlement. The DNB's later supplements continued this process by including leading figures from the Indian subcontinent, Africa, the Caribbean, south-east Asia, and the Pacific. The Oxford DNB as published in 2004 included several hundred imperial and Commonwealth lives overlooked in the compilation of the earlier dictionary, and in May 2007 we publish a further 50 memoirs consolidating and extending our coverage in this important area—the first of several sets we will publish over the next few years.

Colonial administrators are already well represented in the dictionary (as a look at the lists in the themes area will show), but some important figures have yet to be included. In this update we publish the life of Lucius Cary, tenth Viscount Falkland (1803–1884), a man 'so far as can be judged, of no great intellectual endowments' , who nevertheless served as governor successively of Nova Scotia and Bombay at crucial periods in their history. Sir Geoffrey Colby (1901–1958) was a markedly progressive governor of Nyasaland, committed to African landownership and development; Sir Henry Belfield (1855–1923), by contrast, presided over the alienation of much African-farmed land in Kenya. Allan Marwick (1877–1966) was a mentor to King Sobhuza, a crucial figure in the development of Swazi 'traditionalism', and the author of the 'best-documented and most damning indictment of British colonial policy ever written by a long-serving official'.

Other Europeans travelled to distant parts of the empire not to govern but to trade, like the brothers John Moir (1851–1940) and Frederick Moir (1852–1939), founders of the African Lakes Company, which at one point rivalled Rhodes's British South Africa Company. Others travelled to learn, among them Jacob Schön (1803–1889), the Baden-born missionary and Hausa scholar of whom David Livingstone remarked: 'This man's name … will live generations after mine has been forgotten.' Margaret Noble (1867–1911) became a well-known writer on Hindu culture and a follower of Swami Vivekananda, who gave her the name by which she is remembered, Sister Nivedita. In a later generation Bede Griffiths (1906–1993) influentially bridged Hinduism and Christianity without forsaking his vocation as a Benedictine monk.

Colonial politicians and nationalist leaders form an important group in this update, building on the significant numbers already included in the dictionary. Joey Smallwood (1900–1991), who led the movement to incorporate Newfoundland into Canada, now joins the other fathers of Canadian confederation, while Michael Savage (1872–1940) becomes the twenty-fourth premier of New Zealand to be included in the dictionary. From Burma we now include a trio of important nationalist politicians, Aung San (1915–1947), Ba Maw (1893–1977), and Ne Win (1911–2002); from Malaya, Dato Sir Onn bin Jaafar (1895–1962), founder of the United Malays National Organization, and Tun Sir Tan Cheng Lock (1883–1960), founder of the Malayan Chinese Association; and from India Sir Sikander Hyat-Khan (1892–1942), premier of the Punjab, and A. K. Fazlul Haq (1873–1962), chief minister of Bengal and later a governor of East Pakistan. Other important politicians now added to the dictionary include Dunduzu Chisiza (1930–1962) from Nyasaland/Malawi, Simon Kapwepwe (1922–1980) from Northern Rhodesia/Zambia, Vere Bird (1909–1999) from Antigua, and Milton Cato (1915–1997) from St Vincent.

The relationship between British rulers and colonial subjects was by no means always antagonistic. George Ekim Ferguson (1864–1897) was a colonial surveyor of Fante descent who received honours from the Royal Geographical Society and whose early death was described by a British army officer as an 'irreparable loss'. James Johnson (c. 1836–1917), of Yoruba descent, became assistant bishop of Western Equatorial Africa and an important influence in the development of Anglicanism in west Africa. Rokeya Hossain (c. 1880–1932) was encouraged in her efforts to promote education for Indian Muslim women by the wife of the viceroy, Lady Chelmsford. Prince Frederick Duleep Singh (1868–1926), the third son of the deposed maharaja of Lahore, was a 'thorough Englishman' whose most notable legacy was to the preservation of historic buildings in his beloved Norfolk. These and other lives illustrate the multifarious ways in which people from Britain and its empire interacted, and the impact of Britain's imperial connections in both directions. If you would like to read more on this subject you may be interested in A. J. Stockwell's feature essay on Britons in south-east Asia, which is also published as part of this update.

Bishops and the pre-Reformation church

Our second project—to provide biographies on every bishop active in an English or Welsh see between the Norman conquest and the Reformation—begins with publication of 12 lives, ranging chronologically from John the Chanter (d. 1191), bishop of Exeter, to Richard Young, who became bishop of Rochester in 1404.

Completion of this project will see an extra 100 biographies added. Once in place, a complete list of more than 500 archbishops and bishops will provide scholars and students with a unique resource to study commonalities, differences, and developments within the make-up and activities of the pre-Reformation episcopate. From the complete sequence readers will be able to investigate issues relating to social status and education, the roles of the English monarchy and the papacy in episcopal appointments, individual bishop's contribution to diocesan life, and the biographical complexion of different dioceses. Even in this first set of 12 biographies several of these themes are apparent in the biographies of men like Simon of Apulia (d. 1223) and Richard Blund (d. 1253). Like John the Chanter both were bishops of Exeter, though Simon was a native of southern Italy and—close to the king—actively sought to restore royal authority in the south-west, while Bishop Richard was Exeter born and bred and was principally remembered as a 'mild spirited man … stowte in his church's cause'. To accompany the start of this new project May's update includes a feature on the church in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by Henry Summerson.

New groups in British history: First Fleeters to Sunday Tramps

The 50 essays on groups added in May 2007 continue our project to provide a history of significant networks, clubs, and associations in which men and women came together to shape Britain's past. As befits the dictionary, the range of groups now added is broad, extending chronologically from the Norman companions of William the Conqueror to the experimental dramatists and actors of Theatre Workshop, and—geographically—from the Dublin-based Monks of the Screw to the first fleeters who settled in Australia in 1788.

None the less, several common themes are discernible in many of the groups covered in this new set of essays and, more generally, in the full list of more than 125 groups currently available in the themes area of the online edition. One such theme is the importance of war (to combatants and non-combatants alike) in the development of groups and networks, beginning of course with that circle of longstanding associates who accompanied William to England in 1066. Later military groupings include the fifteen Royal Navy captains who under Lord Nelson defeated the French fleet at the battle of the Nile in 1798. It is as Nelson's band of brothers that these officers are now best known, following Nelson's reference to Shakespeare's Henry V ('We few, we happy few, we band of brothers') to highlight a spirit of collective action and homogeneity that, in truth, existed only as a rousing figure of speech. Retrospective labelling is again evident in another military association, the British expeditionary force, or BEF, who fought in France in 1914 and whose identity as a group owes much to members' later self-identification as the Old Contemptibles following alleged comments by Kaiser Wilhelm II. War and its aftermath also brought civilians together in this period. The Romney Street group, for example, took its name from the London residence where members met from 1917 to discuss post-war reconstruction, while the British empire delegation to the Paris peace conference (1919-20) played a major political and diplomatic role in shaping the post-war settlement.

New groups formed during the Second World War include the Moot, a gathering of mainly Christian intellectuals who met during the 1940s to discuss educational and social reform, and panellists on the Brain's Trust, the BBC's hugely popular radio discussion programme. First broadcast in 1941, the Brains Trust was intended to provide servicemen and women with a stimulating discussion programme. In weekly episodes it brought together a diverse set of panellists, guided by regular contributors, to comment on questions submitted by the public. The result was a network of performers (rather like the Goons—a subject in a recent update) whose existence as a group became known to their 10 million listeners through the medium of broadcasting. The importance of a different mode of communication is also seen in two earlier science and engineering groupings, the eighteenth-century Lunar Society of Birmingham and the late nineteenth-century North British network, both of which combined meetings with active correspondence between members. Well-known associations like the Lunar Society also remind us of the importance of place as a means of creating and defining historical networks—be this place a house (Romney Street), an artistic community (the Ancients group of painters), a town (the Spalding Gentlemen's Society), a new world (the first fleeters or the founders of the Virginia Company, whose 1607 settlement of Jamestown we remember in May 2007), or in the case of the Bounty mutineers a single ship. Or on occasion it was the very absence of place that might define a group. Leslie Stephen's Sunday Tramps, for example, were a group of Victorian intellectuals who met fortnightly for discussion in the course of 20-25 mile walks.

As their name suggests, Stephen's Tramps purposefully eschewed religious worship in favour of, quite literally, intellectual pursuits. This desire to go against the grain offers a final common theme that links many of the new groups in May's update. Contributors to the Freewoman (1911-14), for example, sought to change prevailing attitudes to women's roles through publication of their 'weekly feminist review'; in literature the New Apocalypse poets of the 1940s actively sought to reject thirties modernism in favour of an 'organic' vision of the 'wholeness of man', while in art circles the creators of the Society for Painters in Water Colours (along with other art groups) were drawn together partly in reaction to the perceived élitism of one of the dictionary's existing groups, the founders of the Royal Academy of Arts. May's update also sees the addition of a number of more formal campaigning groups, including the eighteenth-century Friends of the People, which advocated franchise reform, and the Society for the Purpose of Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade; the mid-nineteenth-century Kensington Society, which campaigned for the extension of women's rights in marriage and work, the Labour Representation Committee, which sought to increase the labour interest in parliament (and became the Labour Party in 1906), and the men and women of the National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage.

Our next online update

Our next online update will be published in October 2007 and will continue to extend and develop the Oxford DNB's coverage from the 'earliest times' to the later twentieth century. October's update will focus on men and women with strong regional connections across the British Isles, now deserving of national recognition. Particular attention will be paid to industrialists and manufacturers, as well as women in sport and religious life. October's update will also include our next set of bishops and of clubs, gangs, and associations as we move to a final list of about 350 group essays in 2008/9.

Lawrence Goldman, editor

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