Preface

• Landscapers and country house founders
• Shapers of empire and Commonwealth
• Early episcopal and regional lives
• New groups in British history
• Our next online update

> New online contents, May 2008

Welcome to the eleventh online update of the Oxford DNB in which, as every May and October, we extend the dictionary's coverage of men and women 'from the earliest times' to the twentieth century.

The May 2008 update adds biographies of 91 individuals, active between the first century and the late twentieth century. In addition to new biographies the update includes a further 45 'reference group' essays—our expanding selection of well-known groups, clubs, and networks in the British past, available (for people with subscriber access) in the themes area of the online edition.

The new biographies in May 2008 highlight men and women who shared one of three common pursuits. We begin with those who achieved note as garden designers and landscape architects, or who were closely associated with the building of well-known country houses in Britain. Future updates (to be published in October 2008 and May 2009) will develop this theme with articles on prominent horticulturalists, plant hunters, and botanists. Our two other sets this May—shapers of the empire and early Commonwealth and pre-Reformation bishops—continue research projects we began last year to extend our coverage of British imperial history and to provide a complete listing of the English and Welsh episcopate in the middle ages.

The remaining biographies published this month include Roman army officers and their wives, a Scottish saint, the philanthropic widow of one of Elizabethan England's richest men, and a Yorkshire woodcarver whose work is now sold worldwide. Chronologically the subjects now added to the dictionary range from the garrison commander Flavius Genialis (fl. AD 97–105) to Ratu Sir Kamisese Kapaiwai Tuimacilai Mara, prime minister and president of Fiji, who died in 2004.

As ever, full details of the May 2008 update are available from the new online contents page and extracts are available here. I am delighted that, following an agreement between OUP and the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council in April, the online edition of the Oxford DNB will continue to be available in nearly all English public libraries, as well as many others across Britain. In nearly all cases library members have access to the ODNB remotely from home (or any other computer), which means direct access to all our new biographies and the 56,400 existing subjects. More information on reading the Oxford DNB through your local library is available here.

Landscapers and country house founders

The garden designers and architects included in May 2008 range from those responsible for some of Britain's best known (and now most visited) landscapes and private gardens to the creators of city parks, seaside resort gardens, and children's playgrounds.

Before the development of an architectural profession, landscape design was often the work of gentleman–landowners, many of whom had observed French and Italian styles during the grand tour. In the mid-1750s, and after seven years overseas, Thomas Kennedy returned to the family seat at Culzean Castle, Ayrshire, to begin a programme of improving his vast 250,000 acre estate, in part financed by the family's vigorous smuggling enterprise. Kennedy's work at Culzean (which included the building of a Palladian villa and the planting of exotic fruit trees) was extended after his inheritance of nearby Cassillis House and the title of ninth earl of Cassillis. The work was continued by his successor David Kennedy, who, with the assistance of Robert Adam, refashioned Culzean and its estate to create a setting that is today the most visited site owned by the National Trust for Scotland. English landscapers from the same period now added to the dictionary include William Aislabie (d. 1781), who is best known for the remodelling of his seat, Studley Royal, near Ripon in Yorkshire, and the purchase and landscaping of the ruined Fountains Abbey, which bordered on his estate. Aislabie's work to secure the ruins, to open the grounds for the public, and to regulate access is today seen as anticipating modern standards of visitor management. Like Culzean in Scotland, Studley Royal is now the National Trust's most visited pay-for-entry property in England.

Few eighteenth-century landscapers were as altruistic as Aislabie. A very different approach was that of Thomas Coke, an acquisitive and ambitious Norfolk landowner who—having taken the grand tour and secured his coveted earldom in the 1730s—set out to transform his seat at Holkham into an estate to rival that of the prime minister, Robert Walpole, at nearby Houghton. Once believed to be the work of William Kent, the Palladian mansion at Holkham—acknowledged as the finest English example of its kind—in fact owed much of its design to its owner. Of course the movement of styles and talents was not only from continental Europe to the British Isles. In the lives of the father and son John and Joseph Busch, for example, we see designers who left their nursery in Hackney to become landscape gardeners for Catherine the Great of Russia, while Edinburgh-born Thomas Blaikie, with his jardin à l'anglais, became the doyen of ancien regime garden design in France. Later, as Citizen Blaikie, he cultivated seed potatoes in the Tuileries for the French revolutionary government. Nor was landscaping necessarily the preserve of the élite, as new biographies of the Wiltshire grotto-builders Joseph and Josiah Lane reveal.

A century later the common route of entry into landscape design was no longer the continental tour but a professional training in architecture. Those who came to garden design from architecture, often under the influence of the arts and crafts movement, include Charles Mallows, Harold Peto, and Philip Tilden, who undertook a series of commissions at such country houses as Tirley Garth, Cheshire, Port Lympne, Kent, and (for Lloyd George) Bron-y-de, Surrey. Charles Paget Wade (1883–1956) was another architect turned designer, though he is now best known as an eclectic (and eccentric) art collector and the owner, from the 1920s, of Snowshill Manor in the Cotswolds. Guided by the motto Let nothing perish, Wade assembled an extraordinary medley of objects, from reliquaries and spinning wheels to seven suits of samurai armour. His 100 clocks were each set to strike at a different moment so that he might better appreciate their chimes, though this prevented him from knowing the correct time.

The economic difficulties of the interwar years led to the consolidation of the profession (the Institute of Landscape Architects was established in 1929 by another new addition, Richard Sudell) and also prompted members to diversify from private to public clients. Such pressures are well illustrated in the career of Edward Prentice Mawson (1885–1954), who emerges not only as an influential contributor to the work of his father—the better-known landscape architect Thomas Hayton Mawson—but also as a prominent interwar designer of public spaces, whose commissions included Stanley Park, Blackpool, the seafront gardens at Southend-on-Sea and Hastings, and Ruislip Lido, Middlesex. For women designers the impediments to professional progress were even more severe. After working as a lowly assistant for Richard Sudell, Mary Mitchell left Britain in the late 1940s to gain experience in South Africa. On her return Mitchell's dedication and persistence gained her a job in Birmingham's architecture department, where she pioneered children's playgrounds, providing play facilities for every block of flats, and later became a leading advocate of the adventure playground movement. Those who enjoy London park life owe much to another female designer, Fanny Wilkinson (1855–1951), who received her first commission in the 1880s and went on to plan, prepare, and supervise more than seventy-five public gardens in the capital, including Red Lion Square Gardens, Holborn, and the churchyard at St John, Smith Square, Westminster.

It is another metropolitan space, the Festival of Britain Gardens at Battersea Park (1951), that stands as one of Russell Page's finest achievements in a successful international career. Faced with a shrinking budget and a site prone to flooding, Page combined a mass planting of shrubs (including 10,000 hostas) with 'frivolous planting' in free-flowing beds in a design that was restored for a new audience in 2004. Page's appointment at Battersea was made by another new subject, Frank Clark, who as the festival's chief landscape architect inspired the modern fashion for indoor planting in corporate settings. London is also the location for perhaps the most glamorous garden to feature in this update. In the early 1930s the Cardiff-born landscape architect Ralph Hancock (1893–1950) created his Garden of the Nations on the eleventh floor of the RCA building at the Rockefeller Centre, New York (a project that required 3000 tons of earth to be raised via the service elevator, with large trees winched up on the outside of the building). Hancock's experience led to an invitation to create a garden at the top of the Kensington department store Derry and Toms. Hancock's garden (1938) comprised three separate areas—Spanish, Tudor, and woodland—which, at one acre in size, make this Europe's largest roof-top garden. Having fallen into neglect in the 1970s, Hancock's garden has recently been restored and now provides the setting for a restaurant and club owned by Richard Branson's Virgin Group.

Shapers of empire and Commonwealth

It is difficult to overstate the impact of the British empire either on those countries, now independent, which once formed part of it, or indeed on Britain itself. Our latest update, building on that of last May, includes a further 35 biographies extending our coverage in this area. Colonial governors and administrators are once more well represented, and include William Burt, a governor of the Leeward Islands in the late eighteenth century, who spent more than £7000 of his own money improving the defences of St Kitts against the French; William Pritchard, the first resident British consul in Fiji, in the mid-nineteenth century, who played an important part in the prelude to Britain's annexation of the islands; and Sir Brian Marwick (1908–1992), commissioner of Swaziland, who fought a long and ultimately unsuccessful battle for a more democratic constitution for that country.

Nationalist politicians are also well represented in this update, with a clutch of prime ministers of newly independent states including, in the Pacific, Solomon Suna'one Mamaloni (1943–2000), the colourful and controversial prime minister of the Solomon Islands; Walter Lini (1942–1999), the equally controversial prime minister of Vanuatu (and Anglican priest), who had to deal with a separatist movement in Espiritu Santo; and Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara, prime minister of Fiji, whose career was ultimately blighted by ethnic tensions in the islands. From south-east Asia we now include David Marshall (1908–1995), the first chief minister of Singapore, and Tun Hussein Onn (1922–1990), prime minister of Malaysia. The African politicians already included in the dictionary are now joined by Chief Leabua Jonathan (1914–1987), prime minister of Lesotho, at first an ally and then a fierce opponent of apartheid South Africa, and several politicians who, though never holding the highest offices, played important roles in the pre-independence politics of their countries: Lawrence Katilungu (1914–1961), a rival of Kenneth Kaunda in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), Orton Chirwa (1919–1992), a rival of Hastings Banda in Nyasaland (Malawi), and Ambrose Zwane (1924–1998), a leading opponent of royal autocracy in Swaziland. The influence of the media in politics is reflected in the lives of three journalists: John Robson (1870–1945) in Malaya; Sir Leopold Moore (1868–1945) in Northern Rhodesia, a thorn in the side of the British South Africa Company and the Colonial Office; and in Antigua Tim Hector (1942–2002), who fulfilled a similar role with regard to his own government. In the field of business May's update adds entries on Sir Ronald Prain (1907–1991), chairman of RST, with its extensive copper mining interests in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), noted for his links with African nationalists, and once described as 'the acceptable face of British capitalism', and Kwamina Tandoh (c.1877–1932), a west African businessman active in Britain early in the twentieth century.

More intellectual concerns are reflected in memoirs of scholars whose work was shaped by the existence of empire, including Vincent Harlow (1898–1961), a once influential historian of the empire; Sir Norman Anderson (1908–1994), an eminent scholar of Islamic law; Oskar Spate (1911–2000), geographer; Hilda Kuper (1911–1992), anthropologist; Victor Purcell (1896–1965), historian of the Chinese in south-east Asia; and William Shellabear (1862–1947), Malay scholar. Both Anderson and Shellabear started their careers as missionaries, a vocation shared by another important set of new subjects in this update, including George Brown (1835–1917), William Bromilow (1857–1929), and Charles Abel (1862–1930), all of whom played key roles in introducing Christianity to what is now Papua New Guinea. Brown's entry relates how a party of Fijian missionaries under his leadership were attacked, killed, and consumed on the orders of a local chief for encroaching on trade routes in the Gazelle Peninsula; in a controversial move Brown then led a retaliatory expedition, which resulted in the deaths of between ten and a hundred of the 'guilty villagers'. Undoubtedly the most gruesome entry in this release, however, is that on Yagan (c.1800–1833), an Australian Aboriginal warrior whose severed head was taken to England, where it was widely exhibited before being deposited with the Liverpool City Museum. In 1997 the head was returned to Australia, though as a result of a dispute between rival factions of the Nyungar people it remains, at the time of writing, unburied.

Episcopal and regional lives

Our project to publish biographies of every pre-Reformation bishop adds eighteen new lives this May, with a special focus on the dioceses of Exeter, Bath and Wells, Salisbury, Winchester, Worcester, and Norwich. A common feature in a number of these lives is the often uneasy relationship between church and royal authority, with different bishops serving as papal ambassadors or peacemakers. The decision of John XXII, for example, to appoint Rigaud de Asserio (c.1290–1323) rather than Edward II's candidate to the vacant see of Winchester was prompted by papal hopes of moderating the king's behaviour and securing reform of the royal household. In turn Bishop Rigaud became Edward's choice for what proved an unsuccessful expedition to Scotland to treat for peace with Robert Bruce. Diplomacy was also an attribute of William Middleton, who as bishop of Norwich found himself at centre stage in late thirteenth-century disputes concerning crown and church jurisdictions. Middleton's resolution of the conflict, proposing to fine but not imprison wayward clerks, is regarded by his biographer as evidence of 'a gift for thoroughly practical reconciliation', a talent that had previously seen him arbitrate in disputes between combinations of warring bishops, archbishops, deans, and Scottish kings.

If some brought stability, others are remembered for the material benefits they gave to their diocese. Among these is Robert of Bingham (d. 1246), bishop of Salisbury, who markedly improved the city's prosperity by building a bridge (still partially extant) that improved access for traders at times of flooding. And while Bishop Robert's legacy lived on in stone, figures like James Berkeley, bishop of Exeter, gained prominence as objects of veneration—in Berkeley's case following his sudden death in 1327. Cathedral records show that offerings to Berkeley's tomb reached £20 by the following year, mainly by local lay people, who were the cult's chief supporters. Evidence of Berkeley's posthumous following can be seen in the fact that the next Exeter bishop to attract such veneration was buried in an identical tomb to Berkeley on the opposite side of the choir.

The local associations of these two bishops bring us to a final selection of lives that also combine strong local resonance with a wider scholarly or popular interest. The Scottish island of Lismore, for example, remains closely associated with St Moluag, a sixth-century holy man who was said to have travelled there from Ireland on a stone 'quite unlike the rest of the rocks of that island'. Similarly, to many owners of his work, the woodcarver Robert Thompson (1876–1955) is simply known as the Mouseman of Kilburn, a sobriquet derived from Thompson's practice of marking his work with the figure of a mouse and his lifetime association with the North Yorkshire village of Kilburn. He was originally a carver of church memorials, but oak furniture is now exported worldwide from a factory on the site of his original workshop. Finally, May's update also goes behind the scenes of the Roman fort at Vindolanda, now a popular attraction at Chesterholm, Northumberland. That so much is known of life at Vindolanda is due to the discovery in the 1970s of a series of wooden tablets that provide information on the day-to-day existence of the fort's officers. From these tablets it is possible to recreate biographies of Vindolanda's commanders, Flavius Genialis and Flavius Cerialis, as well as Cerialis' wife, Sulpicia Lepidina, and other male and female associates. Such is the richness of the sources that details of garrison government and victualling exist alongside invitations to birthday celebrations, inventories of household goods (from bird nets to dining tunics), and a remarkable summary of the utensils and foodstuffs of Lepidina's kitchen.

Groups in British history: reformers, improvers, and the Kitchen Sink

The forty-five reference group essays added in May 2008 continue our project to offer a history of significant networks, clubs, and associations in which men and women came together to shape Britain's past. Chronologically our latest selection extends from the ninth-century scholars of King Alfred's court to the Beaux Arts Quartet or Kitchen Sink School of painters who came to public attention in the 1950s; geographically the new networks span much of Britain (from the Cockney School to the Scottish martyrs) and, overseas, from the Antarctic (Scott's expeditionary party of 1912) to the Far East (the Chindits, who fought the Japanese in Burma).

In the year marking the ninetieth anniversary of the female franchise (February 1918) and the election of the first woman MP to Westminster (November 1918) it is fitting that three of our essays chart the membership and activities of groups that did much to promote female suffrage. The National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS)—active from 1896 to 1918 and led by Millicent Garrett Fawcett—is generally characterized as the 'non-militant' body that promoted the campaign for equal voting rights for women (under existing franchise laws) through the education of public opinion and the organization of pressure at a constituency level. In contrast to the party neutrality of the NUWSS, the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) emerged in 1903 from supporters of the Independent Labour Party, of which its founder Emmeline Pankhurst was an active member. Unlike the NUWSS, the WSPU insisted on the inclusion of married women in the demand for votes and—drawing much of its support from working-class and socialist women—introduced militant action into its campaign. The third organization, the Women's Freedom League, was a group of socialist dissidents who broke away from the WSPU in 1907, opposed to what they considered the Pankhursts' autocratic leadership. Thereafter they campaigned by militant means for a notion of emancipation that went beyond the vote to address other restrictions in the lives of women, especially working-class women—a campaign subsequent members maintained until the early 1960s.

Reform and dissent, whether political or religious, are themes that connect a number of other groups in this update. Franchise extension had, of course, also been the aim of the Chartist movement, whose National Charter Association was founded in 1840 to co-ordinate and maintain the campaign to achieve 'a full and faithful Representation of the entire people of the United Kingdom'. Between 1840 and 1857 the association stood for Chartism in its most uncompromising and undiluted form, and came to national attention with the second Chartist petition, signed by more than three million people, in 1842. The rise of Chartism coincided with that of the Anti-Corn Law League (like the Charter Association and the WSPU a product of Manchester), whose members' advocacy of free trade led to the repeal of the British corn laws in 1846. In its campaign the league drew on the example of slightly earlier reform networks, including the Anti-Slavery Society (another new addition in this update), which mobilized religious opinion to assert a moral basis for its work. For members of the Anti-Slavery Society—second generation abolitionists active during the 1820 and early 1830s—the focus was on the mitigation and end to slavery following the abolition of the trade in 1807. The appeal to religious nonconformity enabled members of the Anti-Corn Law League to define and broaden the movement as one of general middle-class interest rather than of a self-interested mercantile élite, a perception that brought the league into conflict with the Chartists in the early 1840s.

This interweaving of groups, in structures and members, is further evident in several more of the networks now added to the dictionary. In their campaign for public health legislation in the late 1840s, for example, members of the Health of Towns Association modelled their organization on the Anti-Corn Law League. Nearly a century later a section of Oswald Moseley's British Union of Fascists comprised former suffragettes whose radical feminism was celebrated by the BUF, a movement notable for the political diversity of its most prominent activists.

Likewise, as in such earlier networks as the Green Ribbon and Holy clubs, it is possible to trace aspects of the nonconformist culture on which nineteenth-century reform societies would draw. Fears that Charles II would be succeeded by his brother James, a practising Roman Catholic, led in the mid-1670s to the formation of the London-based Green Ribbon Club, which challenged the denial of political and religious (including nonconformist) liberties. Like the National Charter Association, the Green Ribbon Club co-ordinated other whig groupings in the capital, and further afield, and was an early exponent of the political education movement adopted by later reform societies. Led by John Wesley, and based in the University of Oxford, the Holy Club met during the 1730s to follow the practices of the primitive—that is early—church. At the time the group remained within the established church, as did some of its members throughout their lives. But others later broke with Anglicanism, and Wesley's experience of the club (whose members were first labelled Methodists in 1732) undoubtedly formed the basis of his increasingly ambivalent relationship with the Church of England. Oxford was also the home of an earlier display of religious dissent, that of the late fourteenth-century theologian John Wyclif and his followers at the university, the Wycliffites, who supported his proposals for reform—including vernacular preaching, biblical translation, and in some instances his controversial rejection of transubstantiation. But if the early Methodists were largely accommodated within the established church many of Wyclif's ideas were condemned as heretical at the Council of Constance in 1415. Even so, some Wycliffites remained in the university, in inevitably shadowy networks, and made contact with supporters elsewhere, including the so-called Lollard knights.

In addition to those pursuing radical reform, some groups were motivated by the potential for self or societal improvement, or at least the desire to record and disseminate information with a view to implementing change. During the late 1930s and 1940s members of Mass-Observation documented popular life and belief in ways that it was hoped would contribute to the democratization of sociological knowledge. Under the banner of 'anthropology at home', and by observation of the behaviour and opinions of 'ordinary people', Mass-Observation's leadership sought to advance a 'new synthesis' that would take the country beyond what it identified as 'the miserable conditions of dogmatic faiths'. Efforts to distribute its research in affordable paperback editions (notably the Penguin Special series) recall the earlier work of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Founded in 1826, the society sought to exploit advances in printing and distribution to provide cheap, informative literature that would both appeal to those with an elementary education and guide them towards 'useful ends'. In search of a broad appeal, the society's members encouraged publications that were free from political and religious partisanship, though the movement's sympathy with political reform, and its leaders' involvement in the formation of the new University of London, meant that outsiders often perceived it as radical and secularist.

The collaborative generation of knowledge, albeit of more rarefied kinds, also links other new groups in this update. In the scholars at King Alfred's court and the clerks of Thomas Becket, for example, we see two intellectual networks providing information and instruction for the practice of good government. Alfred's scholars also offer a seemingly unique example in the pre-conquest period of advisers teaching a monarch to read, an innovation due directly to the character of those the king drew to him. It was the pursuit of scientific knowledge that also brought together members of two later networks, the founders of Royal Institution of Great Britain (active between 1799 and 1810, and specializing in 'Useful Mechanical Inventions') and the Analytical Society (1812–13), a gathering of Cambridge undergraduates who sought to substitute French concepts of differential notation for Newtonian geometry and, as they hoped, so establish mathematics as a recognized profession.

As in previous releases, the collaborative activities of artists and writers continue to provide us with a rich crop of creative associations. In art the May update adds the mid-eighteenth-century St Martin's Lane Academy, which, centred on William Hogarth, sought to establish a 'British school' of painting as a counterpoint to the popularity of continental practices. Later art groups include Unit One, a gathering of abstract painters who broke away from the Seven and Five Society (another new addition) in search of modernism, and the Beaux Art Quartet (1953–6) whose quotidian subject matter prompted one critic to ask whether they painted 'Everything but the kitchen sink?: The kitchen sink too', thus prompting the nickname by which they are also known. Appropriately for an update that includes a selection of country house patrons and landscapers, we also add an essay on the late nineteenth-century founders of the National Trust, to which properties like Studley Royal, Snowshill, and Culzean Castle have since passed.

The literary groups in this update are dominated by poets. The most influential of these groups was the early eighteenth-century Scriblerus Club. Though they met for only a few weeks in 1714 the Scriblerians—among them Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope—became for later Hanoverian critics exemplars of satirical writing, political subversiveness, and conservative pessimism. Writers of a more sober disposition include the contributors to the metrical psalter (published 1562), who, variously connected through their involvement in Protector Somerset's household, were drawn together as participants in this defining literary monument to the Elizabethan religious settlement. Four centuries later the notion of a group created and defined by print was repeated with the Georgian poets, now perhaps most closely associated with Rupert Brooke, whose work appeared in five volumes of Georgian Poetry between 1912 and 1922. Poets, albeit 'off-duty', also made up the 'immortal diners', who met on a single evening in December 1817, celebrated as the occasion when, in the company of several other guests, Wordsworth met Keats. The immortal diners are, to date, the shortest-lived of the groups in our selection and provide another interesting example of the various ways in which historical networks were constituted and conceived—from membership clubs and collaborative ventures to secret societies and one-off dinner parties. Food recurs in this update in connection with a slightly earlier political network, the 'mince-pie administration' formed by William Pitt on 18 December 1783 and so named because it was thought unlikely to survive the Christmas period. In fact the mince-pie politicians continued until the following spring, after which Pitt, with a new political configuration, was able to serve as prime minister until 1801. And it was Pitt's death five years later that prompted the creation of another political grouping now known for its evocative name. In search of a gathering of 'talents and character', the new prime minister, Lord Grenville, gave rise to what became his 'ministry of all the talents'—a concept that, almost exactly two hundred years later, was reprised by another new premier in search of breadth, inclusivity, and a fresh start.

If you would like to read more about the groups project you may be interested in the online essay here. Readers with access to the complete Oxford DNB (and this includes almost every member of a British public library) can also browse in the current set of 210 groups available in the themes area of the online edition. A selection of existing group essays is also freely available, along with some highlights from the new groups in the May 2008 update.

Our next online update

Our next online update will be published in October 2008 and will continue to extend the Oxford DNB's coverage of men and women in all periods to the late twentieth century. To mark the ninetieth anniversary of the armistice, October's update will include a special focus on people active during the First World War, in addition to new biographies of gardeners and regional lives, as well as the next instalment of group entries.

Lawrence Goldman, editor

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