Preface to the online release, October 2008

• First World War lives
• Religious benefaction and celebration
• Gardening: cultivation and innovation
• Local and international lives
• Empire and Commonwealth: India
• The professions—new and old
• New groups in British history
• Our next online update

> New online contents, October 2008

Welcome to the twelfth 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 October 2008 update adds biographies of 125 individuals active between the twelfth and the late twentieth century. In addition to new biographies, the update includes a further 21 '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.

Coming a month before the ninetieth anniversary of the armistice in November 1918, this update has a principal focus on individuals active during the First World War. Our selection highlights the different approaches taken by modern scholars studying the history of the conflict. In addition to military figures who were instrumental in shaping the events of 1918—and in bringing the war to its conclusion—the update includes pioneers of new forms of warfare; highly decorated front-line soldiers who came to national attention; people active in theatres other than the western front and in nursing; and men and women who provided cultural responses to the war in the form of songs, poetry, and visual images. One well-known image of the conflict, John Singer Sargent's group portrait Some General Officers of the Great War (NPG), is the starting point for a feature essay by Professor Gary Sheffield assessing the performance of those who commanded British forces on land.

October's update also continues several research projects that, over several years, will extend the dictionary's coverage in particular subject areas. Our second instalment of individuals who shaped the history of gardening highlights those who excelled in plant cultivation. Our interest in the history of empire and Commonwealth continues with men and women significant to the British connection with the Indian subcontinent, while the project on the pre-Reformation church adds biographies of bishops from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

The remaining biographies published in October 2008 include two queens of Scots; three pioneers of geriatric medicine; the extraordinary story of an MP murdered by a gunshot in 1536; the creator of the world's first purpose-built motor racing track (at Brooklands, Surrey); and the remarkable Victoria Woodhull (1838–1927), women's rights campaigner, Anglophile, and the first female presidential candidate in the United States of America. As ever, full details of the October 2008 update are available from the New online contents page and free extracts are available here. Don't forget that the complete dictionary is available online in nearly all English public libraries, as well as many others across Britain and worldwide. More information about gaining access to the Oxford DNB through your local library is available here.

First World War lives

As the ninetieth anniversary of the armistice that ended the First World War approaches, this October's update includes a selection of additional lives connected with this conflict. Many of these additions concern people involved in the later stages of the war, and notably those involved in the battles to resist the German spring offensive, and then the final allied advance, beginning in August 1918. Sir Hugh Jeudwine commanded the 55th division during the successful defence of Givenchy in April 1918; if the line had given way the channel ports might have fallen into enemy hands. The strain told on Edgar William Cox (1882–1918), Field-Marshal Haig's intelligence chief and, at thirty-five, the youngest brigadier in the British army, charged with predicting the location, strength, and direction of the German offensives. His assessments were generally accurate, but his pessimism was not shared by his commander and, in poor health, he drowned in mysterious circumstances in the early stages of the allied offensive. Sir Gerard Boyd (1877–1930), who had risen to temporary major-general after enlisting in 1895 as a private, was in command of the 46th division, which achieved a remarkable feat of arms by crossing the St Quentin Canal to breach the Hindenburg line on 29 September 1918. Hanway Cumming (1867–1921) led the 110th brigade through the battles of 1918, organizing his shattered battalions in the face of the German advance between March and May; and then led the brigade in the fast-moving offensive of the late summer and autumn. Cumming's posthumously published journal reveals the flexibility and initiative shown by brigade commanders during the final phase of the war. By then, less effective figures like Sir William Pulteney (1861–1941), who made costly mistakes during his puzzlingly lengthy command of the 3rd corps, had been weeded out.

Others responded to new forms of warfare. Submarines prompted novel tactics, and challenged existing rules of warfare. Godfrey Herbert (1884–1961), commander of a Q-ship, designed to resemble a merchant vessel to lure enemy submarines, achieved wide notice for his involvement in the controversial 'Baralong incident' of August 1915, when German submariners were shot as they escaped their sinking craft. The pharmacist Edward Harrison (1869–1918) led the team that developed a new respirator to protect troops at the front from gas. Much of the development entailed self-experimentation and, weakened by its effect, he succumbed to influenza in November 1918. The war in the air produced such individual aces as Philip Fullard (1897–1984), who was admired for his 'dash and fearlessness', but who attributed the success of his unit to team work. The former big-game hunter and traveller Hesketh Hesketh-Pearson (1876–1922) worked to improve the British army's use of snipers. The artillery expert Sir Herbert Uniacke (1866–1934) undertook systematic analysis of artillery tactics and techniques, endeavouring to promote 'best practice'. While he insisted on the vital importance of artillery, it was for him only a supporting arm since 'the final decisive factor is the bayonet of the Infantry soldier'.

The update includes several examples from the citizens' armies who fought in the trenches. A Harrogate schoolmaster and Wesleyan Sunday school class leader, who supplemented his earnings by playing professional football, Donald Simpson Bell (1890–1916) joined up in November 1914; he was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross for his attack on a machine-gun post during the battle of the Somme in July 1916. The Burton upon Trent municipal gardener William Coltman (1891–1974), who despite his religious convictions also enlisted early in the war, became a stretcher bearer. He was awarded a VC for his efforts in rescuing the wounded from no man's land, under fire, during the allied advance in October 1918. Another volunteer, the Irish Jesuit priest and military chaplain William Doyle (1873–1917), was killed aiding the wounded during the third battle of Ypres in August 1917 and was recommended for, but never awarded, the VC. The Rhondda miners' leader David Watts Morgan (1867–1933) was the embodiment of patriotic labour; enlisting as a private on the day that war was declared, he rose to the rank of lieutenant-colonel and was said to have recruited 15,000 Welsh miners for military service. Graeme West (1891–1917), who enlisted after university graduation, evoked the realities of the front line in his much-anthologized poem 'The Night Patrol'. By 1916 he had become disillusioned with the war, and his posthumously published diary (he was killed by a sniper's bullet in April 1917), edited as a statement of pacificism, was an early example of the literary reshaping of memories of the war.

By contrast, popular patriotism was aroused by Jessie Pope (1868–1941), who made a living as a prolific versifier. Her widely read war poetry published in newspapers, with its doggerel urgings to enlistment and glorification of combat, apparently oblivious to the horrors of the trenches, later attracted vilification; and in the post-war years she became an obscure figure. Earlier she had helped bring Robert Tressell's 'socialist' novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists to publication. In the 1914 poster 'Your country needs you!' the war produced one of the most famous pieces of graphic design of all time. The poster, a contribution to the unofficial recruiting effort, was produced by the artist Alfred Leete (1882–1933), who later advertised his native Weston-super-Mare as a holiday resort. A morale boost for the troops, the jaunty march–song 'Pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag' was composed by the St Asaph-born brothers Felix Lloyd Powell (1878–1942) and George Henry Powell (1880–1951) as an entry for a prize competition run by a firm of music publishers. The sacrifice of the fallen was marked by the remembrance hymn 'O valiant hearts', written during the war by the Hereford MP and landowner Sir John Stanhope Arkwright (1872–1954), who likened the allied war dead to knightly heroes, and compared their sacrifice to Christ at Calvary. 'Peace could not give back her Dead' was the armistice day reflection of May Cannan (1893–1973), who nevertheless contested the idea that the war had been a futile waste of a generation.

Having served as a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurse and run a canteen for the troops in France before joining the intelligence bureau in Paris, Cannan was one of the many women involved in the war effort. A nurse before the war, Violetta Thurstan (1879–1978) organized hospitals and field ambulance services in Belgium and on the Russian and Salonika fronts, receiving the Military Medal for evacuating the wounded from a dressing station that was under bombardment. Irene Rathbone (1892–1980), an actress who became a VAD nurse in France and later London, sought to record the experience of women's war work in munitions factories and elsewhere in her fictionalized autobiography We That Were Young, published in 1932, whose themes reflected the emotional toll of the war upon women.

The imperial contribution to the war effort is represented by Mir Dast (1874–1945), a Pathan from the north-west frontier of British India who served in the Indian army. Posted to France in March 1915, he fought with the Lahore division in the second battle of Ypres in April 1915, when he rallied survivors after a gas attack, saving the lives of eight British and Indian officers. Twice wounded, he was sent for convalescence to Brighton, whose regency pavilion was thought likely to appeal to Indian soldiers, and it was there that he received the Victoria Cross from the king. Many of the British regular soldiers on the western front had, in turn, served in India. One such was Daniel Laidlaw (1875–1950), a piper of the King's Own Scottish Borderers, who won lasting renown on the first morning of the battle of Loos (25 September 1915). When an attack stalled under heavy artillery fire he scaled the parapets of the trench and piped the regimental march, despite shrapnel wounds, inspiring his battalion to continue the assault. Laidlaw was awarded the VC and, as the 'Piper of Loos', enjoyed some celebrity—though not quite on the scale of that accorded to George Findlater (1872–1942), who had performed a similar feat in piping the Gordon Highlanders into battle in the Tirah campaign of 1897. Findlater re-enlisted in 1914 but was invalided out in the following year.

Alongside these instances of service on the western front October's update includes figures active in other theatres. Sir Howard Kelly (1873–1952), commander of the light cruiser Gloucester, was involved in a naval action in the Mediterranean in the first days of the war, when he successfully detected and shadowed the German warships Goeben and Breslau, but was ordered to break off the chase. Their escape into Turkish waters was a factor in Turkey's entry into the war on the side of the central powers in October 1914. The diplomat Sir Gerard Lowther (1858–1916) was British ambassador at Constantinople in the pre-war years and his support for opponents of the Young Turks weakened British influence with the regime, though he had an admittedly difficult task in the unpredictable political climate of the Ottoman empire. Sir Charles Macpherson Dobell (1869–1954), involved in campaigns in West Africa at the outset of the war, subsequently commanded the Egyptian expeditionary force in its advance into Ottoman-held Palestine. Two attacks on Turkish forces at Gaza in March and April 1917 were failures; the first has been described as 'a wasted muddle', while the second has been accounted a 'senseless slaughter' as the attacking infantry received insufficient artillery support. The eventual collapse of the Ottoman empire produced further military challenges in the post-war period. Despite having seen command on the western front, Sir Aylmer Haldane (1862–1950) regarded a period during his posting at the head of the forces in the former Ottoman territories of Mesopotamia (later Iraq), held by Britain under League of Nations mandate, 'as the most tense cycle of activity' in his military career. Briefed to reduce the size of the garrison, he instead faced an Arab insurgency, in the summer of 1920, that threatened to overwhelm the governing forces. He published a detailed account of how he eventually suppressed the uprising and set about restoring the damaged infrastructure before the creation of the kingdom of Iraq in 1921. Other western front commanders were posted to Ireland during the Anglo-Irish war of 1919–21. Sir Peter Strickland (1869–1951), a divisional commander, led counter-insurgency operations and exercised martial law powers in four counties of Ireland until the truce of July 1921; he was the intended target of the IRA ambush that killed Hanway Cumming. For others who survived the First World War Bolshevism now presented the greatest threat. A member of a prominent engineering firm, Richard Rapier Stokes (1897–1957) gained the Military Cross on the western front, an experience that left him with a deep abhorrence of war, but also a fierce patriotism in the face of communism; in 1940, as a Labour MP (he was subsequently a cabinet minister, only the second Roman Catholic to join the cabinet), he controversially opposed the war against Nazi Germany, believing that it would only benefit Soviet Russia. 'I have spent three of the best years of my life killing Germans … apparently to no avail', Stokes reflected.

Religious benefaction and celebration

Three of the earliest female subjects added in this update are remembered for lives of religious dedication and benefaction. Margaret Holland, countess of Clarence (d. 1439), owed her considerable wealth to her first husband, a son of John of Gaunt. Her independent fortune was instrumental in her second marriage to Henry IV's son Thomas, duke of Clarence, and was evident in her taking a personal retinue of 143 people (including 10 priests and 11 sumptermen to oversee her baggage train) when she travelled to France in 1419. Widowed again in 1421, Margaret bestowed some of her wealth on the Bridgettine monastery at Syon, Middlesex, founded by her brother-in-law Henry V, to which she developed a deep spiritual attachment in later life. Almost a century after Margaret Holland's involvement, Katherine Palmer (d. 1576) entered the monastery, where she remained until its suppression in 1539, when she fled to Flanders. Returning to Syon nearly twenty years later she was elected abbess, only to be forced into exile once more following the accession of Elizabeth I. For another fifteen years she led her sisters across Flanders, defending them from Calvinist attacks, and is now credited with ensuring the survival of what is today England's only religious community with a continuous existence since before the Reformation. The last of our trio of medieval and early modern women is Sibylle Boys (d. in or after 1455), another wealthy widow, whose involvement in the brewing trade (then common among widows) prompted a correspondence with William Paston, to whom she famously submitted her recipe for a 'faire holsom drynk of ale'. In addition to this well-known appearance in Paston's 'scribbling papers', Lady Boys is recalled as a benefactor. Her wealth is thought to have rebuilt St Andrew's Church, Holme Hale, Norfolk, and to have supported the poet John Lydgate, whose 'Epistle to Sibille' describes the sound management and industry of the ideal housewife.

The religious conflicts that shaped Katherine Palmer's life were also evident, from a different perspective, in the career and death of her near contemporary Robert Pakington in 1536. A London MP sympathetic to the doctrines of the emerging Reformation, Pakington was murdered by a mysterious assailant who shot him with a gun—then a highly unusual method of killing. The fact that no one was arrested for the MP's murder prompted numerous theories, many of which suggested an action planned and financed by bishops critical of the Reformation and of Pakington's sympathy to reform. The dangers of religious disagreement are also evident in the early life of Bernard (d. 1214), one of the pre-Reformation bishops added in this update. Though included in the Oxford DNB as a bishop of Carlisle, to which see he was appointed by King John in 1200, Bernard was born in either Italy or Dalmatia and had served as archbishop of Ragusa, from where he had fled in fear of his life having lost the allegiance of his congregation. Bernard's successor at Carlisle, Hugh (d. 1223), owed his election to John's determination that the vacant see would go to the English king's man, not that of the Scottish monarch, Alexander II, who had occupied north-west England in 1216–17. Alexander has a connection to another of our new subjects: Yolande (d. in or after 1324) married the king's son, and so became queen of Scots in 1285. October's update also adds the biography of an earlier Scots queen, Sibylla (d. 1122), consort of Alexander I, whose opinion of his wife does not appear to have been high. On her death the king 'did not waste many sighs on her, for she was wanting, it was said, in correctness of manners and charm of person'. Contests between England and Scotland provide the backdrop for another medieval religious life, that of John Appleby (d. 1389), lawyer and dean of St Paul's. One of Appleby's northern livings involved him closely in the development of border law intended to settle disputes over infringements of the then highly contested border between England and Scotland. Appleby's expertise in civil law provided the basis for the English to enforce greater penalties on those who broke the truce between the two countries, a contribution that prompts his Oxford DNB biographer to commend Appleby's 'significant contribution to the elaboration of the earliest features of international law as it was practised in England'.

The celebratory nature of religious observance is marked, in a less turbulent climate, by new entries on a small group of nineteenth-century hymn writers, whose contributions continue to form part of the Anglo-American religious tradition. In addition to Sir John Arkwright, author of the remembrance hymn, this update adds the Bristol insurance broker William Chatterton Dix (1837–1898), who wrote the Epiphany hymn 'As with gladness men of old', and George Woodward (1848–1934), latterly vicar of St Augustine's, Highgate, who was prominent in reviving the carol tradition, and is best known as the author of the words to 'Ding dong! Merrily on high'. John Julian (1839–1913), incumbent of Wincobank, South Yorkshire, spent twenty-five years compiling his Dictionary of Hymnology, a magisterial work that remains at the centre of hymnological research. Another monumental work of compilation from the early twentieth century was the Anglo-Saxon dictionary of Thomas Northcote Toller (1844–1930).

Gardening: cultivation and innovation

The October 2008 update adds the second of three selections of gardeners' biographies in a project that began in May of this year and will conclude in May 2009. Innovation and experimentation link the achievements of many of those included in this latest set of lives. At his garden at Highdown, near Worthing, Sussex, Sir Frederick Stern (1884–1967), a banker who had gained the Military Cross during war service, demonstrated the possibilities of gardening on chalk, while at East Lambrook, Somerset, Margery Fish (1892–1969), secretary to six editors of the Daily Mail, established a cottage garden planted in reaction to formal bedding to provide colour throughout the year. The founder of the seed company Bees Ltd, which promoted many plant collecting expeditions, Arthur Kilpin Bulley (1861–1942), created a garden at Neston, Cheshire, which was presented to the University of Liverpool and became its botanic garden. The plant collecting tradition is also represented by Euan Cox (1893–1977), a member of a prominent family of Dundee jute manufacturers, who developed the gardens at Glendoick, Perthshire, as a leading centre of rhododendron cultivation.

Another theme is the dynastic nature of gardening knowledge. Four generations of the Jackman family (per. 1763–1976) developed clematis cultivars at their Woking nursery. One of these—developed in 1858 when wild varieties of clematis brought to Britain by plant collectors in China were crossed with other varieties—produced the best-known and most widely-grown clematis cultivar around the world, Clematis Jackmanii. Ernest Ballard (1870–1952) of Colwall, Herefordshire, made a speciality of breeding Michaelmas daisies, which he promoted as an adornment for autumn gardens, valuable for their 'hardiness, ease of culture, variety of colour, and wild profusion of bloom'; his daughter-in-law Helen Ballard (1908–1995), of Mathon, Worcestershire, was an indefatigable collector and hybridizer of hellebores. Sir Frederick William Moore (1857–1949) succeeded his father as curator of the botanic gardens at Dublin, and became recognized as Ireland's premier horticulturist; Richard Irwin Lynch (1850–1924), who revived the Cambridge University Botanic Garden, was the son of a Cornish gardener. The celebrated vicarage garden at Bitton, Gloucestershire, associated with Henry Nicholson Ellacombe (1822–1916), who cultivated some 3000 varieties of plants, had been originally established by the canon's father. Another clergyman gardener, William Wilks (1843–1923), vicar of Shirley near Croydon, developed the Shirley poppy, and used his position as secretary to the Royal Horticultural Society to encourage scientific research into heredity, selection, and cross-fertilization.

Local and international lives

The close connection between gardening and regional history is maintained in other parts of the October update, notably a selection of amateur collectors whose collections are now preserved in museums around the country. The village schoolmaster at Wetton, Staffordshire, Samuel Carrington (bap. 1798, d. 1870), excavated over 100 burial mounds around his native village, and found Celtic, Romano-British, and Anglo-Saxon remains at Thor's Cave, Wetton. He also collected fossils from his local north Staffordshire limestone, with much of his collection being displayed in the pantry of his home in Wetton, and subsequently preserved in a number of museums. The Wells postmaster Herbert Balch (1869–1958) devoted his spare time to the scientific exploration of the Mendip hills cave system, and to curating the collections of the Wells museum. Henry Johnston-Lavis (1856–1914), a physician who started a medical practice for the English community first in Naples and later southern France, pursued geological interests—in particular concerning volcanoes, and became an authority on Vesuvius. His specimens passed to University College, London. An inheritance from the family stove-making business financed the travels of Gertrude Benham (1867–1938), whose anthropological collections, gathered during her eight round-the-world expeditions, were donated to the Plymouth museum. While Benham is remembered for travelling the world, the reputation of members of the Ashington group derives from their depictions of daily life in the Northumberland mining town from which they took their name. The group, all coalminers who came to art through evening classes in the 1930s, gained considerable attention both for the quality of its work and from those attracted by the idea of working people engaging in high cultural pursuits. Though rooted in Ashington for its subject matter, the group's work was displayed widely in the UK and overseas (including China in 1980, one of the first exhibitions from the West after the cultural revolution). There has been renewed interest in the group in recent years: in 2006 the group's permanent collection went on display at a purpose-built gallery at the Woodhorn Colliery Museum, Ashington, and in 2007 the group was the subject of Lee Hall's play The Pitmen Painters (performed at the National Theatre, London, in summer 2008).

Recreational pursuits of a different kind, though both with a similarly strong association to place, are the legacy of two further newcomers to the Oxford DNB. As construction work begins on London's Olympic stadia, it is timely to reflect on the difficulties encountered by the Surrey landowner Hugh Locke King (1848–1926), who created the world's first purpose-built motor-racing track on his estate at Brooklands in 1907. It cost him a sizeable slice of his (and his wife's) personal fortune and led to hundreds of construction workers sleeping rough in the Weybridge area during building work. The enterprise also alienated Locke King's neighbours, who complained of the noise, crowds, litter, and fumes generated by race meetings. But equally it provided British motor sport with a pioneering facility, and had an unexpected role as a centre of wartime aircraft production. Locke King envisaged motor racing as following the format of horse racing. In 1776 the army officer, Yorkshire landowner, and racing enthusiast Anthony St Leger (bap. 1731, d. 1786) had the idea of a sweepstake for three-year-old horses run over two miles. The race that bears his name, run annually at Doncaster racecourse, remains one of five British classic races.

Alongside individuals closely associated with the regions of Britain, the October update also includes individuals from overseas now remembered for their contribution to British life. During the Napoleonic wars the parents of Louis Lucien Bonaparte (1813–1891), relatives of the French emperor, were interned in England, and their son was born at Grimley, Worcestershire. Although his early years were spent in Italy, he settled in London in the 1850s and pursued linguistic studies, becoming an authority on the Basque language. Among these who came to Britain in the First World War was the Serbian philosopher Dimitrije Mitrinoviç (1887–1953), who in August 1914 fled the Austro-Hungarian empire for London, where he spent the rest of his life promoting internationalism. The American graphic designer Edward McKnight Kauffer (1890–1954) likewise left Paris at the outbreak of the war and settled in London, where his innovative poster designs were used to advertise London's underground railway and the launch of the Daily Herald newspaper.

It was a more sinister manifestation of internationalism that concerned Alfred Stace Dyer (1849–1926), the first of a pair of biographies offering historical precedents for present-day social issues. Now much in the news, the subject of trafficking people was a concern in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and was taken up by Dyer, a Northamptonshire printer, who exposed the trafficking of young British girls to the brothels of the European mainland, and later turned his attention to state-regulated prostitution in British India. Alison Neilans (1884–1942), a militant suffragist imprisoned during the women's suffrage campaigns, continued the attack on state-sanctioned brothels, which she associated with militarism, and particularly opposed laws that embodied the 'double standard' in matters of sexual morality and legally stigmatized prostitutes.

Empire and Commonwealth: India

October's update also extends our coverage of the former British empire and early Commonwealth, with the publication of new entries on people significant to British links to the Indian subcontinent. Among them is an entry on the Tagore family (per. 1690–1951), a remarkable dynasty whose members have played leading roles in business, religion, law, and culture in Calcutta and in India more generally from the eighteenth century to the present. The family's most famous member was undoubtedly the Nobel prize-winning poet Rabindranath Tagore, but his grandfather, Dwarkanath Tagore (1794–1846), a fabulously wealthy merchant who dined with Queen Victoria and had audiences with the pope and King Louis-Philippe of France, now also appears in the dictionary in his own right.

The entry on the Tagores makes clear that they willingly allied themselves with European merchants and felt at ease with British culture (while also playing important roles in the development of Hindu culture). A rather different relationship with the British characterized the life of Lakshmi Bai (1827/8–1858), the rani of Jhansi, who, driven by outrage and resentment at the East India Company's decision to annexe Jhansi, became 'the most revered heroine in Indian history' for her role in the Indian 'mutiny' of 1857–8. Later opponents of British rule whose biographies now appear in the dictionary include Varahagiri Venkata (V.V.) Giri (1894–1980), a trade unionist and political activist who was expelled from Ireland in 1916 under suspicion of associating with those responsible for the Easter rising of that year, and who later became president of India; Chaudhary Charan Singh (1902–1987), who became the leading spokesman for the Indian peasantry and later left the Congress party, was jailed by Indira Gandhi, and became Janata Party prime minister; and Rafi Ahmad Kidwai (1894–1954), another Congress politician from the United Provinces, and a follower of Jawaharlal Nehru, who was unusual (and prominent) as a Congress Muslim politician. All three were repeatedly jailed by the British. Another key figure in Muslim politics in India, Sir Mian Fazl-i-Husain (1877–1936), was a good deal more critical of Congress and its policy of non-cooperation with the British, and was one of the founders of the Unionist Party, which held power (and kept both Congress and the Muslim League at bay) in the Punjab until independence. Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan (1917–1980), a British-trained army officer who served during the Second World War in Iraq, north Africa, and Italy, later became military ruler of Pakistan, responsible for launching the disastrous military operation in East Pakistan in 1971 that led to war with India and the independence of Bangladesh, of which Tajuddin Ahmed (1925–1975), a pre-independence Muslim League activist, was the first prime minister.

Lakshmi Bai's fame in India owes something to her balladic evocation by Subhadra Kumari Chauhan (1904–1948), a poet and Gandhian activist who again (with her husband) was frequently jailed for her political activities. Equally important in the literary history of the subcontinent were Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi (1864–1938), who after more than twenty years working for the Indian railways became a key figure in the development of a modern Hindi (as distinct from Urdu) literature, and Saadat Hasan Manto (1912–1955), one of the best-loved and most widely read modern writers in Urdu, who also worked as a scriptwriter in pre-independence Bombay. A much more controversial figure was Katherine Mayo (1867–1940), an American journalist and author, whose Mother India (1921) held Hindu culture responsible for the political, social, and economic woes of India, and provided welcome support for those 'diehards' (such as Winston Churchill) who opposed constitutional reform in the subcontinent. The British impact on India is now, of course, most clearly visible in the built environment, and among the new subjects in this update is Henry Medd (1892–1977), Herbert Baker's representative in New Delhi, and architect in his own right of both the Anglican and the Roman Catholic cathedrals in the city, who burst into tears on leaving India. Finally, the release also includes an entry on the historian Sarvepalli Gopal (1923–2002), author of sympathetic works on British rule (despite his own nationalist beliefs and involvement) as well as of magisterial biographies of Nehru and his own father, the philosopher and politician Sir Sarvepalli Radakrishnan. Gopal's life in many ways encapsulates the ambiguous and complex relationship between Indians and their one-time rulers.

The professions—new and old

One of the medical specialisms that received official recognition at the creation of the National Health Service, which this year marked its sixtieth anniversary, was geriatrics, and October's update records the lives of three of its early practitioners. Joseph Sheldon (1893–1972), appointed a consultant physician at the Royal Hospital, Wolverhampton in 1921, developed a deep interest in the health of older people. He held his out-patient sessions in Wolverhampton on market days in order to make visiting easier, and undertook systematic studies of older people in the community. His later surveys of geriatric services exposed a highly unsatisfactory state of affairs and led to the introduction of purpose-built units. Sir Ferguson Anderson (1914–2001), physician at Stobhill Hospital, Glasgow, overcame much prejudice towards this branch of medicine, and promoted the establishment of the chair of geriatric medicine at Glasgow University, the first in the country (and possibly in the world). Another Glaswegian, Bernard Isaacs (1924–1995), headed Birmingham University's department of geriatric medicine, which became noted for its high standard of effective and respectful care for elderly people. His influential books included The Survival of the Unfittest (1972), a study of old people in the East End of Glasgow, which began with a vivid example of how the consequences of a fall could escalate into risks to health, independence, and quality of life.

Other professions that emerged in the twentieth century are represented in the update. Sir William Smith Crawford (1878–1950) was the Glasgow-born founder of W. S. Crawford Ltd, one of the few early twentieth-century British advertising agencies to achieve an international reach. Crawford made strenuous attempts to raise the status of advertising in public life, and to reclaim the profession from 'quacks and charlatans'. During the great depression of 1931 he directed a Buy British campaign, to persuade the public that discriminating shopping could spend the nation out of the slump. In the late 1930s the sociologist Henry William Durant (1902–1982) set up the British Institute of Public Opinion, whose credibility was reinforced by correctly forecasting the outcome of the West Fulham by-election in 1938. After war service in France, for which he won the Military Cross, Edward Henry Molyneux (1891–1974) in 1919 set up a fashion house in Paris, where he created luxurious clothes for the hedonistic lifestyle of international high society. His impeccably made and fitted clothes, combining British understatement and French chic, reached a height of popularity in the 1930s when his clients included Wallis Simpson. Mid-twentieth century university expansion is represented by Frederick Attenborough (1887–1973), principal of University College, Leicester, from 1932 to 1951, and father of David and Richard, naturalist and film director respectively. Attenborough's major influence was to increase student numbers and teaching facilities and his contribution is commemorated with an eighteen-storey tower block on the campus (named after him in 1970). The journalist and Soho denizen Daniel Farson (1927–1997) became an early television celebrity in the mid-1950s, conducting a series of controversial interviews, one of which, with Dylan Thomas's widow, had to be faded out when he provoked her to fury.

Virginia Woolf, daughter of the DNB's first editor, Leslie Stephen, wrote in 1938 that 'It is much to be regretted that no lives of maids … are to be found in the Dictionary of National Biography'. That is no longer true, and the present update includes Nellie Boxall (1890–1965), daughter of a farm worker from Farncombe, Surrey, who was cook and servant to Virginia Woolf from the mid-1910s to the mid-1930s. The couple had a notably stormy relationship; Boxall appears frequently in Woolf's diaries as the object both of affection and hostility and reveals the contradictions in Woolf's relations with working women who are often championed in her fiction but were more harshly treated in real life. After finally leaving the Woolfs in 1934, Boxall achieved note as cook for the actors Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester before retiring to her native town.

The themes of internationalism and women's work are brought together in one final—and remarkable—life, fittingly added shortly before the American presidential election of November 2008. In 1872 Victoria Claflin Woodhull (1838–1927), the daughter of a gristmill owner from Homer, Ohio, stood as the first female presidential candidate in the United States of America. A scandalous figure, she spent election day in jail in New York, having exposed the sexual misconduct of a prominent America preacher. She came to England in 1877, where she spent most of her life, though remaining an American citizen. She married (as her third husband) a member of the Martin banking family. On his death in 1897 she inherited his Worcestershire estate at Bredon's Norton, where she reinvented herself as a country landowner, and promoter of Anglo-American friendship, for which she was commemorated by a memorial in Tewkesbury Abbey.

Groups in British history

The twenty-one reference group essays added in October 2008 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. Chronologically our new groups extend from the tenth-century Benedictine reformers—a network of ecclesiastics influenced by the resurgence of Benedictine monasticism on the continent—to the 1950s Independent Group, a loose artistic circle identified as the fathers of British pop art.

Some of the networks now added are particularly well known. Our medieval coverage, for example, includes the Lancastrians—supporters of Henry VI during the Wars of the Roses—and the Yorkists, allies of Henry's cousin, Richard, duke of York, who first questioned the legitimacy of, and then took up arms against, the king. War also united those who fought with Henry V against the French in the battle of Agincourt (1415), though it was of course Shakespeare who gave them their legendary status as 'We few, we happy few, we band of brothers'. Just as Henry V is celebrated for his exemplary leadership, so his forebear John, is commonly known as the 'bad' king. However, as our new essay on John's 'evil' counsellors shows, his reign's reputation for venality and tyranny owed much to the thirty-two courtiers who advised the king and whom contemporaries deemed 'evil' and 'most wicked'.

The bloody turmoil of the Reformation and its aftermath is all too evident in the fate of the Marian martyrs, a group of more than 300 men and women executed for heresy by Mary Tudor between 1555 and 1558, and also in the actions of the thirteen Roman Catholic gentlemen—best known as the Gunpowder plotters—who sought to initiate the overthrow of the new Stuart regime with an attack on the Palace of Westminster in 1605. From among those who succeeded in defeating royalists forces later in the century came the Putney debaters, the parliamentarian soldiers and civilian Levellers who met at St Mary's Church, Putney, in 1647 to discuss the prospective settlement of the nation. From the thirty-six men known to have spoken during the eleven days of deliberations, Thomas Rainborowe's defence of the right of all free men to vote ('the poorest hee that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest hee') endures as a key moment in the evolution of democracy and has ensured the debaters' prominence in popular and radical histories of Britain. Progressive thinking, albeit in a calmer political climate, was also a legacy of another well-known group, the mid- to late eighteenth-century Bluestocking circle. Now typically regarded as an assembly of intellectual women dedicated to fostering and promoting the work of other women, the circle originated as a fashionable gathering of men as well as women, and only acquired its modern association over several generations, during which time the term bluestocking also gained negative connotations among conservative critics.

Networks like those active at Agincourt, Westminster, and Putney are also noteworthy for their strong attachments to specific places, a theme evident in several more of our new essays. In a gathering known as the Dedham conference, a group of sixteenth-century ministers met regularly in the Essex market town of Dedham to consider how best to reform the Church of England along quasi-presbyterian lines; the comprehensive records of their assembly provide historians with one of the most detailed accounts of the godly in late Elizabethan England. The Sussex town of Rye was a focal point of the literary impressionists, a small group of late nineteenth-century writers, among them Henry James and Joseph Conrad, who promoted impressionism within English literature, while Leicester House (situated at what is now London's Leicester Square) was the meeting place of the mid-eighteenth-century politicians and courtiers united by their opposition to George II and his ministers, and by their support for the king's ostracized son, Prince Frederick. The importance of prominent individuals, like Frederick, for networks is also shown in three final groups from the twentieth century: the 'fishpond', a grouping of naval officers supportive of the reforms to the service proposed by Sir John Fisher, first sea lord from 1904 to 1910, the 'syndicate of discontent', a second naval circle linked by their opposition to Fisher's innovations; and the Auden group, whose association with the poet was used by supporters and critics alike to describe a loose network of left-wing thirties intellectuals.

As ever, readers with access to the complete Oxford DNB (and this includes almost every member of a British public library) can browse the 230 groups now 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 October 2008 update.

Our next online update

Our next online update will be published in January 2009 and will continue the Oxford DNB's coverage of recent and contemporary history with some 200 biographies of men and women who died in 2005. Our next set of group essays will appear as part of the next-but-one update, to be published in May 2009.

Lawrence Goldman, editor

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