|
The May 2010 update of the Oxford DNB adds biographies of 90 men and women active between the thirteenth and late twentieth century. In addition to new biographies, the update includes 10 ‘reference group’ essays—our expanding selection of well-known networks in the British past.
A full list of subjects is also available, along with the editor’s introduction to the new update. Online access to all of the new biographies—together with the Oxford DNB’s 57,258 existing entries—is now freely available, at home, via nearly all UK public libraries.
| May’s update considers what it takes to be hero. Our starting point is Alice Ayres whose death in a fire led, in 1900, to the creation of the Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice in Postman’s Park, London.
Alice’s life is also available as a
podcast episode. |
 |
 |
On the night of 14/15 April 1912 Wallace Hartley led his orchestra during the evacuation of the RMS Titanic. Reports of the disaster praised Hartley and his fellow musicians for their bravery and claimed that their final performance had been the hymn ‘Nearer, my God, to thee’. |
| Other civilian heroes include the air steward Jane Harrison, the only woman to receive the George Cross in peacetime, and railwayman John Axon, another GC recipient whose heroism was also celebrated in a pioneering radio documentary by folk musician Ewan MacColl. |
 |
May’s update is accompanied by a feature on changing attitudes to heroism which brings together other subjects in the ODNB and reflects on the rise and commemoration of the ‘everyday hero’.
 |
Among Britons overseas are William Weston, the first Englishman to lead an expedition to the New World (probably in 1499) and the London-born architect Gordon Kaufmann who, having moved to California, made his reputation with fashionable Mediterranean homes and the Hoover Dam—interwar America’s pre-eminent symbol of modernism and engineering prowess. |
| Lives with Japanese connections include Thomas Kinder, director of the imperial mint, and the Lancashire phycologist Kathleen Drew. Her work on red algae made possible the artificial cultivation of seaweed and the creation of the modern nori industry whose product is now familiar to consumers of sushi worldwide. |
 |
Interpreters and promoters of continental European languages and cultures include the translators Ellen Marriage and John Mavrogordato, a champion of colloquial Greek whose work prompted riots in Athens. |
| The rise of modern languages within British universities owes much to scholars like the German specialist Leonard Willoughby and the Italianist Uberto Limentani, while Johnny Stuart combined a life studying Russian icons with a passion for motorbikes. |
| May’s update offers the curious case of Edward ‘Boy’ Jones who gained notoriety for repeatedly breaking into Buckingham Palace. It also includes the sorry story of Penelope Boothby who sat for Reynolds’s most successful child portrait, best known as the ‘Mob-Cap’ and the inspiration for Millais’s ‘Cherry Ripe’ (1877). |
 |
Boothby is also remembered for the memorials that marked her early death; these include a striking tomb, a model of which moved Queen Charlotte to tears.
 |
Two more children appear in the remarkable painting that accompanies a biography of their mother, the London silkwoman Alice Barnham: together they make up one of the earliest family portraits painted in England dating from the late 1550s. Artists in the new update include the former St Ives fisherman Alfred Wallis who gained international attention in the 1930s for his ‘primitive’ style of painting. |
May’s update also adds new portraits to 30 existing entries in the Oxford DNB. Here’s a selection, from Ras Prince Monolulu and the Tichborne claimant to Lindow Man and Captain Smith of the Titanic (the latter two being available as podcast episodes). A full list of new portraits is also available.
|
New group essays in May include the:
|
 |
There are now nearly 270 groups available in the Themes area of the online ODNB (available with subscriber access).
> Sign up for a free Life of the Day or biography podcast
> Read the Oxford DNB, free and at home, using your library's subscription
> More about the Oxford DNB
|
