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Preface to the online release, January 2012By Lawrence Goldman
New online contents, January 2012Welcome to the twenty-second online update of the Oxford DNB, which adds 209 new articles and, in total, 220 new biographies to the dictionary. Of these, 217 died in 2008 and thirty-eight were women. The earliest born, in December 1909, was the historian Frank Walbank; the latest, born in November 1960, the racing motorcyclist Robert Dunlop. The vast majority—189 or 87%—were born before the outbreak of the Second World War; 25, or some 11.5%, were born before the outbreak of the First World War. The January release contains notable figures from all areas of public life – the arts, the media, science and scholarship, medicine and law, politics and the civil service, and many other categories beside. But among those who died in 2008, and who are now added to the dictionary, are a group of remarkable figures associated with drama and the stage in Britain whose careers interlocked and coincided from the 1950s to the present decade. As ever, a selection of these new articles and a list of all new subjects added to the dictionary are freely available. The complete dictionary (58,094 biographies and 500 theme articles) is available, free, in nearly all public libraries in the UK, most of which offer remote access that enables members to log in at any time at home (or anywhere they have internet access). Full details of participating public libraries and how to gain access to the complete dictionary are available here. Ralph Evans (1949-2011)It is with great sadness that we must begin by recording the death of Ralph Evans, a long-serving member of the Oxford DNB’s staff, in September 2011 following a short illness. Ralph was a member of the production team at Oxford University Press who prepared the new 60-volume edition of the Oxford DNB for publication in 2004. He then took on the role of production editor for the online edition and played a pivotal role in turning the texts submitted by our authors into the articles that are published in our three annual updates. Ralph co-ordinated the production of new biographies in the dictionary, linking together authors, copy editors, proofreaders, data engineers, typesetters, and all the many specialists whose services are required for online publication. He had both technical and academic skills. He had trained as a historian of late-medieval economy and society and he published several works on the period. He co-edited the volume on late-medieval Oxford for the History of the University of Oxford (OUP, 1992) and edited a volume of essays in memory of the historian Trevor Aston in 2004. He also wrote Aston’s biography for the Oxford DNB. Many contributors to the Oxford DNB will have corresponded with Ralph: all will have been edited by him and owe the final form of their articles to his thoughtful and meticulous approach. Ralph worked on the early stages of the January 2012 update, planning its production and editing parts of the text. We dedicate it to him. Theatre, cinema, dance, and entertainmentAmong the most notable figures added to the dictionary in the January update are those drawn from the worlds of theatre, cinema, and entertainment. Pride of place must go to Harold Pinter, Nobel laureate for literature in 2005 and variously a playwright, screenwriter, director, and actor. He came swiftly to prominence with a series of plays in the late 1950s and early 1960s, including The Birthday Party (1957), The Caretaker (1960), and The Homecoming (1965), which were notable for their unsettling characters who expressed themselves in a sparse, staccato language (as famous for its pauses as for its dialogue), and for the underlying sense of menace which these works thereby engendered. Later, Pinter wrote celebrated screenplays for films, including the adaptation in 1981 of John Fowles’s novel, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and directed a variety of plays written by his friends and associates. He also became a vocal and public critic of the foreign policies of Britain and the United States. Pinter’s private life was often played out in the public arena, but Michael Billington’s memoir of him reminds us of the man himself, his humble roots, and the group of boyhood friends who helped sustain him through his life. One of those playwrights whose works Pinter directed was Simon Gray, famous for Butley (1971), Close of Play (1979), Quatermaine’s Terms (1981), and The Late Middle Classes (1999), the last three directed by Pinter. Their friendship survived Gray’s thinly-disguised portrait of Pinter as Harold Duff, ‘the world’s greatest living playwright’, in Unnatural Pursuits (1993). Gray was latterly famous also as a diarist whose final volumes wittily and poignantly chronicled his struggle with lung cancer. Another of those included in this release who collaborated with Pinter is the director David Jones who moved easily between theatre and film, directing a string of acclaimed arts programmes for the BBC and plays for the Royal Shakespeare Company. He directed Pinter’s television play Langrishe, Go Down in 1978 and Pinter’s first feature film, from his play Betrayal, in 1983. The actor Terence Rigby also had a productive relationship with Pinter: one of his first roles was Joey in The Homecoming. He was frequently on television, notably as a policeman in the BBC detective series Softly, Softly and as Dr Watson in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1987). He twice played the role of Stalin: in the National’s Theatre’s production of State and Revolution (1977) and in the film Testimony (1988). They are joined by Paul Scofield, one of the most talented and praised of British post-war actors. He is best remembered as Sir Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons (1960) which became a highly successful film six years later and for which Scofield won an Oscar. He was also a triumphant Hamlet and Lear (playing the latter in Peter Brook’s 1971 film) and Salieri in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus (1979). Uninterested in the trappings of celebrity and noted for the simple and understated manner in which he lived, he was known in the acting profession as ‘Saint Paul’ and he turned down a knighthood on several occasions. Another Oscar winner included now is the director Anthony Minghella who grew up on the Isle of Wight. He also moved between film, theatre, and television and won his Academy Award in 1996 for the romantic saga The English Patient set in North Africa and Italy before and during the Second World War. He was also nominated three years later for what many will consider his best film, the adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel, The Talented Mr Ripley.
The cinematographer David Watkin began his career with the Southern railway film unit before working on a string of hit films including the Beatles’ Help! (1965), The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), Chariots of Fire (1981), and Out of Africa (1985), for which he too won an Oscar. Meanwhile Russell Lloyd, a film editor, earned a nomination for the 1975 adventure based loosely on a Rudyard Kipling short story, The Man Who Would be King. This came towards the end of a career which had started at Alexander Korda’s Denham Studios in the 1930s and which included Lloyd’s work on the film Moby Dick (1956). January’s update also includes the film producer John Daly who co-founded Hemdale Productions with that quintessential figure from the 1960s, David Hemmings, and who was executive producer for David Puttnam’s film Melody (1971) and the late Ken Russell’s version of Tommy (1975). Daly later moved to the United States where his successful productions included Terminator (1984) and the Vietnam War film, Platoon (1986). The theatre director Frith Banbury championed the work of new playwrights including Rodney Ackland, John Whiting, and Errol John. He directed John’s Moon on a Rainbow Shawl in 1958, the first West End play with an all-black cast. Among actors now added to the dictionary are Elizabeth Spriggs, who was a stalwart of the RSC and National Theatre and frequently seen on television in such series as Poirot, Lovejoy, and Midsomer Murders, and Eileen Herlie, who was Gertrude to Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet on film in 1948 and went on to a successful career on Broadway and in American television, appearing in nearly seven hundred episodes of the popular show All My Children between 1976 and 2008. They are joined by the singular Hazel Court, described by contemporaries as ‘pert’, who found her particular niche as Hammer Horror’s ‘scream queen’ in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and subsequent films. This update also includes four subjects from the worlds of ballet and dance. Nadia Nerina appeared frequently on television in the 1950s and 1960s and famously created the role of Lise in Frederick Ashton’s La Fille Mal Gardée (1960): she was acclaimed as the most virtuosic British ballerina of her generation. The choreographer and ballet director Norman Morrice was co-director of the Ballet Rambert, and later a long-serving director of the Royal Ballet, while the Canadian-born dancer and choreographer Laverne Meyer founded the Northern Dance Theatre. Clive Barnes was the Times’s first specialized dance critic who later moved to New York and became a dance and drama critic for the New York Times and New York Post. He wrote many books on ballet. MusicThe January 2012 update includes the biographies of composers, singers, and musicians drawn from a wide range of musical genres. Two academic composers head our list. The Welsh composer Alun Hoddinott enjoyed a long and distinguished career in the music department at University College, Cardiff, and wrote the music for the investiture of Charles as prince of Wales in 1969, and a fanfare for his marriage to Camilla Parker-Bowles in 2005. Wilfrid Mellers was a musicologist and the first head of music at the new University of York from 1964 to 1981. He combined composition in varied styles with published work on Bach and Beethoven on the one hand, and the Beatles and Bob Dylan on the other. Another composer, Tristram Cary, whose later career was spent at the University of Adelaide, is described as ‘the father of British electronic music’; he not only composed scores for Dr Who and the cult British science fiction film Quatermass and the Pit (1967), but also developed a range of synthesizers for rock and pop bands in the 1970s, notably his VCS3 as used by Pink Floyd. Several figures were particularly closely associated with conducting and playing British music. The conductors Vernon ‘Tod’ Handley, who was a protégé of Sir Adrian Boult, and Richard Hickox were both promoters of the music of Vaughan Williams, Elgar, Arnold, Bliss, and others. The opera singer Marjorie Thomas, who was particularly renowned for her recordings with Sir Malcolm Sargent, was an acclaimed interpreter of Gilbert and Sullivan, Britten, and Vaughan Williams. Peter Glossop, a mainstay of Sadler’s Wells and then the Royal Opera, was also noted for his interpretations of Britten. Among instrumentalists we include the leading oboist of her generation, Evelyn Rothwell, the author of a classic study on oboe technique, who married the conductor John Barbirolli. There is also the clarinettist and basset horn player, Georgina Dobreé, who was indefatigable in playing, recording, and commissioning works for her chosen instruments. Folk music is represented through the lives of Alexander ‘Eck’ McEwen who is included with his brother Rory, and Cliff Hall. Coming from an aristocratic background, McEwen popularized Scottish and English folk music in Britain and the United States in the 1950s and early 1960s but was eclipsed by the rise of rock’n’roll. Hall, meanwhile, was born in Cuba of Jamaican parents and became the guitarist and singer for The Spinners, probably the first multi-racial group to achieve major success in Britain. Through Hall the group added calypso and other Caribbean influences to their folk sound. Davey Graham, from a mixed race background, was one of the most influential guitarists of the last fifty years, eclectic in influences but remarkably original in approach. His career was cut short by a heroin addiction. Another performer whose career pre-dated the pop era was Lita Roza, who had hit records with the bands of Ted Heath and Don Lusher and is best known for that most annoying jingle, ‘How Much is that Doggie in the Window?’ (1952). She was regularly voted favourite female vocalist at this time. She was friendly with the notorious Kray twins and sang in their London nightclubs, but, perhaps wisely, she declined to marry Ronnie Kray. Neil Aspinall began his career in pop music from the unpromising position of driver to the Beatles. But after the death of Brian Epstein in 1967 he became their indispensable manager and chief executive of their company, Apple Corps. He also sang on ‘Yellow Submarine’ and played the harmonica on ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite’. Mike Smith was the keyboard player and vocalist for the Dave Clark Five who reached number one in 1964 with ‘Glad All Over’ and who, in a long career, sold more than a hundred million records. But even this number was eclipsed by Pink Floyd, the ‘psychedelic’ band which emerged in the mid-1960s and whose keyboard player, Rick Wright, now joins another of the band’s founders, Syd Barrett, in the Oxford DNB. Though differences between band members led to a period of six years in the 1980s when Wright was not a part of Pink Floyd, he was a crucial element in their distinctive style, often when playing the VCS3 synthesiser invented by Tristram Cary, above. Finally, the third and last member of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the drummer John ‘Mitch’ Mitchell, now joins Hendrix himself and Noel Redding in the dictionary. Broadcasting and journalismOur first entrant to the dictionary under the heading of broadcasting and journalism might equally well be categorized under jazz music. Humphrey Lyttelton combined one career of over fifty years as an acclaimed trumpeter at the head of several bands specializing in ‘trad jazz’ with another as a broadcaster who helped to popularise jazz on the radio and as a humorist who was best known as the chair of the long-running comedy radio series I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue. ‘Humph’ was playing music and keeping order on Radio 4 right up to his death. Similarly, Miles Kington was a keen jazz musician and jazz critic, but better known as a television and radio presenter and as a humorist writing for newspapers and magazines such as Punch and The Oldie. Over his numerous books of Franglais we must draw a veil. Our list of leading journalists is headed by Sir Charles Wheeler whose biography has been written by the late Anthony Howard. Decorated during the Second World War, Wheeler joined the BBC and served as a correspondent in Berlin, Washington, and New Delhi. From 1980 to 1995 he presented Newsnight for the BBC; thereafter he continued to make the most interesting and distinguished programmes on current affairs and recent history, and his craggy features topped with a mane of silver hair made him one of the most instantly recognizable and respected figures on television. The Irishman Conor Cruise O’Brien enters the dictionary for two reasons: his high profile as a writer and columnist in Britain and his period as editor of The Observer from 1979 to 1981. He was also a diplomat, politician, academic, and author with wide experience of international affairs and a strong antipathy to the IRA and the reunification of Ireland. William Frankel was editor of the Jewish Chronicle for almost two decades, during which time he modernized the weekly paper, widened its appeal, and made it a respected commentator on aspects both Jewish and British. He was also a prominent supporter of Louis Jacobs in the most notable theological controversy within the Anglo-Jewish community during the twentieth century. Other journalists added to the dictionary include John Whale, who was ITN’s first resident Washington correspondent and later head of the BBC’s religious programmes and editor of The Church Times, and David Chipp who, as a Reuters correspondent, was the first western journalist to report from Communist China. Later Chipp was a modernising editor-in-chief of the Press Association and a campaigner for press freedom. The photojournalist Philip Jones Griffiths was best known for his photographs of the Vietnam War and was one of those photographers credited with changing American and western opinion towards that conflict. Much closer to home, Bob Crampsey combined careers as a teacher, broadcaster, and sports journalist. Linking these, he was a prolific author of books on Scottish sporting history. A winner of the BBC’s Brain of Britain, he was the original ‘anorak’, described as ‘Google before Google, Wikipedia before Wikipedia’. Alan Brien presented early television chat shows in the 1950s but later won plaudits as theatre critic of the Sunday Telegraph and as a witty columnist for The Times among other newspapers. Television executives and directors are represented in several lives now added to the dictionary. Bryan Cowgill joined the BBC in 1954, working on Sportsview before launching the hugely successful Grandstand and Match of the Day, staples of Saturday programming for decades afterwards. Cowgill introduced the term ‘action replay’ to the language. He was later the controller of BBC1 and then managing director of Thames Television. Sir Geoffrey Cox was an early recruit to ITN, launched the station’s flagship News at Ten, and then became deputy chairman of Yorkshire Television and chairman of Tyne Tees Television. Sir Bill Cotton was the son of the famous bandleader of the same name, whose television shows he produced early in his career. He went on to launch Top of the Pops, The Two Ronnies, and the Morecambe and Wise Show, and rose to become managing director of BBC Television. Mark Shivas joined Granada Television in 1963 but on moving to the BBC five years later was responsible for a remarkable list of high-quality dramas, becoming head of BBC drama between 1988 and 1993 and then head of BBC films. Like many he despaired of the more recent decline in the quality of television programmes. Jonathan Routh, an inveterate practical joker, launched the pioneering reality TV show, Candid Camera, on BBC television in 1960. He is joined by a later exponent of this genre, Jeremy Beadle, who, in 2001, was voted the second most hated man in Britain (after Saddam Hussein). His programme Beadle’s About revived the Candid Camera format and in the later You’ve Been Framed! the public sent him their humorous clips and films. Beadle was also a tireless raiser of funds for charity. Geoffrey Perkins was a comedy writer who produced distinguished work for both radio and television. He produced The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for BBC radio in 1978 and 1980 before co-founding Hat-Trick Productions and producing a string of successful comedies including Drop the Dead Donkey, Father Ted, and Have I Got News for You. But the broadcaster and writer who must take pride of place in this long list is surely Oliver Postgate, whose television series and books in the 1960s and 1970s, including Ivor the Engine, Noggin the Nog, The Clangers, and Bagpuss (which was later voted the most loved children’s television series ever made), delighted a generation of children and their parents with a winning combination of simple images, gentle humour, and a charming narrative delivered in a kind and avuncular tone. Art, architecture, and designAnother very popular figure who died in 2008 was the self-taught artist, Beryl Cook. She came to art relatively late in life but developed a highly original, comic style, and her ‘fat ladies’ (and not a few fat men as well) were instantly recognizable and hugely popular, reproduced on posters, tea towels, and greetings cards in Britain and abroad. She is joined by Pauline Baynes, who illustrated the books of J.R.R. Tolkein and C.S. Lewis; the potter Robert Fournier, who was noted for his ‘pebble’ pots and use of vibrant colours, later becoming an historian of modern studio pottery; and the leading goldsmith and silversmith Gerald Benney who revived the art of enamelling in strong colours and whose work was notable for its contrasting polished and rough textures. The letter carver and sculptor, Ralph Beyer, who was an apprentice of Eric Gill, was noted for his work in the new Coventry Cathedral, especially the eight ‘Tablets of the Word’. He is joined by the typographic designer, Robert Harling, an authority on Gill, and a powerful influence over the design of newspapers and magazines who was later the editor of House & Garden. A designer of a different type was the so-called ‘tailor to the stars’ from the 1960s to the 1980s, Doug Hayward, who re-defined the classic men’s suit in that era. We include several architects of different types. The conservation architect Sir Bernard Feilden oversaw the restorations of Norwich Cathedral and York Minster among many other projects and was widely regarded as the founder of this new discipline within modern architecture. He may be contrasted with Stefan Buzás, who specialised in high-modern interiors and designed Manchester’s Ringway airport terminal and Standard Bank in Northumberland Avenue, off Trafalgar Square, and with Ann MacEwen, included with her husband Malcolm, the architectural journalist, who specialized in town planning and was a leading advocate for national parks. We also include a selection of notable art historians and critics. Sir Michael Levey was an expert on Renaissance and Italian art who became director of the National Gallery at a time of unprecedented expansion and modernisation. Levey wrote widely, was frequently called on by the media for his strong opinions, and was married to the writer Brigid Brophy. Jerzy Zarnecki was a leading authority on medieval art and especially Romanesque sculpture. Michael Podro, notable for his interest in the relationships between art, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, had been a student of Ernst Gombrich and played a crucial role in reviving interest in the German foundations of art historiography. Another of Gombrich’s pupils was Michael Baxandall, the author of influential books on art theory and Renaissance art history. The art critic John Russell spent long periods reviewing for both the Sunday Times and the New York Times, while the publisher Andreas Papadakis, who was owner and also editor of Architectural Design and Academy Editions, was a notable supporter of both post-modernism and neo-classicism. Literature and languageSir Arthur C. Clarke was one of the leading writers of science fiction in the twentieth century. Best known for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), his masterpiece may well be the remarkable story of contact with a superior race, Childhood’s End (1953). He was also known for his wide-ranging writing on science and is credited with foreshadowing the development of telecommunications satellites. While science journalism and science fiction more recently has been devoted to prophecies of doom, Clarke’s work displayed the optimism of an earlier age in which technology, space travel, human abilities, and reason could be harnessed for progress and mutual benefit. Clarke may be contrasted with other writers working in quite different genres and with a different view of man’s destiny. George Macdonald Fraser was the author of the swashbuckling adventures of the phenomenally successful Flashman series. Two British-based writers who drew on their Caribbean inheritance are also added to the dictionary: the novelist Roy Heath drew extensively on his Guyanese background in his fiction and was the author of acclaimed memoirs, Shadows Round the Moon (1990), and the poet and novelist E. A. Markham, who had been born on Montserrat, produced works which contributed to debates about an emerging multicultural Britain. The poet, playwright, and left-wing activist Adrian Mitchell made many interventions in public life, usually in impassioned lyrics of which the most important was his poem ‘To Whom It May Concern (Tell Me Lies About Vietnam)’, written and first read publicly in the mid-1960s. Mitchell played an important role in the popularization and performance of poetry in Britain. Meanwhile the literary agent Pat Kavanagh, whose biography has been written by Hermione Lee, was not only outstandingly successful but was credited with nurturing the careers of many of Britain’s best known writers of today. Several scholars of English are added to the Oxford DNB in this release. Derek Brewer was an expert on Chaucer, a Cambridge academic, and co-founder of the publisher, Boydell and Brewer. George K. Hunter was a Shakespeare scholar and authority on other Elizabethan playwrights. Ian Jack’s interests were in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and he was an authority on Keats, Browning, and the Brontës. Another of Keats’s biographers was Joanna Richardson, but as a literary biographer she was better known for her studies of nineteenth-century French writers for which she was awarded the Prix Goncourt for biography, the first woman and the first person from outside France to be honoured in this way. She is joined by scholars of less familiar languages: the Persianist, Ann Lambton; the Russian and Slavonic scholar Monica Partridge, an authority on Herzen, and author of a standard Serbo-Croat primer; the Turkish scholar, Geoffrey Lewis; and the Swahili Scholar, Yahya Ali Omar. ScholarshipSeveral archaeologists and experts in the history and culture of the Near East are among those entering the dictionary in January 2012. They include Nicolas Coldstream, the leading archaeologist of the Aegean who was interested in the trading and cultural connections of ancient Greece; John Barron, who combined the study of Greek archaeology with numismatics, sculpture, and literature, and who in 1987 led an influential review of the teaching of classics in British universities; Frank Walbank, the pioneering ancient historian with a special interest in Polybius; Iouliane Chrysostomides, who wrote on many aspects of Byzantine history; and Elizabeth Eames, a medieval archaeologist and expert on medieval building techniques, who made a special study of medieval tiles from her base at the British Museum. Henry Chadwick, meanwhile, was the leading scholar of early Christianity of his generation and the author of key works on Origen, Augustine, Boethius, and Priscillian of Avila. According to his biographer, Henry Mayr-Harting, he ‘relished conflict ... in a past age as much as he hated it around him’. As an ecumenist he worked for Anglican-Roman Catholic reconciliation; as a polymath and churchman he was a college head, successively dean of Christ Church, Oxford, and master of Peterhouse, Cambridge. Alongside this great scholar of religion we add two historians of science. John North’s interests ranged from medieval astrology and horoscopes to twentieth-century astronomy. He defended the detail of his works on the grounds that ‘the need for [completeness] in such a work as this should be as evident as the need to include uninteresting people in telephone directories’. Meanwhile Tom Whiteside was acclaimed for his work on Newton’s mathematical papers, which helped to transform our understanding of the mathematics in the seventeenth century. Among historians dealing with more recent events we include the noted popularizer Christopher Hibbert, whose main aim was ‘to entertain and tell a good accurate story’, and Angus Calder, author of the pioneering account of the Second World War, The People’s War (1969), as well as a poet and essayist, and a fine lecturer who never turned down an invitation to enlighten an audience. His final years were clouded by alcohol and tobacco though his judgement was not impaired: ‘It’s been a helter-skelter existence, and mainly my own fault’. Denis Cosgrove was a cultural geographer who worked with the past, exploring imaginative geographies—geographies of the mind—through history. International relations expert Bill Gutteridge was a leading scholar in two areas: the role of the military in new (especially African) states, and international arms control. Sir Bernard Crick was a political scientist who became a public intellectual and commentator, noted for his work on the place of politics in the school curriculum. His early classic, In Defence of Politics (1962), has been read by generations of students; his later biography of George Orwell (1980) was a detailed and careful account which attained critical success. Science and engineeringAmong life scientists, we include Brian Burtt, the plant taxonomist who had the satisfaction of identifying some 570 new plant species during his career. Sir Leslie Fowden’s work on amino and imino acids in plants had important implications for the production of biocides. Later, as director of Rothamsted Experimental Station, Fowden led research into new biotechnologies of use in developing countries. The marine ecologist David Cushing undertook important work on zooplankton and fish population dynamics, and the entomologist Philip Corbet was a world authority on dragonflies. Corbet also made key advances in identifying the mosquito vector of o’nyong-nyong fever which at one time affected two million people in East Africa, and was called upon to identify and eliminate the nuisance caused by biting flies on the St Lawrence River before the world’s fair in Montreal, Expo '67. The evolutionary biologist Tony Bradshaw demonstrated evolutionary differentiation in grasses and later became a pioneer of restoration ecology (the use of plants to reclaim toxic and derelict sites). The cytogeneticist John Thoday demonstrated the importance of genetic flexibility for evolutionary potential through his work on Drosophila (fruit flies), confirming the hypothesis of ‘disruptive selection’ first noted by Darwin. The biochemist Sir Jim Baddiley conducted research on the teichoic acids and their role in the functioning of bacterial cells. Jeremy Knowles, a chemist, worked on the evolution of enzymatic catalysis and chemical enzymology and rose to become dean of Harvard University. And the microbiologist Sir Howard Dalton worked on the co-oxidation properties of methane monooxygenases which had important implications for ‘green chemistry’ and biocatalysis. Later, as chief scientific advisor at Department for the Environment and Rural Affairs, he was instrumental in drawing attention to the implications of climate change. Another scientist to work on climate change was the glaciologist and polar explorer Fritz Koerner, who repeated transects on Devon Island and elsewhere in the Arctic over many years, thereby providing crucial data on the thinning and shrinkage of sea ice in the polar region. His study of ice cores also revealed summer climates dating back to 9000 BC, which provided crucial data for the debate on climate change. The geologist and sedimentologist Perce Allen overturned previous theories on the formation of the Weald. In 1959 he also predicted the existence of extensive oil reserves under the North Sea. Working in other parts of the world, the geomorphologist John Thomas produced important work on the evolution and management of Mediterranean landscapes and on nutrient and hydrological aspects of the tropical rainforests. The pure mathematician Graham Higman was renowned for his work on group theory. The applied mathematician Philip Saffman made notable advances in the study of fluid mechanics and turbulence, with implications, for example, for the dispersal of turbulent vortices in the wake of aircraft take-off. And the physicist and Cambridge college head, Sir Brian Pippard, explored low-temperature superconductivity and proved the existence of the Fermi surface. Automotive engineering is especially well-represented in the January update and illustrates well the interconnection of modern business and technology. Tony Rolt was a champion racing driver who later established his own engineering company, pioneering advances in four-wheel drive and other advanced automotive technologies. Fred Hart was the engineer responsible for the best-selling car of the 1960s and 1970s, the Ford Cortina; later he was involved in designing advanced vehicles for disabled drivers. But drivers then and now may have mixed feelings about the achievements of Frank Blackmore, who was responsible for the concept and introduction of the mini-roundabout, and then the later refinements of the concept such as the infamous ‘magic roundabout’ in Swindon, a complex of several mini-roundabouts designed, or so it would seem, to bamboozle the poor motorist. Christopher Tremlett was a boat designer and manufacturer responsible for introducing new manufacturing methods which resulted in faster power boats produced at a fraction of their previous cost, contributing greatly, and for good and ill, to the popularity of the sport. On terra firma, the construction engineer Alec Sandberg pioneered materials testing, and was much in demand as an expert witness in cases involving poor quality construction materials. MedicineThe range and importance of contributions from Britain to medical understanding and treatment is evident in the number and variety of medical biographies we are adding to the Oxford DNB in this release. Sir Robert Shields was one of the country’s leading surgeons and made Liverpool University a leader in the treatment of diseases of the liver, intestinal tract, and breast. Patrick Lawther was an expert on environmental medicine and particularly the effects of air pollutants on health. He provided much of the scientific evidence leading to the Clean Air Act 1956 (which ended London’s smog). The neurologist Peter Kynaston Thomas worked on human peripheral nerve disease and inherited neuropathies. The neurosurgeon Bryan Jennett was the first practitioner to describe a ‘persistent vegetative state’ and established the ‘Glasgow coma scale’ to assess the extent of brain damage. Bill Keatinge, a physiologist, made major advances in the understanding of the mechanisms of temperature stress and in the measures which could be taken to reduce mortality in cold and hot spells. The neuroscientist and pharmacologist J. Murdoch Ritchie did important work on the action of local anaesthetics. We also include two anaesthetists who made different types of contribution: Cecil Gray transformed anaesthetic procedure by the introduction of the ‘Liverpool technique’ which enabled the use of only relatively small amounts of anaesthetic, and Peter Baskett was a pioneering figure in the development of modern paramedic (pre-hospital) services in the UK. The pathologist and clinical immunologist Jack Hobbs carried out the first bone marrow transplantation in the UK and developed the technique to cure a range of genetic and other diseases. The pharmacologist and protozoologist Len Goodwin made major advances in the pharmaceutical treatment of tropical diseases, and the bacteriologist Naomi Datta demonstrated the transfer of antibiotic resistance in bacteria. From those many areas of modern life where medicine and society intersect we include the psychoanalyst Isabel Menzies Lyth, who worked on group dynamics among nurses and who demonstrated the role of social and occupational systems as defences against anxiety. The medical sociologist Janet Askham was a pioneer of sociological studies of fertility and sexual relations, and later of old age, dementia, and care of the elderly. One of the greatest afflictions of old age is loneliness and the former army officer, Richard Carr-Gomm, started the Abbeyfield Society and later the Carr-Gomm and Morpeth societies to provide companionship for the elderly as well as sheltered accommodation for them. Finally, we also include the medical journalist Antony Smith, who was for many years the medical correspondent for the Times and who steered the paper towards a more liberal approach on issues such as abortion, euthanasia, and organ transplantation. He was also a prolific author of popular medical guides. Education, law, and religionOur educationists illustrate very well the ideological and professional differences which have been at the heart of educational debate in Britain for a generation and more. Brian Cox was the author of important books on modern poetry but is better known for his role as a founder of the Critical Quarterly and co-editor with Tony Dyson of five Black Papers on education between 1969 and 1977 which attacked the lowering of educational standards in British schools. Cox became a notorious figure in educational circles for holding what were then heterodox opinions. Harold Rosen began as an English teacher but moved on to teacher training and to writing studies on the learning of language in particular, which reflected his faith in the potentiality of every learner and his respect for different social and immigrant cultures. Meanwhile Max Morris, a teacher, trade unionist, and one-time Communist, was both a forceful advocate of comprehensive education and yet also a traditionalist in the classroom who opposed progressive teaching methods. Dame Alison Munro gave up a high-flying civil service career to become a reforming and successful high mistress of St Paul’s Girls’ School between 1964 and 1974. In another part of the educational system Michael Marland was the founding headteacher of North Westminster Community School between 1980 and 1999, where he pioneered new approaches to the curriculum and staff development. His book, The Craft of the Classroom (1975), rapidly became known as ‘the teacher’s bible’. Many a teacher has reached for a Ladybird Book in relief, and we include in this update the initiator and publisher of this wonderful and long-lived series of children’s books, Douglas Keen. Keen helped teach a generation of children to read: he also sold Ladybird books about computers to the Ministry of Defence and about cars to the Thames Valley police force driving school. Our coverage of the law—the legal profession, policing, and also criminality—is equally diverse. At the apex of the legal system we add the biographies of two Scottish justices, Walter Elliott, Lord Elliott, who, after distinguished war service, became the first president of the Scottish lands tribunal in 1971 and later chairman of the Scottish land court, and Donald Macfadyen, Lord Macfadyen who was counsel to the Orkney inquiry into supposed child abuse on the islands, and a judge at the Megrahi trial following the Lockerbie bombing. At the other end of the criminal justice system we have an article on Derek ‘Bertie’ Smalls, bank robber and mainland Britain’s first ‘super-grass’ who was pardoned in exchange for evidence which led to the conviction of 27 accomplices—the first and also the last time (because of the public outcry over the case) that a criminal was offered complete immunity in exchange for evidence. Perhaps surprisingly, Smalls lived to a good age and died of natural causes. In between we have the full panoply of the law. Sir Basil Kelly was a Northern Irish lawyer, Unionist member of the Stormont assembly, attorney general from 1968 to 1972 and judge from 1973 to 1995. Sir Francis Vallat was an international lawyer and a legal adviser to the Foreign Office in the 1960s who became director of international law studies at King’s College, London, and wrote standard works on international law and human rights. Several of our subjects were expert in new areas of the law. Sir Hugh Laddie was an expert in the new discipline of intellectual property law and a High Court judge noted for his efficiency (according to one observer, ‘if Laddie had been around in Dickens’ day, Jarndyce versus Jarndyce would have been over by lunchtime’). Margaret Puxon, a gynaecologist as well as a barrister, was a leading figure in another emerging legal discipline, medical law. And Edward Grayson was the founding father of sports law (and the author of the key textbook). Sadly, bankruptcy has always been with us, and Muir Hunter was an expert in the law of bankruptcy and insolvency whose cross-examination of John Poulson in 1972-3 led to the biggest British corruption trial of the twentieth century. We also include several policemen, of whom the most memorable is Sir John Hermon, chief constable of the Royal Ulster Constabulary at the height of the Northern Ireland ‘troubles’, whose desire for reform of the service was thwarted by the political situation and who clashed fiercely with Ian Paisley and other hard line Unionists. Harry Cole was a bobby from Southwark, south London, and the author of several light-hearted books describing the work of the policeman on the beat. Less humorous by far was the indictment in 1964 of Harold ‘Tanky’ Challenor, a former SAS soldier turned policeman, for planting evidence. He was ruled unfit to plead owing to mental illness but the case highlighted an almost endemic culture of brutality and corruption in the Metropolitan Police of that era. Finally we also include Ray Wyre, who was a pioneering though controversial expert on sexual crime and on the use of group therapy to challenge the belief systems of offenders. Among notable figures drawn from the religious life of Britain we include the Revd Leslie Hardman, who, as a Jewish army chaplain, was with the British forces that liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945. Later he became minister of Hendon Synagogue and a leading figure in the Holocaust Education Trust. David Kerr was a scholar of Christian-Muslim relations who sought to counter adverse views of Islam in the west. Mary Hall, otherwise known as Mother Rosario, was also involved in the promotion of inter-faith relations: a nun and educationist, she founded the Multi-Faith Centre in Birmingham. The Presbyterian and United Reformed minister Arthur Macarthur was a key figure in the negotiations which united the Presbyterian and Congregational churches and was involved in wider ecumenical initiatives. Among Anglicans we include George Noakes, the popular archbishop of Wales who nurtured the career of the current archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams; and also the liberal-minded John Yates, bishop of Gloucester, who supported the ordination of women priests and a more accepting attitude towards homosexual relationships. Business and industryAmong the notable figures from the commercial world are two ‘company doctors’, so-called; one real, and one promoted by the media after a successful career in business. Sir John Harvey-Jones was the latter: he rose to be chairman of ICI in the 1980s, radically restructuring and repositioning the company. He was often in the limelight, particularly when disagreeing with the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, over the importance of manufacturing industry, and was probably Britain’s best-known industrialist. After retirement he enjoyed a second career on television dispensing advice as a company Troubleshooter. Sir Lewis Robertson was a real company doctor, famed as ‘the most methodical man in Scotland’, who returned many companies to profitability. He defended his high fees by saying, ‘Anything companies get for peanuts is fit for nothing but monkeys’. We include three businessmen whose careers were bound up with Britain’s nationalized industries. Donald Stokes, Baron Stokes was the first chairman and managing director of British Leyland, the nationalized amalgamation of several car-making companies. His tenure from 1968 to 1975 coincided with recession and troubled industrial relations. Later, British Leyland was managed by Sir Austin Bide, who had been extraordinarily successful as chairman and chief executive of Glaxo (1973-85) but who was much less successful—inevitably—at BL between 1982 and 1986, where he saw his role as getting the company ‘to the point where someone might want to buy it’. Sir Denis Rooke was the engineer who oversaw the successful programme for the conversion of British homes to natural gas in the 1960s and rose to become chairman of the British Gas Corporation. He opposed its break-up and privatization in 1986 but presided over its flotation. Another industrialist to become caught up in politics was John Cuckney, Baron Cuckney. A former MI5 officer, he had held a series of demanding posts in the public and private sectors at the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board, the Property Services Agency, and Crown Agents, and at Thomas Cook, Brooke Bond Tea, and the engineering firm John Brown. But he came to public attention as the chairman of Westland Helicopters at the time of the ‘Westland affair’ which divided the Conservative cabinet in 1986. Margaret Thatcher later referred in her memoirs to his ‘extraordinary talents’. Noted industrialists include Sir David Orr, chairman of Unilever from 1974 to 1982, who is credited with introducing strategic thinking into the Anglo-Dutch company and who was later a tireless fundraiser as chairman of the Globe Theatre Trust. Sir Richard Morris was an engineer who had a wide-ranging business career in the private and public sectors, including as deputy chairman of the National Enterprise Board and Nirex. Sir Derek Alun-Jones enjoyed both success and failure at the electronics firm and defence supplier, Ferranti: as managing director after 1975 he returned the company to profitability, but his purchase of a compromised American firm led to his resignation in 1990 and Ferranti’s break-up. Sir Robert Telford held various senior positions at another electronics company, Marconi, which he helped to diversify. Two contrasting lives are drawn from the emergent computer industries. David Caminer carried out the systems analysis and software design for LEO, the world’s first business computer, and later oversaw the design and installation of computers for the European Community. Sir Edwin Nixon was managing director of IBM(UK) between 1965 and 1986, during which time the company enjoyed massive expansion; he was later much involved in business education. Two other biographies are linked by a shared experience of Britain’s nuclear power industry. Tom Tuohy was a chemical engineer and nuclear industry executive who in 1957 bravely took the necessary steps to put out the fire at the Sellafield nuclear reactor, thus preventing a far worse accident. Tuohy went on to become the first managing director of British Nuclear Fuels but never received recognition for his role in 1957 because of the official policy to cover up the accident. The nuclear physicist Sir John Hill was also involved in the events of 1957, assigned to investigate the causes of the accident which he blamed on faulty instrumentation. He was later chairman of the UK Atomic Energy Authority from 1967 to 1981, at a time of growing public scepticism about the safety of nuclear power. From the City of London, we include Alastair Ross Goobey, a pension fund manager and frequent broadcaster who was closely involved in the topical issues of better corporate governance, greater transparency, and an end to boardroom pay-offs and automatic bonuses. The banker, Sir Derek Higgs, chairman of S.G. Warburg, and later of Alliance and Leicester, was involved with similar issues, notably good practice in British boardrooms and the role of non-executive directors , the subject of his report in 2003. Sir John Templeton was an American-born investment adviser and head of the highly successful Templeton Growth Fund. A strong Anglophile from his days as a Rhodes scholar in Oxford, he took British citizenship, established the John Templeton Foundation, and gave handsomely to higher education among other causes. Self-made entrepreneurs of rather different types also feature in our list. Michael Cole, for example, was a Cambridge metallurgist who founded Metals Research Ltd (which employed over 500 people by the early 1970s) and then bought Genevac, manufacturers of laboratory vacuum pumps. His later attempts to grow porcini mushrooms commercially were not as successful. Conversely, Lucy Appleby revived the near-extinct traditional methods of Cheshire cheese-making, created her own successful business thereby, and became a model and adviser to other artisan cheese and regional food manufacturers in Britain. Paul Raymond made a fortune from erotic shows, pornographic magazines, and property investments but died lonely and embittered. Sir Jack Lyons with his brother Bernard Lyons oversaw the rapid growth of the United Drapery Stores but was later convicted of offences connected with illegal share support in the Guinness affair of the 1980s and was stripped of his knighthood. Finally, we also include Eirlys Roberts, a champion of consumer rights as the editor of Which? magazine between 1958 and 1973 and ‘the most considerable figure thrown up by the British consumer movement’, and Sir Len Neal, a trade union official who moved into personnel relations and had a notable career in industrial relations with Esso and British Rail, and was a strong supporter of the legislation to curb trade union powers in the 1980s. Politics, government, diplomacy, and the armed forcesThe leading political life in this update is that of Francis Pym, Baron Pym, who was successively chief whip under Edward Heath’s leadership of the Conservative Party and then defence secretary, leader of the house, lord president of the council, and foreign secretary in Margaret Thatcher’s first administration. A natural centrist and a tory ‘wet’, he was sacked after the 1983 election for publicly expressing the hope that his party would win with only a small majority. Peter Rees, Baron Rees, who was notable for his Pickwickian appearance, was MP for Dover 1970-87, and chief secretary to the Treasury between 1983 and 1985. On the other side of the House Eric Varley, Baron Varley was MP for Chesterfield for twenty years (1964-84) and successively secretary of state for energy and then industry between 1974 and 1979. Varley moved from the left to the right of the Labour Party. George Thomson, Baron Thomson of Monifieth, undertook a similar odyssey, though in his case after twenty years as Labour MP for Dundee East (1952-72) and four years as a European Commissioner (1973-7) he eventually joined the Liberal Democrats, serving as their spokesman on Europe in the House of Lords in the 1990s. Other prominent Liberal Democrats included now are Ray Michie, Baroness Michie of Gallanach, the Liberal Democrat MP for Argyll from 1987 to 2001; Russell Johnston, Baron Russell-Johnston, at one time leader of the Scottish Liberal Party and MP for Inverness (1964-97), first as a Liberal and then as a Liberal Democrat; and Richard Holme, Baron Holme of Cheltenham, a successful businessman and then strategist for the Liberal Party who advised both David Steel and Paddy Ashdown and was chairman of the Hansard Society. From the backbenches we also include two individualistic Labour MPs, Leo Abse and Gwyneth Dunwoody. Abse was notorious for his exotic dress and colourful rhetoric; he was also a noted supporter of liberal causes. Dunwoody was born into the Labour movement: her father had been the party’s national organizer and her mother was a life peer. But after junior ministerial office in the 1960s, their daughter emerged as a thorn in the side of the Labour leadership in the 1990s and 2000s and a prominent critic of Tony Blair. Sandy Bruce-Lockhart, Baron Bruce-Lockhart was Conservative leader of Kent County Council (1997-2005) and nationally prominent as a key figure in the Local Government Association. Brian Keenan was an IRA paramilitary and army council member who was once described as ‘the biggest single threat to the British state’ but was later a key supporter of Gerry Adams and the Northern Ireland peace process. John Hunt, Baron Hunt of Tanworth, who was cabinet secretary from 1973 to 1979, had the distinction of having served four different prime ministers in that position. He made the cabinet office into a genuine department of state, led it with drive and energy, and navigated a way through the many difficult economic, political, and constitutional issues of the 1970s. A Roman Catholic, he later rescued The Tablet. Sir David Serpell was permanent secretary at the Ministry of Transport (1968-70) and then the Department of the Environment (1970-2). He was also responsible for the controversial Serpell Report on the finances of British Rail. Sir Peter Kemp was by nature blunt, entrepreneurial, and extrovert—all the things, in short, which senior civil servants are not supposed to be. His role after 1988 was to implement the ‘Next Steps’ reforms of the civil service, establishing agencies to which specific government functions would be outsourced, the greatest change in its structure since the nineteenth century. Perhaps it was inevitable that he made many enemies and was forced out in 1992. Sir Curtis Keeble was the first British ambassador to East Germany and later ambassador to the Soviet Union at the time of the invasion of Afghanistan. Dame Maeve Fort was successively ambassador to Mozambique, Lebanon, and South Africa and had ‘a knack for getting on with awkward people’. Sir Dick Franks spent his career in intelligence, first in the SOE during the Second World War and then in MI6, which he led between 1978 and 1981. Jon Vickers was general secretary of the Civil Service Union from 1962 to 1977 and ensured that it made special efforts on behalf of lower-paid and part-time government workers. Maurice Stonefrost was the leading local government finance officer of his generation and in charge of the finances of the Greater London Council from 1973 until its abolition in 1985. Good at outwitting central government, he allowed Ken Livingstone, when mayor, to pursue radical policies. This update of the Oxford DNB also includes two winners of the Victoria Cross: Eric Wilson, an army officer, was awarded the VC for his bravery in resisting the Italian invasion of British Somaliland, and Ian Fraser, a submariner, won his for a midget submarine attack on Japanese shipping in the closing stages of the Second World War. Pearl Witherington was a wartime SOE agent who organized the ‘Wrestler’ circuit in Sologne, whose 3000 members forced the surrender of 18,000 German soldiers in 1944. Diana Barnato Walker, socialite and granddaughter of Barney Barnato, was a wartime ATA pilot (or ‘Atagirl’) and later the first British woman to fly faster than the speed of sound. Sir John Barraclough was a flying boat pilot in the Second World War who rose to be vice-chief of the defence staff and air secretary, and later collaborated with General Sir John Hackett on the best-selling The Third World War (1978). Veterans of more recent conflicts include Jim Johnson, an SAS officer who organized mercenaries to fight rebels in Yemen and later founded Britain’s first private military company, and Sam Dunlop, commodore of the Royal Fleet Auxiliary and commander of the explosives ship, Fort Austin, during the Falklands War. In the latter capacity he was heard to say: ‘You don’t have to worry about going down in this ship, you’ll only ever go up’. SportOur final category, sport, includes the footballer and Celtic legend, Tommy Burns, who played over 500 times for the club, scoring 82 goals, and who won 8 caps for Scotland. Revered by Celtic fans, like many footballers before him he was less successful as a team manager. Eric Ashton played 497 games of rugby league for Wigan and won 26 caps for Great Britain, scoring over 1900 points in all. Ashton was the first rugby league player to receive a royal honour, appointed MBE in 1966. We also include Pat Moss, who was a show jumper and rally driving champion like her brother, Stirling Moss, and the first woman to win an international rally open to men and women, in 1960. Finally, in Olympic year, we have the figure skater Cecilia Colledge who, aged 11 in 1932, became, and remains, the youngest ever competitor in the winter games. Colledge went on to win national, European, and world championships in figure skating before moving to Boston in the United States to train skaters. Our next online updateOur next online update, which will be published on Thursday 24 May 2012, will continue to extend the Oxford DNB’s coverage of men and women active from the middle ages to the late-twentieth century. May’s update includes a special focus on 600 years of Londoners and metropolitan history, plus historical Olympians and pioneer athletes prior to the London Games and paralympics held between July and September 2012. Lawrence Goldman, editor |
